Relational Fractals: Patterns of Life and Belonging Across Scales

Across the living world, patterns of relationship recur at every scale—from microbial communities within and around us to human societies, ecosystems, and planetary systems.

Drawing on specimens from the Peabody Museum, this interdisciplinary conversation with Professor Susan Prescott and recent Yale School of Art alumna, Taisha Carrington will bring art and science together to explore these nested worlds and the dynamic connections that sustain them across deep time. Moving across scales and millennia, the conversation invites us to encounter life not as a collection of separate entities, but as an unfolding web of relationships—intricate, vulnerable, and continually generating the conditions—and the mystery—of life itself.

The event will also consider how these relational patterns extend from individual bodies to communities and collective life—and what happens when connections are fractured through ecological disruption, social fragmentation, displacement, and loss of place. Through art, science, and dialogue, we will explore how resilience may emerge through renewed relationships, reciprocity, mutualism, and belonging.

To explore these themes, Susan Prescott will draw on her art, alongside her work in planetary health and human health to explore how deep relational patterns connect ecosystems, shape wellbeing across scales, and reveal ancient forms of interdependence that can help us rethink health, resilience, and belonging in a fragmented world

Taisha Carrington will draw on her artistic practice to discuss systems of movement—of people, materials, and resources—and how climate change, environmental transformation, and geopolitical forces shape migration, adaptation, and the futures of Caribbean communities. Together, the group will examine objects in the museum's collections that illuminate forms of adaptation, resilience, and cultural continuity.

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