STATEMENT

My long-term study of plants and animals expands my imagination in generating ideas for my work. Gilded Phytophillic Bats is comprised of over 30 life-sized, gold-plated ceramic bats, hanging in a willow tree along the Brooklyn waterfront. I created the piece to raise awareness of the mysterious environmental problem causing widespread death in many bat colonies in New York. Gold-plating the sculptures, expresses the precious role bats play in our ecosystem and recontextualizes bats’ stigmas of being dangerous or grotesque. So often, public art is very confrontational so I wanted to make a piece where there was a sense of discovery. People come to that park to relax and take in a little piece of nature and I wanted to present them with something unexpected to see. The installation was part of an exhibition titled "Relative Environment" installed across the ƒulton-Ferry State Park during the summer of 2008 and was on view concurrently with Olafur Eliasson’s “The New York City Waterfalls,” for which the park was a main viewing location.

The Orchid-Bat series is inspired by the evolutionary ability of organisms to adapt to their environment. This body of work aims to explore the heightened intensity of polymorphous sensation. Rooted simultaneously in science while evoking the fantastical, these works depict the fusion of bats and orchids. The appeal to me of science is not to use hard facts to explain the world, but rather, utilizing science as a medium to pry open and reinterpret things. The stimulus for the Orchid-Bat series originated from bats’ physical abilities to resemble the plants around them as a camouflage technique and from the way orchids can become more visually similar to the animals that eat their nectar in order to seduce them into pollinating. The two species transcend their existing boundaries, in a play on survival of the fittest, using mimetic adaptation to gain a new identity. Through my work, I investigate my role as the artist as creator and Creation as metaphor.

The Jardinière installation is inspired by walks in Prospect Park, where I became fascinated by bark shed from old London Plane trees and started collecting large quantities of the bark. I was immediately struck by the formal similarities between the bark and the shapes I was painting on the wall in the Orchid-Bat series. I replicated the size and shape of the bark cutout from varying types of wood, and then created ceramic works with the bark pressed directly into the clay. Other elements like mushrooms or berries I collected were cast in clay slip to make multiples or dipped in clay slip and then fired at high temperature in a cremation-like process. Some forms are based on quick drawings of the paths I took while walking through the park, rather than on actual objects. To represent the human and animal co-inhabitors of the park, I created abstract forms, which are punctuated by striking, red tongue-like forms, imbuing them with lifeblood. This installation reflects nature observed in a variety of ways, including through photos, artists’ renderings and firsthand. The wall painting, on which all of the pieces are mounted, was based on an 18th Century anonymous etching of an old Banyan tree with large exposed roots; it is ambiguous which are branches verses roots and which way the tree is growing. Adding to that feeling is the tree’s being painted on its side with the roots on the left undulating into the branches on the right, referencing the typical way we read images or words left to right. The title of the piece is a pun based on the French word for a female gardener and or indoor planter; as a female artist creating an indoor garden of sorts, I am also making a nod to Patrick Blanc, the French botanist and artist who makes vertical garden creations in unexpected places.