In middle school I walked my yellow Schwinn bike through a forest and over a wood chip trail to get to class. The earth underfoot was a soft, blue-grey mound. Years and years of pine needles constantly decomposing makes for a soft soil. Rabbit droppings and furry moss create a slate tint. I’ve been fascinated with fossil records since these early days of exploring the woods, and a little further out from my backyard, the ancient glacial moraine history of the Great Lakes. The Microcosms collection refocuses on the subterranean forest floor and frothy swamps of my old stomping grounds.

Between 2019 and 2021, I studied and documented coral reef and their biodiversity from the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, located approximately 100 miles off the Galveston, Texas coast. The resulting drawings were exhibited at the Houston Public Library in Colleen Maynard: Calyxes and Polyps (Celebrating Coral of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary), March-May 2022. This exhibition was funded in part by the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance.

My home state rock, the honeycombed Petoskey stone (as it turns out, a fossilized extinct rugose coral, Hexagonaria percarinata), littered the Great Lakes and my 2nd-grade rock collection. In Kansas City, Missouri I bicycled a city of limestone ledges while studying painting and writing. I biked the flat sea of cornfields while studying botanical illustration at the Illinois Natural Survey—where, notably, an Entomologist kindly magnified a pretty bryozoan I brought in, confirming my fondness for fossils. Animal bones, shells, and rocks became my keys to learning about other histories. Marine coral colonies, trilobites, and bryozoans are still some of my favorite things to draw, and sweeter still to stumble on outdoors. Rough mineralized fossils remind us where we come from and that we will go back to the mud.