- Hello, I'm Rebecca Cronon, your guest host for ARTEFFECTS.

In our featured segment, we meet Sarah LaShelle of Reno.

LaShelle is a natural healer and herbalist who uses plant medicine and herbal adaptogens.

She pulls from indigenous knowledge of botany to create skin products, tonics, and beverages to facilitate harmony within the body.

(lively music) - I think of art as a translation, as our own inner language that exists solely within one of us.

I think that's why, for me, art is so profoundly intoxicating.

(lively music) My name is Sarah LaShelle.

I am a holistic esthetician and herbalist and a healer.

We all are humaning, we all have the effects of stress, we all have life, we all have things that affect us, and an adaptogen just kind of holds you in a really gentle way.

It's something that helps your body adapt to the effects of stress.

(lively music) I think of herbalism and what I do as a translation of a story that has existed far before me.

The relationship to Earth and the relationship to plants and the ability to self-heal, it's just innately within us.

(gentle music) My intention was to make herbs and adaptogens taste good, like Mary Poppins kind of.

And then I've just continued to try and make drinks that have a really energetic feel without it being alcohol, and that's what my bar was kind of built around.

(gentle music) So I have a very large jar that I put all of the ingredients, all the herbs, the dried plants and flowers.

It's this beautiful layer of herbs, it's just so beautiful.

And then I take an oil blend that I also custom-make and then I pour it over to saturate the herbs.

It's usually full moon, and then I usually will bottle it up with the full moon as well.

I think I'm inspired mainly by the story of the herb, and then I try to build a story around the herb and then also make it tasty for all the tongues to enjoy, 'cause I really want people to be able to receive medicine in a way that is delightful and enjoyable, people can feel it and can taste it and can experience it in a more enveloped way.

I do hold deep reverence for so many different cultures and people and places where plant medicine was absolutely a way of survival.

And that's kind of been a really big new joy for me in making really beautiful, tasty drinks and finding the glasses.

And it's really also the joy of being able to witness the experience.

(gentle music) Plants and herbs and all of these different modalities or remedies, it's really important to have them work together within their energy and the synergy of the plant.

Some things can activate other things in stronger ways.

I think that it needs to be like this unification of a dance of some sort where they all kind of work together to activate exactly the way they need to, and they all kind of can create this chord or this melody that has a stronger sound.

(gentle music) My art is transforming something that already exists, is an old story, and allowing the way that I see it and taste it and see the medicine that it offers, being able to put that into a form that is consumable or felt or seen.

(gentle music) I get to listen to what the plants have carried for generations, and they're my medium, they're like my paintbrush.

And the things that I create with my elixirs and my tinctures and my salves, all the things are my canvas.

I obsess over texture and smell and creating something that can be consumed in a beautiful vessel to then make you feel all of those things.

It's not just a flavor, it's my entire process that I think people consume and that's why they feel really good, and it gives me so much joy to see it.

- [Announcer] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by Sandy Raffealli with Bill Pearce Motors, Heidimarie Rochlin, in memory of Sue McDowell, the Carol Franc Buck Foundation, and by the annual contributions of PBS Reno members.

(lively music)