Kellie Bornhoft’s By a Thread features illustrations of 64 plants and animals from the Great Salt Lake ecosystem printed on sheer fabric and installed as banners that the viewer can touch and move. Unfinished edges of the fabric incorporate a sense of how delicate the ecosystem is, that it can unravel without care from our community. Without action, the collapse of the Great Salt Lake would have major implications for the ecology and economy of the city, state, and region.  

The illustrations Bornhoft created for By a Thread will be made freely available via the creative commons for researchers, artists, and others to use and repurpose. This act of creative sharing will expand Bornhoft’s contribution to the Great Salt Lake cause in unexpected ways for years to come. 

Several of Bornhoft’s illustrations depict newly discovered species that have had no previous images associated with them, including a kangaroo rat endemic to one the Lake’s islands and a newly discovered species of algae current nicknamed “frilly boi.” Bornhoft has worked with Dr. Bonnie Baxter at the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster University and Paul Thompson and John Luft from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to learn about the species that rely on the Lake.