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Crafting Nature
Beyond inspiration
Barbara Straussberg, Christy E. O’Connor, Michele Randall, and Francis Beaty all collaborate with nature as an artistic aide in their process. Straussberg and Beaty use natural materials to create pieces that appear or are deconstructed, and mirror nature’s recurring cycle of growth and decay. O’Connor and Randall use nature as raw material in their work–O’Connor uses fragments of nature’s bones, flowers, and chrysalis remnants in her feminine inspired sculptures, and Randall uses the sun as a developer for her floral inspired prints.
Bending nature to our will
Amy Sarner Williams, Jeremy Waak, and Kathran Siegal use various man made tools to recreate, reference, and interact with nature. Sarner Williams and Siegal cut and carve various wood materials to create abstract representations of nature. Waak’s love for machinery and nature is melded into a fictitious agave flower and machine hybrid.
Lingering in the psyche
Mary Powers Holt and Kimberly Stemler produce paintings that evoke memoria tied to a specific natural place, and compare man’s effect on nature with nature’s effect on man. Powers Holt captures her own memory of a land being developed, while Stemler creates a placeless sense of recollection and nostalgia of nature.
Admiration of anatomy
Karen Hunter McLaughlin and Patti Dougherty both create representations of nature that demonstrate a deep admiration for the scientific composition and symbolically impactful physicality found within nature. Hunter McLaughlin celebrates the symbiotic relationship between plant and fungi, while Dougherty studies universal forms as a symbol for the passage of time, at once both animating birth and decay.
The artists in Crafting Nature all depict the various ways humans interact with the natural world, whether collaborating, admiring, and pondering, or designing, shaping, and constraining nature. The artists ask us, what is our impact on the earth? Or perhaps more significantly, how does the earth shape and change our own permeable selves?
