The highway drive westbound past Emporia has been a familiar pattern in my life for a little over seven years. The idea of taking a place for granted isn’t a unique one; the human brain is an expert at sensory adaptation which causes us to prioritize changes rather than constants. Before I attended the Tallgrass Artist Residency, my painting practice was approaching a necessary shift. I needed to start asking new questions so I could draft paintings in a new way. This residency taught me that this sense of ‘newness’, which overrides creative sensory adaptation, can be found in familiar patterns if only I take a closer look.

Reading environmental science fiction (Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, The Word For World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan, to name a few) was the catalyst for recontextualizing my appreciation of the Flint Hills. How strange and unusual was this landscape I was so used to driving through? How could it inspire world building à la Frank Herbert or Le Guin? My ten days in Matfield Green were spent painting while thinking about the deep reach of grass roots, identifying flowers that grew along the winding prairie paths, and watching storms roll over the great horizontal landscape. I tried to imagine what it would feel like if I was seeing it all for the first time, as if I were from another planet. When you start to look at the petals, stamens, and pistils of a flower as if they were ‘alien’, which honestly isn’t difficult to do, the unique forms become characters that can tell the story of the larger ecosystem. 

I don’t think pretending to come from another planet is the only or best way to truly appreciate a place, but it did put my mind in a space to ask questions, and the answers to those questions were the beginnings of a shift in my work. There’s no better place to mull over new questions than in the prairie. The many miles I hiked through the tallgrass fueled a collection of ideas that I will have the pleasure of molding into new work for many years to come.

The prairie ecology and landscapes I documented in Chase county are now serving as inspiration for my own speculative fiction project. Transmedial storytelling, in the form of interdependent paintings and short stories, is a brand new approach within my practice that I’m excited to continue exploring. I’ve been standing a step away from the Flint Hills all my life, and the Tallgrass Artist Residency gave me the opportunity to take that step into the prairie and learn how to find new answers in familiar places.

Caroline Honas is an artist from the prairie currently residing in Kansas City, Kansas. Honas graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2022 with a BFA in painting, minoring in social practice. She is primarily an oil painter, and also incorporates sewing, piecing, and quilting into her work as an ode to her family’s generational craftsmanship. Interested in the intersection between art and natural science, her practice explores the concept of interdependence by drawing parallels between ecological– specifically, botanical– phenomena and the human experience. All flora that she depicts within her painting practice is based on specimens encountered while existing and working within the land. Honas has shown work at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, H&R Block Artspace, Mark Arts Center, and the Kansas City Artist Coalition, among others. She is a 2024-2026 studio resident at the Charlotte Street Foundation.