Artist Statement
Industrialization and consumer culture have changed our planet at great cost to the environment. As the cycle of consumption and obsolescence has become increasingly rapid, the cast-offs from this disposable lifestyle is leaving our natural and human resources abused, our environment polluted and degraded, and our lives increasing divorced from the natural and real. Attempting to adapt to the onslaught of changes being done to the environment by humans, nature is increasingly creating hybrid forms that fuse the man-made with the natural. Living things are evolving to permit artificial compounds in their bodies. Mollusks incorporating plastics into their shells, organisms adapting to tolerate former poisons, and animals that use refuse to create their homes are just some of the modifications nature is devising. These hybrids are like many of products we consume – are simultaneously compelling and toxic. Using these new life forms as inspiration, I use metal remains reclaimed from industrial sites and cast them within concrete, and then color their surfaces. The concrete and reclaimed materials reference how humanity has manipulated natural materials. The concrete also represents the ubiquity of humanity’s influence on the earth. According to geologists Colin Neil Waters and Jan Zalasiewicz, concrete is most abundant human created sedimentary rock on earth and is an important marker of the Anthropocene age. The uncanny forms are intended to suggest an animated fusion of the organic and the industrial. The colors are meant to evoke the natural changes that are happening to these materials. I also work on installations and sculptures made with materials such as steel ductwork, conduit and electrical wiring which are associated with our contemporary architecture. Like these hybrid organisms, many of the environments that we exist in are mutant hybrids of simulacrum of past, present and future; and the natural and the manufactured. All of these hybrids characterize the new reality of the Anthropocene period. The forms and environments that I create are intended to suggest that nature will triumph long after humans are extinct.