Zion Canyon Mesa residency

With thanks to CMZ RESIDENCY

https://zioncanyonmesa.org/

Special thanks to

LOGAN HEBNER

KAILA KOEBER

“THE PRIMITIVE WOMAN”

Two years ago, I had to flee my home to keep from dying of sadness, and swimming in the sea saved me. I was born anew. Writing, research, and photography came together to accompany me through this life change. My great buoy—keeping me from sinking and allowing me to float without fear—was a piece of advice from Marguerite Yourcenar: “The best remedy for the turbulence of the spirit is to learn. It is the only thing that never fails.” I then remembered that I had stored away in a wooden box a mastodon tooth, thirty photomicrographs of diatom cells, and some whale fragments, intending to use them to write a labyrinthine cosmogony. I did not know that my grief and mourning would lead me to discover many worlds of glacial trees—trees that sustain worlds of flowers, lifting their pollen across worlds of mountain ranges and canyons, eroding alongside worlds of rivers that flow out into worlds of seas.

Before my residency in Mesa, Zion, I did not know that junipers (*Juniperus*) were pygmy pines. I did not know that their botanical ancestors had served as food for mammoths and mastodons. I did not know they were as ancient as the dinosaurs, nor that their fertilization is a fascinating, slow biological process—part of the reproductive cycle of gymnosperms, plants that bear seeds without flowers. I did not know that their fruits, or cones (galbuli), take two to three years to mature. I did not know that the Utah juniper had developed unique evolutionary mechanisms to survive where other trees perish. I did not know that their cousins ​​include cedars, incense-cedars, cypresses, and sequoias. I did not know that the family first appeared during the Triassic period, some 200 million years ago. I did not know that these mountain ranges of Zion would grant me the power to imagine “great dreams”—visions of great women cooking mastodon marrow to feed and care for their families.

ANGELICA ESCOTO 2026

(multidisciplinary artist, open-water swimmer)

https://angelicaescoto.org