Teagan White (Artist-in-Residence, 2024)

Isle Royale Reflection

When immersed in Nature I always find myself returning to the same role: collector of visual echoes. It seems to me that an aesthetic harmony emerges in healthy ecosystems, as if all organisms are in sympathy with one another, all matter inexorably drawn to self-veneration.

Minong is marked by the conspicuous interplay of vast chaotic forces and ephemeral oases of tranquility, that together give rise to an anarchic complexity of life. Time is put in perspective here, daily time an echo of seasonal time an echo of geologic time. My animal neighbors — the loon who swims close enough for me to see the red of her eye, the mother moose who thrusts her head across my path in warning, the red squirrel who scolds me when I pass the wood pile, the sandhill crane who peers in at me through the screen door of the cabin, the family of geese that shares my yard and skeptically overlooks my poor rock-skipping performance, the white-throated sparrow whose distant song is carried to me across the harbor at dusk — are content to be governed by the tempers of the weather, and the magnificent rising and setting of the Sun. They live the same lives that their ancestors did, and their descendants will live the same lives as them. The patient plants surrender themselves to uncertain conditions — pockets of summer wildflowers creep from shallow depressions on the austere shoreline, only to be washed away by winter storms; tendrils of fireweed root hibernate in the understory for decades, waiting for the good fortune of a lightning strike to draw them up to the surface; shallow-rooted forests perch atop volcanic bedrock, nestling themselves into angles scraped away by glaciers, slowly accumulating soil for future iterations.

When my mind follows currents of color, texture, form, and significance that flow through a landscape, it feels like necessary work, in spite of its lack of scientific rigor or practical application. Maybe a preoccupation with beauty is not self-indulgent, but an ancient process for uncovering sacred truth contained within all life. Social geographer and political theorist Élisée Reclus believed that “humanity is Nature becoming self-conscious” — our species is not meant to be separate from the land, but an active participant. Of late we shape our anthropocentric world as if Nature’s cyclical patterns did not exist, shackled to a collective delusion of progressive linear time, but my residency was a rare opportunity to enter back into the rhythm of the more-than-human world. I wake early to admire the rising Sun, carry water in buckets from the lake, cook simple meals, spend slow hours exploring and noticing by foot and canoe, and admire the setting Sun before retiring into the lull of darkness. Rustic cabin life needs no deviation or improvement; anything extra would threaten to take time away from the simple pleasures of observation and participation.

Does the loon see me as the artist who is here every year, as I see her as the loon who is here every year? It seems to me there is one long, shared life of the Isle Royale Artist-In-Residence that I stepped inside briefly. When I read other artists’ entries in the cabin journal, many of my own thoughts are mirrored back to me, nearly identical feelings and happenings echoing out of a distant past. Before them, the families who settled on the island and built the now-historic cabins surely shared many of these same experiences, as did the Anishinaabe people who frequented Minong for millennia. In these reverberations I encounter my own loonness, a legacy of honoring the paradoxical volatility and immortality of a specific place through our devoted presence with it. Though I’m only a visitor, like the migratory crane or a harebell sprouting from a crack at the lake’s edge, it feels like learning what it is to belong in a place for the first time. Part of me feels devastated that this experience is so hard to come by in modern life, but another part has taken its lesson from the patient plants. I’m just one subterranean rhizome of fireweed, preserving a memory of my species’ purpose, hoping for a wildfire to clear a time and place for us to flourish again.

"Echoes"

About the Artist

Teagan White is an artist and outsider naturalist whose work arises from direct experience with natural phenomena and dedicated communication with the land. Through careful observation and poetic allegory, their paintings explore regional ecological issues such as drought, wildfire, habitat fragmentation, and biodiversity loss, as well as the universal spiritual and psychosomatic burden of our acquiescence to a necrotic, extractivist civilization.

Bleak only at surface level, their work is saturated with the conviction that other, stranger, and more beautiful ways of engaging with the world are not only possible but limitless, and that solutions won’t be found through exclusionary conservation, technocratic fantasies, or neocolonial exploitation, but through a return to devoted kinship with all beings.

Though influenced by many years in the Midwest, Teagan currently lives in and makes work about the Pacific Northwest, where multitudes of licorice fern surge and wane in tandem with the rain, and dead seabirds sometimes wash up at their feet.

Teagan was an artist-in-residence at Isle Royale National Park from July 9 to July 24, 2025.

You can see more of Teagan's work at teaganwhite.com, and their children's illustration work at tinymouthstudios.com. The characters and setting of their forthcoming book The Sweater (Penguin 2026) are based on their time on Isle Royale, and field recordings from their residency are incorporated into the experimental album In the Unknown Twilight by Bird Battles, coming soon from Sleep In The Fire Records.