The Ridges is excited to present Rachel Davis and Andrew Hipp as the 2025 Festival of Nature keynote speakers.

Rachel and Andrew have been collaborating formally as an artist (RD) and a writer (AH) for more than 20 years. They have published two books—Field Guide to Wisconsin Sedges and Oak Origins: From Acorns to Species and the Tree of Life—and several illustrated natural essays together. They are currently working on a series of paintings and essays based on the lakes of Northern Wisconsin, supported by a multiyear residency through the Drawing Water Program at UW Madison’s Trout Lake Station.

Rachel and Andrew collaborate at the interface between art, literature, science, and natural history. Their work is in part documentation, seeing and recording what the natural world presents, then sharing it in their own ways. However, their collaboration moves beyond documentation and delineation. It also informs their individual work in art, education, and science. For Andrew, writing mediates between subjects of inquiry—a weevil escaping from an acorn, an early-emerging false rue anemone—and the processes that connect individual organisms. Sentences convey information, but they also give form to understanding. The writing complements his work as a researcher and herbarium curator. For Rachel, photographing plants, fungi and insects is a first step to discovering the formal in the natural. Painting, drawing, natural dyes, and printmaking are ways to distill the shapes of plants, the light reflected off the water, mosses seen through a magnifying lens, and lichens into patterns. The rearrangement of shapes from the landscape with colors found in nature engages and feeds her as an artist and as a teacher.
 

Field Notes will illustrate how Rachel and Andrew’s collaboration both reveals and exists in parallel with the natural world, while presenting their understanding of how integrating art, science, and natural history have changed their respective practices.