4 swfl artists foraged materials ran adler woven wall display
Courtesy Scott Smith

4 Southwest Florida Artists Working With Foraged Materials

From ceiling-hung mahogany pods to pine needle baskets coiled around stone, these local artists give lasting form to nature’s fleeting beauty.

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Arts + Culture

Between the Everglades and the Gulf, the landscape is defined by resilience and renewal. Trees shed their pods, flowers bloom and fall, and shells dissolve to sand, often without witness. These four Southwest Florida artists work inside the Earth’s cycles, drawn to the tension between what is fragile and what endures. They forage on foot, gathering fallen fragments from beaches, parks and backyards, shaping them by hand into visual records of the land. Muhly grass is woven, seed pods are strung and leaves are pressed, their textures fixed in fiber, thread and ink. From Ran Adler’s ceiling-hung installations of mahogany pods to Kathryn Erickson’s pine needle baskets coiled around ancient stone, their art gives lasting form to the region’s fleeting wonders. 

Ran Adler

One of Southwest Florida’s most respected assemblage artists, Ran Adler threads and weaves hundreds of weathered fragments into large-scale installations that honor nature’s irregularities. For Mahogany Pods (right), the artist began by walking the parks near his Naples home, foraging for the tough seed casings that drop to the ground. Back in his studio, he sorted, cut and strung the pods into sweeping compositions that drape across walls and hang from ceilings, mimicking the supple movement of quilted fabric. 

As his practice has grown, so has the steady stream of castoffs brought to his studio. When a local basket weaver offered her discarded staves and reed clippings, Ran reassembled them into Re-Purposed (left), a vertical form that gathers into a coiled crown, reflecting the chaotic precision of a bird’s nest. Horsetail Rush (previous spread) also reflects nature’s turbulence, with segments of the wetland stalk—collected from a 5-acre stretch off the Mississippi River—whirled into a cyclone. 

The meditative work of threading pod after pod or wrapping stave after stave is part of the art for Ran, whose work leans on the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi, the innate visual appeal of transience and imperfection. His installations are built from objects marked by weather and time: Wood tones age in the sun, storms blacken bright green sea grapes. “The water and the wind—I like that. It’s a part of that impermanence that I love,” Ran says. —Emma Witmer

Kat Boll

Dried palm fronds and collected shells line the shelves and fill the drawers of Katherine ‘Kat’ Boll’s home studio. The Naples-born printmaker lives and works on a tree-shrouded Bayshore property, immersed in lush gardens cultivated by previous homeowners over two generations. “Every inch of it is amazing,” she says. 

Kat walks the grounds, collecting fallen matter for her botanical relief prints. She inks foraged leaves, seeds and flowers, and runs them through an etching press onto durable mulberry paper. For floral prints, she often gathers fresh blooms, fixing their textures before they fade.

Her prints capture the details decay would otherwise erase—the velvety surface of a coleus leaf, the translucent layering of a petal, each ring and fissure of a cross-cut trunk. Her latest series of prints focuses on the undulating lines that mark a tree’s lifespan. A maroon wood-grain print (right) serves as a reminder of her art school days in Pennsylvania, tracing the radiating growth rings of a branch she cut from a tree her neighbor felled. “I like to think of myself as a kind of stump Lorax—saving small pieces of trees that have been cut down and transforming them into prints that allow part of their history to last a little longer,” she says. —Jaynie Bartley

 Jewel Hovland

“Nature is, in itself, an artist,” multidisciplinary creative Jewel Hovland says. The Naples native, who splits her time between the Gulf and Tallahassee, sketches, paints, collages and builds hanging assemblages rooted in close observation of natural patterns. She encourages the viewer to look more closely at the smallest elements of nature, such as the intricate markings on a butterfly’s wings.

In 2021, Jewel started crafting chandelier-like assemblages with organic matter collected on beach walks and park forays. She arranges the materials in their natural state, giving delicate forms room to breathe and age as they would in the wild. In Bilateral Dendrite, a tree branch serves as the structural base for a mobile of feathers, seed pods, pinecones and flowers, each hung on fine threads in balanced repetition. As viewers circle the object, the elements sway, subtly disrupting the symmetry and bringing the person into the composition. 

She also works with discarded man-made objects, including beads and buttons. “I call it human detritus,” she says. The natural and the synthetic parallel what the Earth makes and what people leave behind. — Alyssa Riley

Kathryn Erickson

The matriarch of Punta Gorda’s Southwest Florida Fiber Arts Guild, master basket weaver Kathryn Erickson creates intricate vessels shaped as much by time as by hand. Her materials come from the Earth—native muhly grasses cultivated in her garden, pine needles gathered from roadsides and parks, geodes formed under centuries of pressure. She begins by drying fresh needles in a darkened room, where colors shift from forest green to sandy brown. A 10-minute soak gives a pliable bend to the bundles of brittle stalks that form the coils of her baskets—stitched tightly together without resin or plastic.

Kathryn spent more than 100 hours gathering, drying, bundling, looping and stitching the organic elements in this basket—Pearls of the Pond—with concentric rings rising around a quartz geode center. To achieve the arcing cables, the 80-year-old artist works with two coils at once, stitching them in tandem—a technique created after decades of practice. “I made it to look like a waterfall,” she says. A smattering of glinting pearls that belonged to her grandmother punctuates the stitching, like light glimmering off the water’s surface. — E.W.