Liz is Dr Elizabeth Malott Penton. She is my father’s neighbour here on the Sound, which is part of Wilmington, North Carolina. She’s my paddle guide during my twice yearly visits to spend time with my father and exhibit my wares at High Point Market. Liz has inherited deep knowledge about this place from her grandmother (known in the neighbourhood as ‘a real character’) and her wonderful water-baby mother. Liz knows about the skate nurseries, the sea turtle egg-laying preferences, and the secret passages through the marsh to get to the big island of Masonboro — 8.4 miles of uninhabited dunes, beach, and the Atlantic Ocean. She also knows the history of this place, both the good and the shameful.

Liz and I don’t stay in close touch between my visits, but when I arrive in spring and fall we get straight to it: paddling out towards the ocean. We watch as the dawn conjugates through every red and rosy gold to blue. Often we take flasks of coffee to Moonstone Beach or secret tiny islands and talk to each other about our projects. We have a lot to talk about. We each have a son and a daughter. While I was investigating caves as maternity dens used by bears in the Andes, Liz was poking around underground in remote France looking at cave art. I taught conservation biology at the University of Kent in England and until recently, Liz taught anthropology and the history of non-Western art at the university here in Wilmington.

While I have been devoting myself to pattern, Liz’s passion of recent years has been the work of a local visionary artist, Minnie Evans. (Visionary art is defined by the American Visionary Art Museum as “art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself”.)

Liz is utterly captivated by Minnie Evan‘s art. The first thing I remember her showing me was an intricate formal analysis of the the way Minnie (she insisted people call her Minnie) used colour, especially metallic Crayola crayons. At first it was lost on me, I admit. Five years later and I’m a complete convert. I now, like Liz, see Minnie’s work as transcendental work of real genius.

“Minnie Evans had a direct connection with the Divine - that’s what she said - and what could be more compelling or interesting than how one pictures the Divine?”

These are Liz’s words from a documentary film she helped to make called Minnie Evans: Draw or Die which premiered last Friday night in Wilmington’s historic Thalian Hall. Directed by Linda Royal, the film is tremendous - truly beautiful. Wonderful archival interviews with Minnie make it feel like you really spend time with her. The premiere began with a young local composer called Algernon Robinson introducing a piece of music he composed about Minnie, which was then performed by members of the Wilmington Symphony Orchestra. Minnie’s descendants were interviewed afterwards and sat throughout in the first and second rows - so proud. It felt as if the whole community of Wilmington was proud of Minnie Evans, who lived here from 1892-1987.

After decades in domestic service, at 56, Minnie became the attendant at the Airlie Gardens gatehouse, where she presided for decades, making and displaying her artwork for sale. To see Minnie there, drawing peacefully, surrounded by the azaleas and the powerfully fragrant magnolias of Airlie Gardens, you wouldn’t imagine that she lived through one of the most brutal episodes in American post-Civil War history. (I am ashamed to relate that, despite living in Wilmington off and on for decades, it’s a history I only learnt about after the storming of the Capitol, on January 6, 2021, when this antecedent was brought to national attention.)

In 1898, when Minnie Evans was 6 years old, she was awakened by her grandmother in the middle of the night and rushed off to hide in a graveyard, while her neighbourhood was ransacked by a mob. Scores of Black Americans were massacred (the exact number is unknown). She hid under funerary monuments of angels and crucifixes, while the offices of the town’s Black-owned newspaper were burned to the ground. This turned out to be the only successful coup d’état in American history - a white supremacist mob violently overthrowing the city’s democratically-elected, multiracial government. A lasting white domination ensued, with municipal parks and high schools in Wilmington being named after the coup plotters. This history was pretty comprehensively swept underground until recently.

Imagery of angels and prophets are found throughout Minnie Evans’ work, along with birds, flowers, butterflies, trees, strange animals, the skies and water. Her art often includes eyes which seem to look at you while you look at them. Minnie never slept well at night, and dreams crossed the boundary into her waking hours for the rest of her life.

As well as relating this brutal history alongside many other stories from Minnie Evans’ life, the documentary really illustrates how the water, sky and landscape of this place, especially the sunrises, suffuse her art.

