In a drawing that spans fifteen feet, Nicole Anderson conjures a world where eucalyptus trees split through the air like lightning bolts. Rendered in charcoal and pastel on brown contractor’s paper, the work grew improvisationally without a predetermined plan into a emotionally charged reverie.

The composition began as an act of anxiety, after clearing her studio post-solo show, Nicole covered her white walls with sheets of brown paper to ease the tension of blankness. From this site of personal uncertainty, a new way of working emerged, more about instinct and driven less by clarity, which gives the work an emotional atmosphere. She calls the resulting landscape an “aftermath”: one side full of glowing, feverish color, like headlights flickering through a forest at night, while the other remains quiet, muted, almost ash-like. What connects them is light: how it distorts, hides, and dramatizes. Her drawings often take cues from photographs, shaky exposures, off-camera flashes, blurred objects in motion… All these make it dream-like, a fever dream that would never make sense, but shows your deepest fear or desire. Nicole held a lens for me to peek through her vision.

Raised in California, Nicole has long been drawn to eucalyptus trees: invasive, spectral, and oddly human. “They have this bad reputation. Their bark is strange. As a kid, I always imagined them as monsters.” In Nicole’s speculative world, plants aren’t background: they’re agents, survivors, even aggressors in a future ecology that’s not quite post-human but no longer governed by familiar logic.

While we talk, Nicole usually goes silent, she doesn’t explain everything. In those quiet moments, her drawings drowned me like water, swallowed me in, then dominated the space, became more than just landscape, but perception, trauma, and the act of seeing in partial light like dreamcore. As Nicole put it, “I want the work to cast a spell. To move people more than explain something.”