It is easy to like Jane Booth. She is vibrant and youthful with a head of long, loose curls and an air both athletic and confident. She is tall and takes long strides that hint at the many miles of walks she regularly logs on the resuscitated Kansas prairie where her home and studio are located. For our meeting she wears plaid pants and a chic knit sweater seemingly thrown over her shoulders in a casual manner. For the next hour-and-a-half she drives us through the rolling hills of northeastern Kansas and then angles south to Sedalia, Missouri. Our destination is the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, where the exhibition Jane Booth: Instinct is on view.

“In the woods, we return to reason and faith.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay Nature, published anonymously in 1836

To spend time on Jane Booth’s land, is to spend time within the artist’s most private property: that of her spirit. Each blade of grass, fluttering bird or shaft of light seems to have a concomitant and poetic habitation within her heart and intellect, translating into metaphors that express how life passes through us, altering us physically and emotionally; forcing us to transform.