Casey Nicholls-Bull

Casey Nicholls-Bull is interested in understanding ecological and emotional multispecies relationships — symbiotic, parasitic, reciprocal, messy, or otherwise — and painting her understanding of these relations onto wood, then sanding parts off, adding, combining, covering, and burning again, cyclically. This process aims to mirror how these relationships and ecologies coexist, grow, and weather together, both visibly and beneath the surface.

She often depicts lichen, a slow-growing multispecies relation between algae and fungi that often grows on rocks and trees. This algae-fungi relation is a reminder of how we can't separate ourselves from our surroundings — nor our gut bacteria from our human cells — without destabalizing the 'individual' and opening it up to its environment.

She considers many other multispecies relations too, hoping to elicit questions around what might be learned from them — whether this is as close to home as the cats interacting with birds and possums outside her window, a hermaphroditic barnacle living on the skin of an orca whale, or a matriarchy of bisexual bonobos.