My Creative Cup of Tea

June 30, 2026

#MCCOTBeauty {34}

Hildegaard

Brookhaven Hamle

Eastern Long Island

United States of America

Elevating Beauty to Art. This is the bold purpose of Lia Chavez, a talented and deeply- committed internationally-renowned- exhibited at Venice Biennale, Tate Britain, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology- American Artist, scholar, and steward of botanical traditions, devoted to the restoration of the human being to the Living Light that animates all created things.
A passionate woman on a mission who has always followed her heart and who has been fascinated by light since her childhood. She spent countless hours alone in a darkened attic observing luminous phenomena, A lifelong inquiry that has clearly shaped both her artistic practice and her work with medicinal plants.
Working with light as primary medium for two decades, she has crafted unforgettable encounters which explore the phenomenology of light, illumination, and their impact on our lives and inmost creative selves.
Her study of light organically led her increasingly toward plants—the great transformers of light into life. Lia's botanical education encompasses the study of plant science under T. Colin Campbell, and herbalism under Rosemary Gladstar,
Through more than three decades of cultivation, preparation, and contemplative practice in her own garden, she developed a profound understanding of medicinal plants and their role in supporting vitality, beauty, and restoration.
At prestigious British University of Oxford where she studied, Lia crossed the path of the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, physician, composer, botanist Hildegard von Bingen: A very special human being and committed woman she sincerely feels very close to for many ways, who became her main inspiration and muse later on. She always had known what Hildegard called Lux vivens- the Living Light- to be real.
"Throughout my artistic life, light and devotional consciousness have been my primary materials — I have spent decades studying their phenomenology, mapping their neurology, inhabiting their metaphysics — and it was in plants that I found their most sovereign expression: living alchemists who have perfected, over millennia, the sacred art of receiving celestial light and transmuting it into energy, into medicine, into the very substance of life itself — innately, irreducibly beautiful — what Hildegard von Bingen herself called viriditas, that noble greening power which pulses, by grace, through all created things." she explains.
Lia established Hildegaard Haute botanical in 2021. A beautiful and sincere love letter to Mother Earth. A luxury creative house at the vanguard of art and spirituality, that weds the mystical, the organic, and the scientific, founded upon the conviction that the body is a temple, and upon the practice of anointing—one of humanity’s most enduring rituals of care, through which botanical preparations have nourished, restored, and consecrated the body.
'Beauty has been under assault for as long as I can remember — and I have spent my life in its defense, pursuing light itself as both subject and material, believing with everything in me that the Beautiful is not an indulgence but a necessity: one of the few forces capable of speaking transformatively into the depths of the human soul. What remains in beauty's place, where that force has been suppressed, is a hollow materialism that locates value in artifice and the temporal rather than in the luminous, eternal depths from which all genuine beauty arises.'
Hildegaard is a niche premium committed-to-the-environment facial oil collection. crafted mindfully, by hand, at the Maison's atelier located in Brookhaven Hamlet near New York, in small batches (limited editions of 250).
Each creation is one hundred percent botanical and composed exclusively from plants of conscious provenance, chosen for their capacity to express luminosity. In their union, and scientifically proven to magnify beauty and wellness form the core of every composition.
The permanent collection unfolds in four devotions: Neroli, Olibanum, Immortelle, and Rose—each a distinct expression of light rendered through flower, resin, and air.
The house, that partners with the Leaping Bunny Program. is also proud to collaborate with the foremost artists and scientists in regenerative agriculture to source the most extraordinary botanical ingredients on earth. LMR Naturals provides the exceptional plant essences and Isabella Rossellini's Mama Farm cultivates the incomparable heirloom medicinal plants for the extracts.
As its founder, Hildegaard is a maison with a big heart that is proud of its charitable commitments to support non-profit organization United Plant Savers, established by the legendary herbalist Rosemary Gladstar, Lia's mentor and the global network 1% for the Planet. Every purchase becomes an act of earth stewardship — a contribution to the living botanical heritage upon which all true healing depends.