About Brandywine

I’m Kiah Treece, an artist, writer, and gardener and the person behind Brandywine Farmstead & Studio.

My work begins with the natural world, but rarely ends there.

I’m interested in the ways people have tried to understand, record, decorate, and make meaning from the world around them—particularly through folk art, natural history, alchemy, botanical traditions, and the forms of domestic and creative work historically practiced by women.

I return again and again to old paintings, quilts, samplers, textiles, botanical illustrations, herbals, household objects, symbols, and handwork. I’m fascinated by objects whose makers may never have thought of themselves as artists, and by forms of creativity that were often categorized as useful, decorative, domestic, or ordinary rather than “fine art.”

There is something about that boundary that interests me.

So does the boundary between observation and imagination.

Much of my source material comes from the landscape around Brandywine: things growing in the garden, objects collected on walks, seasonal changes, birds and insects, old trees, flowers at every stage of decay, and colors I want to remember.

My background in ecology and geology also shapes the way I see the landscape—not as scenery, but as something layered, changing, interconnected, and full of evidence of what came before.

Sometimes those observations become paintings. Sometimes they become writing. Sometimes they lead me down a historical research rabbit hole or into an experiment with plant pigments, textiles, natural dyes, or another material entirely.

That freedom to follow curiosity is central to Brandywine.