To Know the Dark

For more than three decades, Kratz has transformed overlooked remnants of the natural world into luminous meditations on beauty, time, and renewal. Seedpods, branches, animal bones, and other organic materials—gathered in and around her home in Phoenix, Arizona, and during countless wanderings through the desert—are carefully arranged and suspended within layers of colored resin. Kratz does not collect indiscriminately. Certain discoveries, she explains, possess a kind of vibration, awakening memory or longing before finding their place in the studio. Sanded to a smooth, matte finish, these works invite slow, attentive looking. Familiar botanical forms dissolve into glimmering galaxies, nocturnal gardens, and otherworldly landscapes, while fragments of once-living things are not simply preserved but transfigured, their fragilit...