Diane Hemingway: The Wild Cosmos
There is nothing you can see that is not a flower;
there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.
Bashō
My parents were teachers with a great sense of adventure. They loved the outdoors, and each summer our family of six piled into the Suburban with tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, and our small collection of 8-track tapes. For months, we made our way across the country, from Maine to California, sleeping under the stars.
Nothing prepared me for when the stars—my mom, dad, and brother—fell from the sky. They say that breaths come in pairs, except at two times in our lives—the beginning and the end. I don’t believe it. I hold one for each of them.
Returning to the natural world, I retraced the cross-country trips of my youth and explored the backroads of Maine. I wanted to rekindle the wonder of my untethered childhood while remembering those I had lost.
The Wild Cosmos grew from photographs and writing, loosely based on journals, field notes, and dreams. The work is a conversation between life and loss, the humble and the magical, the past and the present.
Wolf
Buttercups
Lady Slipper and Trees
Morning Star
Yellow Curtain
Final Blue Note
Floating Heart
Spanish Moss
Eleven Birds
Weeping Cherry
Holding the Moon
Sample of Audio Installation
Bio
Diane Hemingway is an artist whose practice is deeply rooted in the natural world. She uses photography, writing, and recorded prose to explore the emotional and physical connections between nature and the stories we carry. Her work is a love letter to places, memories, dreams, and family.
Hemingway received her MFA from Maine Media College in Rockport, Maine. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Danforth Art Museum, Brand Library & Art Center, the Museum of Nature in Spain, Gallery 263, and the Atlanta Photography Group.
Her work has been featured in All About Photo Magazine (Nature Edition) and Aesthetica Magazine (June/July 2025), and she was selected for First Look at Panopticon Gallery (2022).
She is the author of two monographs, The Fire in My Throat (2021) and The Wild Cosmos (2020), a multimedia work combining image, text, and audio. In 2023, Hemingway reimagined The Wild Cosmos as her first handmade artist book, created in memory of her brother. Her photographs have also appeared in curated editions of NORDphotography, and on the album cover of Leçons de Ténèbres – Miserere.
Based in Maine, her practice continues to be shaped by the natural world.