Hildegaard’s haute botanical facial oil. Photo by Ioulex.

Artist Lia Chavez has launched her new hyper-luxury brand Hildegaard Life, for which the first release is a line of haute botanical facial oils. Made from ingredients and extracts that are 98% organically cultivated and plants source from Chavez’ neighbor, Isabelle Rossellini, the oils come in four varieties of Tunisian Orange Blossom, Olibanum of Somalia, Immortelle of Serbia, and Damask Rose of Turkey.

For Chavez, the use of these oils is meditative. Taking notes from folk medicine, Hildegaard’s products harken to the concern of what we do with our bodies. What we eat, what we wear, what we absorb matters—not just to our own bodies, but to all living things, to the Earth.

We caught up with Chavez to discuss this new venture. Read below and visit Hildegaard to explore the collection.

Lia Chavez wears sustainable couture by DOBS NY. Photo by Ioulex

You seek to ensure your brand provides oils that will work for every skin type, including sensitive skin. Why was this something that was important to you and how did you achieve this?

The skin is the site of phenomenological exchange between humans and the rest of the cosmos, so it is a particularly important locus in which art can bring refinement to the perception. In order to perceive the genius of Nature clearly, we must be calm, so the botanical composition of our first collection is founded upon potent anti-inflammatory elements such as prickly pear, calendula and maidenhair tree, which help the integumentary system to achieve optimal health, regardless of skin type. Once the porous layer of our skin is soothed and restored, we are able to engage in a profound embodied encounter with Nature’s wisdom.

As a creative house, Hildegaard’s aim is to introduce revelatory encounters with Nature’s subjecthood, intelligence, and radicality. The oils in our first collection have a universally regenerative effect on every skin type which is a testimony to combined potency of plant elements that are cultivated with regenerative agricultural techniques and our reverent, couture-level craftsmanship of the plants.

Our first collection introduces Hildegaard’s haute botanical facial oil, which is a one hundred percent botanical composition that brings together a Baroque constellation of 70 medicinal plants of conscious provenance, which we cultivate ourselves using contemplative botany and regenerative farming. So wide and wondrous are the plants and their restorative powers. All carrier oils in our compositions are organic, cold-pressed and virgin, so they possess the nutritive density of the plants. Each creations’ namesake plant essence — Neroli, Olibanum, Immortelle and Rose, respectively — is the finest on the earth thanks to our exclusive partnership with LMR Naturals by IFF, the world’s leader in natural perfumery and sustainable practice.

We introduce these new standards for craft, connoisseurship, intention, and sustainable practice to beauty to facilitate an intimate and transformational encounter between plants and one’s whole person. Plants gather up the mysteries of cosmic light and make them accessible to humans. This is an incredibly precious gift for humans to explore.

Hildegaard’s gardens at Mama Farm. Photo by Ioulex.

Each oil is named after a different plant. What inspired this idea and how does each oil represent the plant it’s named after?

The oils are named after specific plants—Neroli, Olibanum, Immortelle and Rose—which enables us to drawn attention specifically to the provenance of the plants featured in our haute botanical creations. Provenance is important to us not only for ensuring sustainable and responsible practices, but it also helps our collectors reach a deeper level of appreciation of the preciousness and exquisite purity of the plants they encounter in our creations. We aim to introduce a new level of connoisseurship to beauty.

Although our creations are perennial, they are released in limited editions, which enables us to tell an in-depth story of the edition’s provenance according to harvest, seasonality, and geography. Our glass bottles are engraved with an individual edition numbers, so they are quite beautiful and collectible.

Can you tell us a bit about sourcing ingredients from your neighbor, Isabella Rossellini, and why you decided to partner with her?

Hildegaard cultivates the plants that are included in our creations at the annual and perennial gardens at Isabella’s Mama Farm on Long Island. Cultivation of the earth is truly an artistic endeavor for us and cultivating in the very special setting of Isabella’s farm has helped us to develope an experimental, couture-level approach to the materiality of our creations.

Prior to cultivating the gardens at Mama Farm, Isabella had commissioned me to create performance artworks there, so my introduction to farming really was through Isabella and the idea of merging Nature with culture.

Mama Farm is a haven for artistic experimentation within Nature, and the farm aims to foster the next generation of environmental stewards through the preservation and rejuvenation of the earth.

Alongside intensive regenerative agricultural techniques such as permaculture, we practice contemplative botany, an ancient technique which involves the exploration of plants’ beneficial properties through direct inquiry via meditation. The sublime gardens at Mama Farm are an ideal place to contemplate plant intelligence and meditate with our plants because the farm is charged with unique qualities of passion and presence.

The farm is a distinctive place which nourishes both body and soul, and it is animated by Isabella’s rare creative brilliance and love of community. For us, it is an irreplaceable living laboratory for artistic experimentation within Nature.

How does your brand fulfill its goal of centering nature?

The creative house of Hildegaard is animated by Hildegard von Bingen’s holistic philosophy of Nature. Von Bingen stated, “Everything that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.” Her vision of cosmic communion and humanity’s belonging within this interconnected order inspires us utterly, and her prescient ideas provide, we believe, an integrated philosophical structure which contemporary humans need to evolve alongside the challenges of our time.

