The Art of Relationship: In Conversation with Lydia Cheshewalla

Katherine Kassouf Cummings:
I’d love to hear about your journey as an artist and how you got to where you are. You’re so thoughtful about keeping extraction out of your art and not selling your pieces, letting them go back to the land after shows, not holding on to what you make. Can you share a bit about your path and how relationships shape what you create?

Lydia Cheshewalla:
It all started with walks, you know? I’d wander out in nature, just taking it in, asking myself, “What’s catching my eye? What’s asking to be noticed? What keeps pulling me back?” It’s like, “who’s starting this connection and am I open enough to really see it and respond?”

That’s how I got into this gathering thing. We all do it, right? You see a cool rock and think, “You’re coming with me!” People have rocks in their pockets all the time; it’s just human to collect. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but I started wondering what it means to gather, especially when you’re doing it a lot. For me, it began with the silver maples in my childhood backyard. I’ve known those trees forever. There’s just one left now, and it’s struggling—probably needs to come down. Silver maples aren’t native to the plains; they grow fast but get taken out by strong winds or ants.

When I was a kid, I loved playing with their helicopter seeds: you know, those samaras with the little wings that just cover your yard when they fall? I figured, “These are everywhere, and they’re not even supposed to be here, so collecting them feels okay.” It’s almost like helping the land by taking them out. Plus, those seeds bring back that kid-like wonder, that first moment you connect with nature. So I gathered a bunch and just kept them around for a couple of years, wondering, “What are we doing together? You’re just sitting there, all dry, not decomposing, in this weird in-between state.”

Then I started playing with them, arranging them outside on the ground where the wind could carry them off. Nature would mess with my designs, which was cool. Later, I brought them into a workshop to try working in a way that’s “here one minute, gone the next.” Inside, without the wind, I could make new shapes, and I was like, “Okay, this is interesting.” When you’re handling something that much, really noticing its lifecycle, it’s hard to think of it as just “stuff.” These seeds aren’t just material; they’re full of life. They are the tree’s hope for new growth, as an ecologist might put it.

And trees? They make choices. Sometimes you’ll see a seed that’s flat when it should be round, like the tree decided it couldn’t bring this seed to life. That hit me hard: these seeds aren’t just things, they’re alive. In my culture and others that I’ve been around, everything is connected, like family. I’m not just working with materials; I’m working with relatives. So what does it mean to create with relatives? I can’t just pull them out of their world for my art. They’re living, breathing beings.

Even rocks, which aren’t “alive” in the usual sense, have their own story. They’re shaped by wild Earth forces, some of the oldest things around, holding the ground together. So I can’t treat them like they’re nothing. It’s about asking: Am I taking my relatives on a good journey? Am I listening to what they need?

Around this time, I got into learning about prairies. After all, I grew up on the plains. I went to Nebraska to work with a friend on prescribed burns, which was huge. It taught me how to be in relationship with the land, getting my hands dirty and really caring for the land. It’s slow work, showing up over and over, having conversations with the land and its creatures. I’ve been doing this for six years now, visiting prairies everywhere, like Illinois during the fight to save Bell Bowl Prairie. 

I come from love, not anger, about what’s happened to the land. My work’s about healing, not blaming. I love this land, I love people, and I want them to notice butterflies, flowers, the moon—these relatives that haven’t changed in centuries because we’ve cared for them. That’s not heavy, it’s light; it’s love. I want my art to invite people to fall in love with the land, to feel called to act and to heal.

We’ve done a lot of damage in Western society by pulling ourselves away from nature, community, and even from our emotions. But it’s all connected—self and community, self and ecology—they overlap, like in-between spaces. I’m one person, but I act for the whole—for my community, for the land. Burn ecology taught me that: One action, like a controlled fire, can feed the whole system, from bugs to soil to air. The levity of love gets us everywhere. I want to have the heavier conversations, but I don’t want the work to be about pointing fingers. We’re all relatives, part of this Earth, living in a closed system under a protective dome. 

The more we tell negative stories our future, the more we get stuck there. I love sci-fi, but why keep dreaming up awful futures? Why not tell stories of hope, where tech and nature blend together, like a prairie working as one? I think of Richard Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” where tech and nature are so woven together they’re one thing. That’s what I’m after, art that opens doors to something better, more loving. 

Everyone sees things differently. I’ve got astigmatism, my eyes don’t work like yours. So how can I say other beings don’t have their own way of being aware? It’s all questions, not answers, and that’s fine. The questions give people room to find their own way. Like at the North Side Garden in St. Louis—a native bee habitat—it looks wild, not neat, because it’s for the bees, not us. Caring doesn’t always mean a tidy lawn. Grass probably doesn’t even want that much tidiness.

My work’s about letting my relatives—seeds, rocks, whatever—be themselves. I don’t change them; I just arrange them as they are. That matters to me. They show up as whole beings, and I want people to see them that way. The shapes I make come from their shapes. It’s a conversation, and now it’s bigger than me. I’m just giving a platform to what’s already happening between these beings.

The excerpt above is from an interview between Lydia and Katherine Kassouf Cummings and Erin Williams, both from the Center for Humans & Nature. We will release Part Two of this conversation when Lydia returns the relatives from her exhibition Before Dreams Are the Last Place We Find You to the land. To be notified when Part Two is published, please subscribe to the Center for Humans & Nature’s newsletter here.