My work pivots around the ways in which actual physical phenomenon resonate metaphorically with thought and how we find meaning. Sight is blurred when the eye and body are moving and what we see is crisp and clear when our bodies are static. Our peripheral vision enters this continuum. Tending to the limits of our capacity lets us know more about what’s out there.
I’ve realized that when looking at a plant body I’m always looking at the whole ecosystem, the surroundings, the weather, the climate—all of that is inseparable from the plant body. The same goes with us. The “I” making the work is actually the world around me: it is the plants I live with, the plants I eat and drink that build my body and its bacterial terrain, the people around me, the books I read, the society and its values…I am just a compost trying to create fertile ground out of this all.
While dérive was a response to physical urban spaces, we also experience our contemporary urban geography through virtual structures, with populations acting in concert with communications networks and sets of common interfaces and devices, etc. In my work, I’ve put virtual and physical spaces on par in certain ways. They are both material for use.
Houseplants are our way of corralling nature, organizing it, and preserving it. They make ecology accessible and domestic. Still, houseplants, vegetation, botanical enterprise all have histories and experiences far bigger than me. As a material, their associated context is greater than my conception, but I like that. Plants, as a medium, have an ability to shift the work through various paradigms and intertexts: from fine art, to science, to personal and intimate, to vernacular.
