Anna Hartley Powell

Anna Hartley Powell is a plant admirer, farmer, herbalist, artist as well as lover of wild places and wild things. She finds inspiration in her surroundings whether a bug on a flower, city block, forgotten railroad track, icy river, or a sunset reflected in the ocean shores at low tide. Her images begin in the whispering patterns and poetic lingering of a dynamic world and emerge on scraps of paper, fabric, found objects, in photographs, and drawings in the dust. Her art is rooted in and grows from her belief in the healing power of the creative process and expression.

Anna studied art therapy at Marylhurst University and has exhibited work in Oakland, C.A., San Francisco, C.A., and New Orleans, L.A. and is a published illustrator for Chelsea Green.

She currently lives in the settler occupied ancestral lands of the Passamaquoddy peoples in what is now called Machias, Maine.

HOLDING LIGHT Nature & Landscape Photography Exhibition

I see earth poems every day when I walk around in the world. They are fleeting whispers woven in the cracking, melting frozen crust of a low tide on a wintery morning. Or in the delicate carving of sand by the rhythmic movement of moon-pulled saltwater against the curvature of the ocean floor. Sometimes the words are written in ice cracks or in rock fissures formed so many eons ago that neon green lichen has made its home in the deep, ancient creases like an illuminated manuscript. There are poems hidden in the many textures of water: tenderly suspended droplets, delicate crystals that melt with the heat of breath, humid air so thick it drips. For me, photography provides the tools to capture these brief moments in all their detail so they can be reread and seen by other eyes. I see the photograph as a tool to isolate and emphasize moments in space and time and to frame and capture the stories lingering in the shadows and in the breath of the wind.