How to Bioluminesce: Artist Ash Eliza Williams’s Reveries of Wonder

In a world ablaze with unseen brilliances, artist Ash Eliza Williams channels the silent languages of nature into luminous art that bridges human shyness and nonhuman wonder.[1][2] Growing up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwest Virginia, Williams dreamed as a profoundly shy child of communicating not through words, but via bioluminescence—that ethereal glow of fireflies and deep-sea creatures, powered by luciferin.[1][2] Lacking such biology, Williams turned to art as humanity’s alchemical equivalent, crafting paintings and sculptures that whisper across species boundaries.[1]

From Childhood Reverie to Artistic Alchemy

Williams’s origin story is one of intimate longing for alternative connections. “When I was a child, I was extremely shy, and I dreamed of being able to express myself with bioluminescence, or by quietly passing information through a network of fungal filaments, instead of with spoken words,” they write in their artist statement.[2] This fascination evolved into a profound exploration of non-human languages: the sentience of rocks, the sensory worlds of squids and clouds, the murmurs of trees and bats.[1][2] Their work probes desire and longing, weaving “communication attempts” inspired by interspecies dialogues, from mating fruit bats to grieving elephants.[2]

Drawing from medieval bestiaries, 19th-century zoological illustrations, geophysics, and graphic novels, Williams conjures endless forms most beautiful, echoing Darwin’s awe.[1] Series titles like Urgent Beings and The History of Weather read as miniature poems, evoking Rachel Carson’s insistence that wonder is our inheritance against indifference.[1] One project began as a book on Carson but morphed into durational paintings of creatures—a starling, violet-eared waxbill, orange fruit-dove, hickory tree—using graphic novel formats to delve into their Umwelt, the expansive sensory bubble each inhabits.[1]

Lichen Reveries and Creaturely Dreams

Among Williams’s most enchanting bodies of work are painted reveries of lichen, that symbiotic marvel of fungi and algae teaching us interdependence.[1] These pieces radiate an “obsessive yet spacious curiosity,” zooming from minutiae to cosmic grandeur, as physicist Willard Gibbs noted: “The whole is simpler than its parts,” yet demands kind attention to the intertwined.[1]

In The Dreams of Small Animals (2024, ArtYard, Frenchtown, NJ), Williams employs multi-panel oil-on-paper compositions mimicking storyboards, but dissolve boundaries between subject and environment.[3] Night Pollinator (2022) depicts a house centipede as a glowing sea apparition, its form vibrational and mystical.[3] Dreams of a Dandelion and Dreams of a Starling (both 2024, 46 × 12 inches) channel floral and avian perceptions, blurring anatomical limits ingrained in human four-limbed cosmologies.[3]

Dreams of a Frog in a Riopel Pond (2024, 69 panels) transforms biologists’ flashlights into UFO beams from a frog’s nocturnal gaze, rhythmic horizon lines evoking amphibian liminality—half-submerged, half-airborne.[3] These works speculate on perception as contact: a butterfly’s wing-eyes as revelatory signs, its visitation an Annunciation.[3] Ephemera from Williams’s process—rituals of presence inspired by scientific observation—underscore art’s subjective brush with the observed.[3]

Sculptural pairings amplify this: Moth and Spine (24″ x 12″ oil on paper with clay, gouache sculpture) and Murmuration (30″ x 20″ oil on paper with clay, water, found rock) evoke tactile interspecies murmurs.[5]

Exhibitions, Residencies, and a 2025-2026 Horizon

Williams (they/them) has exhibited globally: Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Hersbruck Museum (Germany), National Center for Atmospheric Research (Boulder), Bronx Museum Project Space (NY), New York Hall of Science, Wasserman Projects (Detroit).[2] Solos include Infinity and Beyond (Friend of A Friend Gallery, Denver, 2025, curated by Derrick Velasquez), Biophilia (University of Minnesota, Morris, curated by Jessica Larson), Ocean Body (Wasserman Projects, 2021).[2]

Grants and fellowships affirm their impact: 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship, Puffin Foundation Environmental Arts Grant, Mass MoCA Studios residency (full fellowship), Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (full fellowship).[2] In 2023, Lucille Walton Fellow at University of Virginia’s Mountain Lake Biological Station; currently (2025-2026), artist-in-residence at The Roswell Foundation (RAiR).[2]

Publications like New American Paintings, Hyperallergic, and The Washington Post have spotlighted their oeuvre.[2] A 2025 NMSU Visiting Artist Lecture delved into dreams, darkness, and desert life, sparking curiosity-driven art.[4]

Wonder as Antidote to Loneliness

Williams’s ethos counters ecological and human isolation: “When human noise drowns out messages between beings, we miss urgent warnings about climate change… as well as quieter transmissions: desire, grief, mutualism.”[2] By fostering vocabularies for clouds, trees, rocks, their art mitigates loneliness, urging vibrant interactions with nature and each other.[2]

As Maria Popova observes, Williams refuses the art-science divide, embodying Sy Montgomery’s vision of worlds “far more vibrant, far more holy.”[1] In an era of disconnection, How to Bioluminesce isn’t instruction—it’s invocation: glow inwardly, listen to the quiet, and let wonder alchemize silence into connection.[1][2]

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Original source: The Marginalian – How to Bioluminesce: Artist Ash Eliza Williams’s Reveries of Wonder