My current work explores the environmental discussions surrounding biodiversity, climate change, and urban growth. Relationships in space and structure are organized to create new narratives modified by their characteristics, habitats, and transitory nature. The work aims to celebrate our capacity for a connection with nature, the conservation between living and non-living things, and a desire to mitigate ecological destruction. The work acts as a creative laboratory for studying dense ecosystems and overlapping habitats, calling attention to the delicate balance between human activity and the environment.
As an artist working in print media, drawing, and sculpture, my current practice is inspired by the records of observational and scientific illustrations, Canadian flora and fauna, and 19th-century botanical illustration specifically plant morphology and their visual identification. My process often employs strategies related to archiving components from biodiversity referencing images from plants, animals, and microorganisms from the surrounding landscape. While many of these environments are drawn up through imagination producing new taxonomies, organic and ephemeral materials are used throughout my practice building from natural objects, including insects, botany, seedpods, birds, and geometric forms. Each project illustrates animal nature and the complexities of the changing landscape emphasizing how various paths of nature have been interrupted.
My interests in native and non-native plants and animals as archetypes evolve into fictitious environments, constructing stories from merging elements both imagined and real. These subjects are extracted from their current environments and assigned new roles within a fabricated landscape.
Each component of the natural world is rendered through traditional drawing, print media, patterns, and technology intertwined with the influence of urban growth and cyclical changes. Their form and structure carry a heightened sense of interconnectedness demonstrating both animal and plant attributes often appearing indistinguishable and creating their own dense topography and underlying dystopian thread that alludes to an organism affected by the disruption of their habitat.
The busy urban setting bordered by lakes, wetlands, tree canopies, and meadows is a field site, a creative laboratory for studying the dense ecosystems and overlapping habitats, calling attention to the delicate balance between human activity and the environment.