In her latest body of work, Lesley Anderson turns her attention to one of Austin’s most unassuming yet emblematic plants: the prickly pear. Encountered everywhere, from neighborhood sidewalks to roadside lots, the cactus became a quiet source of wonder. Hardy yet soft-edged, familiar yet faintly exotic, its rounded pads and irregular silhouettes offered forms that felt botanical, sculptural, and slightly otherworldly.
Anderson began this series by collecting photographs of these cacti in the wild, building a reference archive shaped by daily routines and travels around Texas. Her process begins with a contour sketch; a continuous line drawing tracing the curvilinear asymmetries that define the plant.
Each painting is grounded in a process Anderson has refined over many years: raw, clear-primed canvas washed with ink that moves according to its own logic, pooling, drifting, and drying in patterns determined as much by gravity as by intention. These poured forms introduce an unpredictable element—an emerging shape that must be integrated as the composition develops. Over this foundation, Anderson creates hard-edged painted motifs that sit in sharp contrast to the soft ink. The result is a conversation of opposites: fluid with fixed, organic with constructed, softness with structural clarity.
At the heart of the work is an exploration of resilience. The prickly pear endures heat, drought, and sudden storms, mirroring the region's shifting balance of harshness and abundance. Anderson’s fascination lies not only in the cactus itself but in the open spaces that shape it—the thresholds, intervals, and “in-betweens” she often feels she inhabits. These intervals echo Gestalt ideas about how the mind fills gaps and connects fragments into a coherent landscape.
For Anderson, Austin’s threshold biome becomes a collaborator, something one must listen to, respond to, and allow oneself to be shaped by. Her work seeks an engagement with the land, one that honors its energy, its vitality, and its capacity to shape those who receive it. As Anderson writes, “mapping it in one’s own, subjective and feeling way… curve by curve,” she positions herself in dialogue with the environment. Through this lens, her paintings contribute to a broader feminist reframing of the land as a responsive and generative place rather than a void.
Ultimately, this work functions as a visual record of sensory impressions, cultural layering, and the slow work of coming to know a new place. Through her mindful process of surface-building and mark-making, Anderson reveals how this in-between terrain, in all its rigor and radiance, quietly asks us to pay attention.
