Piper Gross

Hey! I’m Piper and I use they/them pronouns. I’m a North Carolina and Maryland based artist specializing in scientific illustration with a focus on botanicals. My work includes themes of Queer Ecology, trans identity, symbiosis of humanity and nature, and more.  

My childhood was spent exploring the woods and muddy creek bed of my family’s homestead in the Appalachian mountains of western Maryland. There, my passion for the outdoors was born. As I grew older I took this passion abroad and in 2023 I spent three months in the Aysen region of Patagonia backpacking and kayaking in the Chilean wilderness. I fell in love with this new environment, illustrating every new plant I met.

My genderfluid identity deeply influences my work. In the United States, to be trans is to be inherently political. We, the trans community, resist hatred by any means necessary, and I choose to do that through my art and political  organizing. I work to support and protect my trans community.   

My work employs many mediums from gouache and line art, collages and digital illustration, to wood-working and fiber arts. I explored many of these mediums while attending Oxbow, an art-focused gap year program in Napa, California. I specialize in botanical illustration to make the wilderness more accessible to and cared for by all. I believe that protection and conservation of wild spaces must be founded in deep love, interdependence, and empathy and this can only be fostered from a place of connection. 

Botanical illustration is my contribution to this connection.