All of my work in the past few years has grown from a love of nature and the intricacies and ingenuity of the relationships in nature. Whether it be plants and pollinators or monogamous birds- I love it all. One of my goals is to show the beauty in the world that we as a society have grown detached from. As a result, we have forgotten the interdependence that we humans must be a positive part of in order to survive.
This series was put into focus and released from the corners of my mind when Woman Made Gallery made a call for art for an exhibit titled, “Dear Earth” in 2019. The exhibit challenged the artists to submit work with a letter to Earth containing our message for the planet. I wanted to show our interdependence with nature as well as instances of its resilience despite our damaging actions.
For instance, the peppered moth is a creature many of us learned about in grade school. A moth that once was peppered white and black to match the bark of trees, camouflaging it from predators, is now mostly black. How did this happen? During the first Industrial Revolution in England, the pollution from factories blackened the same trees that these moths sought refuge from, ultimately making the typical peppered ones easy to spot and be eaten. However, peppered moths with a rare mutation (very recently linked back to the year 1819 in a 2016 DNA study), were completely black, making it possible for them to survive the rapid human-made changes in its environment. Typically, we think of evolution and adaptation as something that occurs over thousands or millions of years, but here is a case in which humans altered the environment so drastically and quickly, yet a species somehow overcame this.
Unfortunately, not all living creatures have or will have a survival story like this, for instance, in another piece in this series, I explore the seemingly impervious nature of the jellyfish. While so many creatures are losing their habitats due to climate change, jellyfish seem to thrive on this increase in temperature. Poisonous jellyfish that once only graced the waters near Australia and parts of Asia, are now spreading to other waters wreaking havoc on other ocean creatures, getting closer to humans, as well as blocking cooling filters of nuclear power plants with huge blooms.
I find myself very interested in these stories of nature and its reaction to man-made changes in the environment. My goal is to illuminate some of these events and important developments in our world- to show their beauty, their strength, and at times, their treacherous and terrifying vengeance.
In terms of my artistic approach, I tend to work small, partly out of necessity, but mostly because my subjects are often micro in a macro setting. Meaning, they may seem small and trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I think one thing we are continuing to see and learn, is that the small things add up. Whether it be a loss of these small things (such as our pollinators) or the over abundance of small things (such as the beautiful blooms of jellyfish), these small things are all important and related to all of us and we need to pay attention.