Team Member Projects

Please click on team members’ names to learn more about what they’re working on!

darren sears | worldviews

Darren views nature in spatial rather than scenic terms - as maps of linked experiences rather than collections of disjointed landscapes. Finding most natural environments too boundless, disorderly, and difficult to absorb, he struggles to understand and appreciate them without knowing where they end and what lies beyond. Ecological edges and adjacencies rarely seem to be the focus of artists or just about anyone else, but Darren sees them as giving definition and meaning to a landscape, as a frame does to a picture or dark does to light.

In his watercolor, oil and mixed media works, inspired by travel and imagination, Darren organizes nature into discrete, comprehensible slices. The places depicted are fictional to varying degrees, but in the face of climate change, invasive species and habitat destruction - particularly devastating to the sensitive ecosystems and ecological zonation patterns of island and mountain environments - they express my distress at the fragility of the real places that inspire them. 

paul downton | design

Paul’s longstanding commitment to ecological architecture & urban design encompasses projects that range from the design of individual sustainable houses & community buildings to multi-unit dwellings & whole town plans.