Tessa Cotron is a visual artist whose work primarily focuses on the botanical world and the living things that grow at the edges of our attention. Her work is a practice of presence rooted in the belief that beauty is not something we find, but something we finally allow ourselves to see. Working in oil, she moves between tender observation and bold transformation. Some works are quiet and close, acting as devotional studies of a single flower or stem, painted with reverence for the life within them. Others push further, warping and layering natural forms until they become something luminous and strange, thresholds into an interior world. In the curve of a petal, the persistence of a weed, the wild density of a field left to itself, she finds evidence of something vast and interconnected: a universe that is always in conversation with itself. Her paintings are an attempt to hold that conversation still, long enough to enter it.

Cotron currently works from her home studio in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.