Jill Bliss is an artist (and naturalist, educator, farmhand, caretaker, and deckhand) who lives on a small island in the Salish Sea in the Pacific Northwest. After a busy career as a designer in New York and San Francisco, she sold her home and almost all she possessed in 2012 to go to the island and get back in touch with nature.
Bliss creates magnificent arrangements out of a variety of the stunningly colorful wild fungus she discovers, photographs them, and names the project Nature Medleys. A selection of some of our favorites can be found below.
“I’ve plunked down my life savings for a modest half acre of cleared land on a small island of 30 full-time households to live out the rest of my days in tune with the natural world,” writes Bliss.
“I satisfy my nomadic nature by holing up in various off-grid cabins on small islands, preferably with wild animals and semi-feral people for neighbors, mentors and muses. These are the months for hibernation, quiet reflection, close observations of discreet moments in nature, art making, sleeping, reading, cooking, chopping wood, stoking wood stove fires, hiking and kayaking in the rain.”
