Statement
My work investigates restructuring flora and fauna through the process of collage. My collages contain representational imagery from the ‘natural world,’ that through a process of sampling, deconstruction, and reconstruction, come together to form something new.
Peter Schwenger’s book, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects, has been instrumental to the way I view collections and collages. Schwenger posits that collections are assembled very much like how dreams are formed from snippets of images previously experienced. Dreams can seem to progress at times out of order, in varying degrees of clarity, with details shuffled and rearranged. I find my collages grow in a similar fashion. I weave together snippets of plants, bones, insects, and cells (to name a few) replicating, distorting, and assembling these fragments into strange, if familiar, constructions. As a child I spent countless hours exploring my father’s garden and biking through neighboring orchards. This interest is ever present in my work. I sift through scientific journals and historical ephemera, outdoor gardens and natural history collections. My process relies heavily on collecting imagery, and I have amassed a small library of botanical and biological images through these explorations.
Ultimately, these collages pull from my memories of outdoor adventures, utilizing image fragments as visual stand-ins or markers for these memories, but in compositions that fuse various species together to create new forms. My intent is to explore the hybridization that occurs when these species are collaged into new constructions that are not quite as straightforward as they were previously. In some sense my process is an attempt to re-organize and contextualize the world, while the conglomeration of images I use are the pieces of an unconscious narrative. In putting them together I seek to create an environment that is beautiful, richly layered, and intricately woven.
