Nettle Blackthumb

Nettle Blackthumb is an artist and basketmaker raised on a steep ridge in the rolling hills of northern Maryland. She has been making art since early childhood and has created a strange range of drawings, writings, and prints in that time. Since moving to Hampshire County WV in 2018 she has been practicing herbalism, foraging, gardening, fermentation, weaving baskets, learning about ecology all the time, just learning through curiosity and experience. She started teaching classes with her abundantly knowledgeable partner Osier in 2022 to encourage learning and wonderment in other humans. She loves to witness others lighting up with new understanding or sensation during a plant walk or basketry class.

Her art bubbles up from a spring of wondering, struggling, and marveling about reality and materializes through her relationships with more than human life. She aims in her life and work to dismantle the notion of humans as separate from and superior to (their own concept of) "Nature" and challenges herself (and others) to perceive their humble place in the world through an animist and somatic lense. The materials are fellow community members harvested from the local landscape when she weaves a basket or makes cordage or tries to tan a hide. She likes making inks from local nut hulls, planting willows, collecting her cats' hair for an eventual sweater, creating cordage from dogbane, flax, nettle, and milkweed fiber, weaving honeysuckle baskets, foraging plant food and medicine and scavenging wild game, raising and breeding chickens, growing naively organized herb gardens, tending wild gardens of apples and other elders, and floating in Shaver's Fork or Blackwater River. 

These are some of the arts she is devoted to learning and practicing and sharing in her new home of Elkins WV.