With Hildegaard’s first collection, we introduce a new paradigm of beauty called “haute botanical,” which gives our collectors an intimate encounter with the genius of the plant world and invites them into a heightened level of connoisseurship that hasn’t been introduced within the beauty industry before. Each Hildegaard haute botanical creation is one hundred percent botanical and is composed from plants of conscious provenance, which means the plants are grown, by us at Mama Farm, according to vanguard regenerative agricultural practices. As with haute couture, haute botanical elevates the pursuit of beauty to an artform. Our plants are grown from heirloom seeds which are chosen with the same level of intention that a couturier like Mariano Fortuny or Madame Grès would employ in selecting a silk to sculpt a precise drape of a garment. In Hildegaard’s case, we are sculpting an elevated perception of Nature and humanity’s place of belonging within the cosmos.

Plants are formidable creatures and have given me so much. They’ve given me a new creative medium, as I layer their healing qualities, engage their inner wisdom and develop their olfactive composition. They have provided me with a deepening of vocational calling and joy as I support the radiant wellness of myself and my loved ones. They bring about an education spanning science, seasonality, farming, and the importance of how humans might engage in regenerative action and learn how to become a symbiotic presence on the earth.

Plants possess the power to fortify our bodies and our souls, and their wisdom sits squarely at the center of the pursuit of the Beautiful as well as a sound philosophical mind. So Hildegaard is, in a way, my love letter to them.

How did your artistic vision and experience aid you in the development of your brand?

From the very beginning, my passion for the phenomenology of light brought my artistic life into focus. My creative work is driven by an obsession to uncover the nature and origins of light and to present transformative encounters — through organic, scientific, or technological means — with the physical, spiritual, and astral dimensions of light. My work is conceptually driven, so I tend to learn and engage new disciplines, such as contemplative practice, neuroscience, hacking, and now farming, in order to serve my broader creative vision for clarifying light’s impact on our lives and inner creative selves.

With Hildegaard, I wish to bring the same conceptual and aesthetic depth of art to the world of beauty.

Hildegaard’s core focus is reuniting beauty and philosophy through a dignified approach to Nature, but it’s also an exercise in pure aesthetics. After all, the aesthetic experience is what lures us to wisdom and virtue. Accordingly, my intention to elevate and transform the perception of Nature and her plants has found its expression in a work of experiential art which presents an intimate encounter of what Nature in her purest and most realized state looks like, feels like, smells like.

Hildegaard draws up my belief in the prophetic power of art — that ability to declare intentions of beauty or goodness or truth and to trust that the creative process working through the finely tuned human instrument will manifest the impossible into the world of material reality. The declarations we make as a creative house reveal the intentions that are presently in the process of generating form in the world. Connoisseurship is really the consequence of cultivating acutely alive senses, so my artistic work in expanding the perception of light’s relationship to human consciousness translates in a direct way to how Hildegaard moves throughout the culture. I live by sensation…and I believe that true genius — especially the genius of Nature — must be spoken directly through the senses.

Working with the regenerative cultivation of plants has been my safe space to discover new forms of creative experimentation, conceptual techniques, and intelligence, to take risks, to trust myself, my Muse and the ever complex creative process, to challenge myself and to explore the sacred mysteries of light made tangible. I’ve always been an intuitive artist and my artistry relies on staying true to the inspiration I receive from that mysterious creative source in the universe. I have spent so much time conversing with this source within my inner landscape that it seems inevitable that I would eventually follow that conversation into the landscape of the natural world. I love engaging with paradox — light and dark, matter and spirit, and combining ethereal, illuminatory concepts with visceral, embodied, and fleshly encounters – often all in one work. Plants, which germinate in the darkness and contemplative silence of the earth only to burst forth in magnificence, have long helped in providing me with an understanding of myself as an artist. My creativity also relies on seasonality, often mimicking the agrarian lifecycles of fecund summers and brittle winters. Even at the outset, it was absolutely clear to me that I would release Hildegaard seasonally in limited editions because that’s the way I create and experience the Nature within myself.

As an artist, this is the first time you’ve ventured into beauty. What drew you to this new avenue?

As an artist, I am ever interested in creating unforgettable encounters with physical light which usher in deeper forms of enlightenment, and of course, plants are the great masters of this process — converting celestial light into energy for life and inner illumination. So the desire to honor plants as the great alchemists of light led me into the beauty world.

Artistically speaking, I am interested in the impact that a heightened level of nobility in materials and a passion for intention and cultivation can have upon the cultural practice of beauty. Anytime materiality is privileged over materialism, breakthroughs can occur which lead us to a deeper appreciation of the sophistication embedded in our most primal experiences — touch, scent, and conscious awareness, for example. Through Hildegaard, I approach beauty through the philosophical Beautiful in a way which acknowledges the innate connection between the unseen truths of our existence — cosmic interconnectedness, for instance — and how the natural universe proclaims these truths. Specifically, I am interested in the relationship between aesthetic experience and material integrity; the superlative quality and efficacy of Hildegaard’s botanical elements are direct reflections of the regenerative agricultural methods, artistic passion and mindful intention at the core of our creative process. During cultivation, our plants are cared for with daily reverence and individually tailored attention. Each cell of the plant contains the wholeness of life itself, and so each plant is respected as a well of life in and of itself. We seek to honor Nature and in doing so, we hope to provide an encounter with Nature’s subjecthood in an intensely embodied way. Nature, as a subject, is radical without being anarchic, and this is deeply fascinating to me, conceptually speaking.

I have seen time and time again how Nature has the power to connect us to the eternal things. Plants have connected me more deeply to myself, to my family, to my creative instincts, to so many dear and darling friends, and to the larger cosmic order. Hildegaard is a celebration of this interconnectedness.