Desert Ehrhart is a multimedia Artist residing in Washington DC.
She recently translanted from Tucson AZ, unceded Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui land, often still working in that area.
Desert knew she wanted to be an artist since her early childhood and let that interest flourish through their youth and teen years. Once out on her own as an adult, she took a break from the arts to delve into the subjects of native ecology and herbal medicine, developing her connection to sustainable, restorative and relational systems of healing. Engagement with these processes had a deep impact on her artistic work and the different mediums she now choose to work with. The most recent work predominantly features the native flora and fauna of the South West. In upcoming work she intend to cycle back to working with the form of the body and integrating that with this new relationship to ecology.
Desert’s primary influence in art is the direct experience of connection and the different shape that takes, depending on who or what the connection is created with. Whether that’s the process of tending to seeds in her garden, learning the paths that lead to ephemeral streams within the Sonoran Desert, or the shifting of expressions on a friend’s face; there is a felt sense of motion and fluidity.
Many of the subjects Desert chooses to work with come from a desire to understand that subject more deeply, to know who and what she is seeing. That experience of witnessing offers the inspiration to create. She sees the offering of art as an active leaning into and honoring of the tactile world and it’s infinite language.