In the summer of 2016, artist and photographer Christin Paige Minnotte was chosen from approximately 100 candidates and awarded the opportunity to participate in an artist residency called, “Voices of the Wilderness”. The residency took place in the Tongass National Forest in the wilderness of Alaska with United States Forest Service Rangers tasked specifically with the preservation of this wilderness. By pairing the artist with forest rangers, the express goals of the residency were that the artist come away with a sense of the stewardship required to preserve America’s public lands and that the artwork “communicates something of the meaning of these lands.” (fs.usda.gov)

Accompanying the forest rangers as they surveyed and monitored the Tongass, Minnotte kayaked daily through the Alaskan wildernesss, photographing extensively on land and water. She spent hours looking through her camera lens at the light reflected back from the micro and macro patterning of the natural universe. Her continued exploration of light and reflection gradually evolved to a revelation that the fundamental meaning of both light and reflection in nature was as immaterial as it was material, that it was principle as well as practice. Like a light dawning in consciousness it became clear to her that the meaning of these lands was derived from the logic of nature’s unity. The material and immaterial glow one sees and feels in nature is a reflection of the fact that light is continuously reflected : both literally by and through forms in nature, and figuratively, in the radiant grandeur of its intelligent ordering, or principle.

What began as a technical exploration employing light and reflection by means of her camera, became a discovery, an understanding and revelation that each component in nature reflects, reciprocally, the purpose of all the other elements, to function harmoniously, or logically, as a whole. In this way, Minnotte realized, everything in nature is both a literal and figurative mirror of, a reflection of, itself - an infinity in unity. This unified purpose was demonstrated as harmony, thus beauty, by means of reciprocal benefit.

From this logic, the idea came to pair, through mirror, light and reflection, images of the natural world, with the experiential world of the man-made.  She wanted the viewer to experience on the image plane a marriage of his environment with the natural environment. Minnotte wanted to develop a method of employing light and reflection which occasioned a merging of the harmoniously unified sense of the natural world, with the manmade, so that she could develop visually and conceptually, a revealing and informative dialogue, between the two. She considered this dialogue in both formal and ethical applications.

After her return to Miami, where she lived and worked at the time, Minnotte started to artistically refine her discovery of the reciprocal dialogue between light and reflection. The works that emerged glowed dynamically according to received atmospheric light and angle of view.

Interestingly, too, reflecting the sophisticated operation of light in nature, the design of the artworks included the need for light and functioned responsively according to the nuances of light. They were alive in that they changed dynamically depending on the viewer’s angle or the type of light in the room in which they were placed.

When she began to show these works in her studio, for example, large 4 x 5 foot images of what was only a 10mm section of mushroom, a pattern began to emerge in the reactions of viewers. People were first struck by their dynamism and how they glowed, then by their inability to decipher what type of natural beauty they were observing - they could only be sure it was nature in some form. Often individuals described wide aerial views, water systems or even patterns in the moon. When told they were looking at tiny subsections of lichen or mushroom or tree, they expressed a feeling of wonder and enlightenment caused by the revelation of this expanded sense of the beauty of nature. The images had thereby inspired them to reflect and illumined their thinking on the subject. They learned to see something new and beautiful in things they thought they knew or had ceased to think about or explore, a mushroom for example.

Minnotte’s artistic ability allowed her to see the meaning of the wilderness, and then to recreate it in an innovation that reflected and further illumined that meaning. Realizing that the physics of nature and its ethics were one in principle, the artworks she created were derived from, and reflected, both. Through her artistic research and creative reasoning, Minnotte employed the light-gathering and magnification technology of the camera and lens to illumine these same principles in nature, as both form and principle: as light, reflection, magnification and scale. She reorganized these principles into an incredibly simple but broadly applicable light-based and light-activated, dynamic, perception-enhancing design innovation created to reveal more insight into the meaning of nature. Thereby, she developed a design innovation capable of revealing to the public, the logic of that glorious sense of beauty and grandeur one gets in nature when its harmonious unity and order is revealed.