Chasing the Sun is a research-based project that intertwines images of extinct and endangered plants with sustainable home design by women architects. Organized into time zones, the project offers a global view on climate change and sustainability efforts.

Resulting in a series of prints, murals, and a three-channel video installation, the project's video channels are organized into 24 tall, vertical bands for 24 time zones. Within each stripe, segments of the plants and homes from each time zone are randomly fragmented and placed by code, drifting left to right and rotating. As a concrete example, one stripe contains fragments of a flowering plant, the Hibiscadelphus woodii, endemic to Kauai, Hawaii. Once thought to be extinct, Hibiscadelphus woodii, or Wood's hau kuahiwi, was rediscovered in 2019 by a drone where it was growing out of the steep, vertical face of a cliff. When drawing such unexpected connections, the project confidently advocates for technology's role in solving the climate crisis.

Inspired by artist Joelle Dietrick’s Global Scholar Fulbright to Germany, Chile and China and her five-year-old daughter’s wish to travel at the same pace as the sun to never sleep, Dietrick began work on the series during the COVID pandemic when natural systems felt out of control. Originally envisioned as an indoor sundial in which each vertical band’s shift to darkness aligns with real world time, the project is in dialogue with the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2 about an installation in their South Lung and is looking for other partners in this phase of the project.