Urban Wildlife

______________________________________________________

Overall, my work is driven by an innate need to understand myself and my relationship to the world around me. I liken the process of creation to excavation. While building up I am tearing away at meanings and relationships, while reflecting and responding to my discoveries. This process usually takes the form of ceramic sculpture and installation revolving around the form of the human and the animal. Ceramic sculptures of the figure have historically been used to comment on culture, from Japanese Haniwa to Tang dynasty splash ware to Mochican portrait vessels, offering insight into the creator's social, religious, and environmental surroundings. This concept extends to my most recent body of work, Urban Wildlife. Urban Wildlife is a portrait of the animals struggle for survival and adaptation, and more acutely, portrays the connection or disconnection between ourselves and our environment. This work explores wildlife's relationship to the urban landscape through ceramic sculpture and digital photographs, which serve as a documentary of the work in the context they were created for. The idea of camouflage, a means of concealment or disguise that creates the effect of being part of the natural surroundings, is the basis for color and surface texture selections of this work. Browns and gray- the familiar colors of wildlife camouflage found in North America- are replaced with "urban camouflage"; a myriad of manufactured colors and references to materials found in the urban landscape. The intense order of manufactured objects that construct our urban environments- conglomerations of concrete, brick, steel, power lines, telephone poles, and billboards- and the chaos of natures constant fluctuation- especially the process of decay that soon overtakes the newly contrived landscape- is symbolic of the continuation and persistence of nature and serves as the inspiration for surface choices. The new camouflages created for each animal are both visually beautiful and environmentally disturbing, creating animals that are eerily in sync with their surroundings. The photographs serve as a reminder of adaptability amidst an evolving artificial landscape.