“Matter is memory, and memory is a medium,” says artist Annalise Neil, whose surreal cyanotypes brim with animals, fungi, geological specimens, shells, and more that she augments with watercolor. Recently, the artist has been adding rich, earthy tones with natural dyes such as wild strawberry leaf, oak gall, loquat leaf, and chestnut. She has used botanical teas to shift the natural blue color of the cyanotypes for quite a while, but the sepia tonality has emerged as a larger focus lately, which allows her to layer hues like browns and purples.

Neil’s experiences in nature profoundly influence her individual pieces in a process that she poetically describes as “melting, rolling, pinching, sanding, walking across meadows, cheek on sun-warmed boulders.” This year, she’s a resident artist at Volcan Mountain Foundation in Julian, California, which merges artistic and scientific inquiry. “I endeavor to create work that will lead to contemplation and reflection and that invites a thoughtful examination of our relationship to reality and our surroundings,” she says.

“For my site-specific work, I begin by hiking for many days and photographing intriguing things I find, including birds and mammals, plants, geological forms, and insects,” she says. “As I photograph specimens in wild and cultivated spaces, I capture a brief version of their existence that I transmute into a negative and then into a cyanotype.” The images are then supported on hand-carved wooden panels.

Neil’s work is currently on view in shows in San Diego: Unfold Projects Exhibition 01: We Must Imagine It, presented in collaboration with ICA San Diego and continuing through August 2, and Organica: Flora to Fauna at The Granger Hotel in San Diego, curated by JFIN Collective, which continues through the end of the year. See more and follow updates on the artist’s Instagram.