Spending so much time with Minnie’s art and her masterful use of colour has inspired Liz to start painting. She covers her enormous canvasses with the beautiful scenes from the water, the spartina grass, the play of the light, the blue clamshells. I too make nature-themed designs that come from a place of complete devotion.

Liz has used wallpaper and fabric of mine in her bedroom and bathroom. It’s a design called Paisley Paramecium and it celebrates the micro-organisms that form the base of the pyramid of all life in the oceans (phyto-plankton and beasties like like amoebas, water-bears, diatoms, spirogyra, coccolithophores, and the fabulous copepods). It was honestly a highlight of my life seeing how my design chimes with the Minnie Evans’ art that Liz has framed on the wall in the same room.

The experience of being in that theatre for the premiere, with a full house of people of mixed ages, races and backgrounds, all celebrating Wilmington’s pride and joy — Minnie Evans — well, it felt incredibly good. Particularly because the Thalian Hall stands just a few blocks away from where the murderous mob rampaged when she was a girl. And particularly given the undeniable resurgence of hateful racist forces in our society. This was the opposite of all of that. A triumph of beauty.

Beyond North Carolina, Minnie Evans isn’t yet nearly as well-known as she should be. (For example, there is only one reference to her in the website of the American Visionary Art Museum.) Liz is doing her very best to help change that. As well as contributing to the film, Liz is writing a book and working on the first ever catalogue raisonné: a comprehensive, annotated listing of all Minnie’s known works, of which there are more than 3000.

I love the last thing that Liz says in the film:

“What is Minnie telling us as an artist? She is showing us that right here we have enough….[]…We have light, colours, spectrums, space, minds and voices. We have all we need to engage with the splendours of this world and therefore to imagine how we might connect to something beyond. She is showing us Transcendence.”

Back to the paddle-boards. We’re right at the threshold between sky and water with those rare creatures who interpenetrate this threshold - the fish that leap, chased from beneath, the ospreys that hunt, the dark mounds that are dolphins coming up to breathe, loons that glide impassively then vanish beneath. Our own hands churn the water to excite the bioluminescent dinoflagellates. Little points of cool light below, just like the stars above.

The biggest ever exhibition of Minnie’s art opened on November 14th at the High Museum in Atlanta. It’s called A Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans and is open until April 19, 2026.

This is what I said - it was unscripted - just me rambling. I learned from the auto-transcript generation that I talk in one big excited run-on sentence. Everything connected by “ands”. I guess this does fit though with my maximalist, everything-is-connected approach to life!

Here is the minimally edited version of what I say..

“Ceilings are usually pretty boring. But you can think of them as blank canvases and they can be used to incredible effect in interior design. Imagine that you're in your bed and you're looking up, or you've tipped your head back in your living room on your sofa, or you've just finished a big meal. You allow your eyes to wander upwards and you contemplate some kind of lovely, serene yet intricate design, intriguing design…

The whole process of expanding your gaze upward, is incredibly soothing for the nervous system. It's like looking up at stars and contemplating the underside of trees and branches. It's like dreaming. It's the opposite of that focused kind of downward attention that we spend so much of our brain power on with our phones or when we're worried. So they say it's "salutogenic", it's health-giving to look up and expand our gaze.

And in terms of biophilic design, which is something I'm really passionate about, in a way the ceiling is kind of like a new frontier, a new domain in reminding us to be connected to nature.

Cecilia Casagrande is a fabulous interior designer out of Boston and she's used my nature-celebrating wallpapers and fabrics to incredible effect through the years. She and I decided that we would like to work together on something. It was Cecilia's idea that we think about ceilings because it's difficult to find good designs for that space.

Most wallpaper designs are unidirectional: they're meant to be viewed from one particular direction. But not so with ceilings. You really want to create something that's very much more sort of expansive and multi-directional. I've had various different experiments in how to create designs that would have that sort of infinite feel.

I've been very inspired in that process by a designer called Joseph Frank. He was an Austrian who worked for Svenskt Tenn in Sweden for a long time. His designs are really very, very innovative in terms of how he created his pattern repeats. And I really wanted, for these ceiling designs, for your eye really to have that wonderful process of slowly fathoming out the design.

