The Natural History Institute Art Gallery Presents

The Rights of Nature: Expressions of Animacy, Interconnection, and Wholeness

an art exhibtion by Edie Dillon

April 24 – July 19, 2026

Natural History Institute Gallery
Open Tuesday–Friday, Noon–4 PM
Free and open to the public

Edie Dillon’s recent mixed media sculpture offers thought provoking visual interpretations of the ideas that lead us away from the limiting frame of human exceptionalism: interdependence, reciprocity, and connection between humans and the more than human world.

The growing Rights of Nature movement – which advances nature itself as a body deserving legal rights – has the potential to significantly increase our chances of sustaining all life on the planet. The movement puts into practice our increasingly inclusive and multidimensional understandings of the more than human world – understandings that encompass both deep spiritual traditions and sophisticated scientific discoveries.

Grief is Love

Ponderosa pine bark, mirrors, steel, aluminum, alcohol inks. 

36″ x 20″ x 8″    

Hope Rising / Prayer Wheel / Prayer Circle

Found and altered wood (vintage oak mast hoop) glass, metal, plexiglass, ceramic, vintage Bakelite. Seeds of some of the most common food plants in the world: bean, squash, Glass Gem Corn, flax. Bearings. This piece spins on its axis.

20” x 12” x 12”

Artist Statement

The Rights of Nature: Expressions of Animacy, Interconnection, and Wholeness

I engage our human and environmental predicament at the meeting place between serendipity and intention; where the beauty of the sacred found is enriched by fabrication. The intention is always to be a force for healing – on both individual and community levels.

What we pay attention to, and how that affects what we choose to keep or throw away, be they materials, ideas, people, or specifics of the natural environment, can change the stories we tell and the potentials we allow. Materials picked up in the forest and desert, old things, everyday things – long used, or used and discarded – possess a resonance of memory and time; they are rich with meaning, nostalgia and reference. I make use of these references, enhancing, enlarging, and redefining their meanings through unexpected combinations.

This process allows me to see how we might deflect a disheartening and destructive trajectory and generate different possibilities for our story.

My recent mixed media sculpture interprets the ideas – respect for diversity, interdependence, reciprocity, and animacy – that have flowered into the Rights of Nature movement.

Our increasingly inclusive and multidimensional understandings of the more than human world encompass both deep spiritual traditions and sophisticated scientific discoveries. They advance nature itself as a body deserving legal rights, and significantly increase our chances of sustaining all life on the planet.

Los Derechos de la Naturaleza / The Rights of Nature 

Text of Chapter 7, Article 71 in the constitution of Ecuador that guarantees rights to Nature (Pacha Mama) hand etched onto glass; Cobalt-winged Parakeets at a clay lick in Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park (detail of photograph by Tom Fleischner) printed on metal; found and altered metal; frame constructed of recycled wood. Number 11 glass beads wire formed into various flaura and fauna of Ecuador.

28” x 20”

Breathe

Found Pinyon, Manzanita, and Oak wood, found glass leaves, found and welded metal, medical oxygen tubing.

5’ x 3’ x 3’

Edie Dillon

Ediedillonartanddesign.com – or – wellspringstudio.org

I am a sculptor, painter, writer, and mother whose work seeks to honor the beauty and mystery of the world.

My life has been shaped by remarkable experiences in beloved wild places as an environmental educator and advocate. I am especially grateful to the glaciers and wild valleys of the North Cascades, the expansive skies and Ponderosa Pine forests of Arizona, the lush and mysterious lowcountry of South Carolina, the sweet fields, forests, and shorelines of New England, and the country of Ecuador, brimming with diversity. Each has offered revelations of beauty, both astonishing and delicate.

I was honored to serve as a Park Ranger in North Cascades National Park, develop recycling education and logistics in several cities, lead children through the Mogollon Highlands as Education Director for the Highlands Center for Natural History, join art and nature in summer camps, and advance community outreach for the Verde River, among other projects.

Over time, communicating the same environmental and social issues through the language of visual art became important to me. I tested the waters and received a remarkable education taking classes and managing the gallery at Yavapai College. Then, in order to answer personal questions about art’s role in cultural change, I focused my master’s research at Prescott College on the transformative power of visual art, with particular attention to environmental art. I was able to put my engaged practice into this emboldening context.

My studio practice is a search for a personal visual language that can speak to the human and environmental predicament potently, authentically, aesthetically, and with the needed urgency. I hope to support people in seeing and understanding the beauty we live in, and to create a vision of healing which is still in our power. In the same vein, my writing focuses on highlighting acts of healing and repair.

My essays have been published in Nature Love Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness, Real Ground, Ecopsychology, Women’s Eco Art Dialog, and The Center for Humans and Nature. My chapbook, Pulling Together in Rising Waters: Reciprocity as Practice, which was first published in fall 2025 by River Glass Books is happily going into its second printing this spring.