Ardine Nelson is a Columbus-based artist who retired from the Department of Art, The Ohio State University, after over forty years of teaching. She earned her MFA degree from the University of Iowa. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, her work resides in more than twenty-five public collections, and she received the John Simon Guggenheim Photography Fellowship in 2008–09 for Green Spaces: Small Garden Communities of Dresden, Germany. 

Ardine Nelson has held a career-long interest in visualizing the landscape, be it urban or wild, man-altered or natural. Recently, this interest has led her to work with ideas of regeneration and death, those things that will return and those forever gone. These works reflect Nelson’s embrace of the aging process and mature appreciation for all of life’s stages.

She uses the technique of macro photography to reveal the minute details of plant material typically unseen by the naked eye. Typically, macro photography is thought to have a relatively limited area of sharp focus, but Nelson employs the technique of focus stacking, layering up to sixty frames with slightly different focus points to build astoundingly sharp images.