Cecilia and I talked a lot about what we would create for ceilings. And we love the idea of a forest canopy - looking up into trees. Safe in the shelter of their branches. We've decided on three different designs to begin with.

Cecilia has just recently been to Japan and I've been interested in Japan for a long time, although I've never been. We're doing our first design about “sakura”: the Cherry Blossom Festival in Japan is a real sort of portal in the year through which Japanese culture has this very deep connection with nature.

I'm in northern France and there's a wonderful garden here called Meizicourt which has Japanese cherries. The trees themselves have a sort of elbow shape and I wanted to try and create that in the design. I've been experimenting with how to create that lovely serrated edge of the leaves - I've been using watercolour.

The second design is to do with cloud forests in Ecuador. It turns out that Andean cloud forests are important to Celia as well as to me, I having studied bears there and having been on a recent trip to Los Cedros in Ecuador. I worked on this design while I was there. The misty tree ferns, bromeliads, all of the layered texture.

The third design is all about "fall color" in New England: all those wonderful oranges and yellows and reds of the maples and other trees. It's one of the few natural phenomena on earth that's visible from space. We felt very inspired by that idea as well. So watch this space! Thank you for your for your attention and I look forward to sharing more with you as the designs develop...”

I actually feel quite comfortable making presentations - you know, academic or informal talks with slides and facts. When I was a PhD student, I won First Prize for my talk at the Cambridge Conference on Conservation Science. I think I won that mostly because, thanks to some computer glitch, the scattered points on the map of my study site, each one indicating a bear poop I’d found, magically turned into dollar signs. The map was covered with them, like a nasty pecuniary rash. I made some throwaway remark about wishing it were really that easy to find money for conservation. It wasn’t especially funny, but the audience and I shared a good old spontaneous laugh so we all felt happier.

But having to “entertain” on an actual stage is another thing altogether. (The use of scare quotes here to draw attention to a noteworthy, incorrect or ironic usage, is kind of like the curtains, the lights: really notice this person who will now - Tah Dah - {{‘“perform’”}}.) Extremely daunting.

Olivia Williams and I met thirty years ago, on Remembrance Day, at my life-long friend Lucy Brier’s wedding. Both of these women, and most of the wedding party, were actors, and they were all outrageously funny and warm people. I fell in love with them and indeed I married one. But I’ve never ever wanted to join their ranks. Quite the opposite: I have been subject to recurring nightmares about suddenly having to step into the breach and go on for someone. “You just have to stand there. No lines. We promise.” Then, just before being pushed on stage, “Wait, you did learn your lines, right?” or “You do know the steps to the group number and your solo, right?”.

At the rehearsal, the performers had to show me how to use a microphone, how to find my light, how to stand still on a mark, how to bow. I’d been in dressing rooms in West End theatres, but I’d never made that walk through the backstage, with all of the lights and props and tripping hazards, all dark and cramped, through the wings and onto the stage.

The Beautiful World Cabaret is the brainchild of musical theatre legend, Janie Dee. Her goal was to inspire people to think more deeply about the climate and nature crises, and to challenge us to do more, using the art form she loves most. Janie had an extremely successful run at the Edinburgh Festival. Our cabaret was part of a spin-off series at the Charing Cross Theatre, during London Climate Week, convened and MC-ed by various performer friends of Janie’s. My dear pal Olivia Williams, brilliant actress and extraordinary human being, invited me to be a part of her evening. I said ‘please no’ several times. She prevailed. She usually does.

I had no idea how I could be on a stage with these sublime performers. I mean, have you ever heard alto Melanie Marshall’s heart-melting voice? Or that of Broadway legend and Bridgerton heart-throb Julian Ovenden? Days before our cabaret, the dazzling Lizzie Ball had been playing her violin on stage at Glastonbury. Stephen Higgins, our musical director, is working on an opera with Jacob Collier. That’s not to mention the poetry and prose to be served up by Olivia herself and John Schwab of Reduced Shakespeare Company fame. It was all diabolically intimidating.

