“I think that nature is an experience,” printmaker Catherine Alice Michaelis says in "Nature," the latest installment of Craft in America, PBS’s Peabody Award-winning series. “It’s very experiential. It’s very sensorial and sensual, and when we make art about it, we’re fixing it, and I want it to stay alive as much as I can. I want my own experience of nature to keep expanding and growing.”

If Michaelis sums up the riddle facing artists who distill or reflect on the natural world, then this episode, premiering on April 21 (check local listings), shows how various makers attempt to solve it. In addition to Michaelis, the hour-long program features stick sculptor Patrick Dougherty (who's featured in the upcoming June/July issue of American Craft), woodworker Michelle Holzapfel, sculptor Mary Merkel-Hess, glass artist Preston Singletary. The work these artists produce treats nature as everything from an origin to a habitat to a myth. Dougherty’s mammoth bent-stick structures, Merkel-Hess’s grassland-inspired figures, and Singletary’s glass retelling of a Tlingit creation story all respond to the same question: How do we understand the world around us?

With lovely, lingering shots of the artists’ work and peeks inside their studios and homes, "Nature" lets viewers understand both the inspiration for the pieces and the labor required to make them real. The episode unpacks the process by which, in the hands of these masters, branches become a castle and a sunrise becomes a basket.

Watch a preview of the episode below, and if you’re in Los Angeles, be sure to visit the Craft in America Center for "Nature: Highlights from the Episode," an exhibition of the featured work.