NEW FOUND LAND // Observations from The Rock’s natural world

During my residency in Gros Morne National Park—Newfoundland, Canada— I walked the land the way a new arrival does: slowly, curiously, and paying close attention. Newfoundland sits at the southernmost point where you can access the boreal forest, a meeting ground where the North Atlantic, the Tablelands, and the tuckamore come together, and nearly everything I met there was new to me. I photographed what I found along the trails, shorelines, and bogs: purple pitcher plants, bunchberries, reindeer lichen, a green frog, a skate’s egg case, chanterelles and violet-capped mushrooms I couldn’t yet name. Each was a small introduction to fungi, flora, and fauna that the people of The Rock have known for generations and that I was meeting for the first time.

This collage gathers those encounters into a field guide made of color rather than taxonomy. Rows move from bone and shell to berry and blossom, through moss and goldenrod, into kelp, rust, and the deep blues of mussel and blueberry. Mixed in among them are a cod jig, a frayed length of green rope, and a worn shard of sea glass, which remind me that this landscape has always been worked, fished, and lived in. NEW FOUND LAND is an act of looking and of learning a place one specimen at a time. It’s also a reminder that every “discovery” is really an introduction to a world that was already whole long before I arrived.