I knew the sorts of things I wanted to talk about (broadly, the topics were bears, pattern and the Rights of Nature) but I realised it would be better if I spoke directly to the audience, off the cuff, without a script, to make it feel immediate and personal. I wanted people to smell the bears, to feel the cool shrouding of mist in the cloud forest. Even though not being scripted made it far scarier.

Walking out onto the stage at the rehearsal, I was thrown back into the terror of that oft-repeated nightmare I mentioned. But it was too late to back out. I had to find a way to cope. My go-to method of self-soothing is thinking about colour. The velvet curtains and the backdrop were a wonderful deep red velvet. Opposite red on the colour wheel is green, and I realised immediately I wanted to wear my favourite emerald coat, spun from a diet of pure mulberry leaves by Chinese silk worms and embellished with tracings of flowers and leaves. I love the way red and green look together. I love green so much that I seriously considered naming my son Kermit. Now Kermit…he knew how to handle a cabaret. Yes, I’d wear green.

My mother died ten years ago today. The last thing she ever said was “Ugggh”, accompanied by a twinkly eye roll. It was in reference to a mawkish friend who had come to pay her last respects (ie make my mother’s passing all about her). My mother was funny and irreverent and never followed the script. Before that “Ugggh" she said something profound about the business I was about to launch.

She understood that my whole business idea was predicated on storytelling - I’d make textile designs about specific wonders of wild nature. The goal would be to use beautiful colours and patterns to infiltrate people’s hearts, minds, and homes, and once in, somehow communicate with them the urgency of conservation. She was very pleased I was naming my new business after her, Anne “Newton Paisley”. She’d seen the logo design. She felt invested.

My mother’s deathbed advice to me was this: “Whatever else you do, don’t forget actually to tell the story.” She was holding my hands. It was profound advice, and I think of it regularly. In the case of my business, it’s all too easy for my designs to become disconnected from the narratives behind them. The world doesn’t need more pretty stuff. If what I create isn’t about reconnecting to nature and the more-than-human world, well, the whole enterprise is lost. She knew I needed to find the words, to write them down, to speak them out loud.

My mother was there the day we planted our mulberry tree, 22 years ago. The berries are ripe right now and they’re especially delicious this summer. When picking them, you are under the canopy in a world of green, eyes seeking the contrast, reading the pattern. The masses of berries jostle on the stems, ripening to red and then to the ultimate purpley black.

You’ll never see mulberries for sale in a shop. They are far too rebellious, too anarchic. To pick, you must pluck or twist each berry tenderly, sensitive to the individual. Some come away intact, but many cling on to the stem then burst in your hand - the blood-red juice dripping down arm in rivulets. You look like you’ve committed some horrible crime. It is the most delicious fruit and very variable in flavour, like Pick’n Mix sweeties. Not firm and demure like blackberries, mulberries are far too ephemeral, dangerous, wasp-guarded, full of mischief. Shakespeare describes, “the ripest mulberry, That will not hold the handling”. Mulberries can’t be packaged. Like cabaret.

In the Bohemian neighbourhood of Montmartre in Paris, cabarets like Le Chat Noir mixed music and other entertainment with satire and often urgent political commentary. On that last note, the final “performer” in our Beautiful World Cabaret was Professor Hugh Montgomery, OBE. His message about climate change, though delivered with humour and calls to action, was absolutely harrowing. It landed deeply with everyone who heard him, burst open, as we all were, by the evening’s beauty.

For the first time I understood that insight about the magic of live performance being created by the audience as well as by the people performing. It is the two-way communication that creates the shared moment, the intimacy. There is jeopardy and generosity. It can never be reproduced, and it really can’t be packaged.

So I stood there in high heels in a spotlight, at the centre of the red-swathed stage. In my green silk coat. My heart hurling itself at the bars of my ribcage. I could see people’s faces looking up at me expectantly, smilingly. The word “cabaret” comes from the Walloon word for “little room”, and it did feel really intimate and friendly. My own design of bears in the cloud forest was projected behind me. The sounds of rain, frogs and birds from the Ecuadorian cloud forest set in gentle music recorded and composed by my son, provided the soundscape. All I could do was take a deep breath and tell my story - unpredictable like a mulberry and determined to make my mama proud.

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