Windgate-Lamar Fellowship
2020
My work explores how we construct the relational framework between humans and the environment. This framework has a deep impact on how we participate in the ecosystems which we inhabit. Furniture is a uniquely positioned creative medium with which to address our relationship to our environment, since it simultaneously relates to both our bodies and the spaces we exist within. By engaging furniture’s inherent materiality and dependence on natural resources, the larger human relationship to materials and natural processes can be highlighted. Through material exploration and poetic composition, my furniture investigates areas where the natural and the synthetic meet, and how these can influence and shape each other. These objects embody a more reciprocal framework, in which the built environment and the natural environment are more interconnected, and can be examined as parts of an overarching system, rather than separate, disconnected, and oppositional actors. In the context of capitalism and industrialization, humans are seen as separate from natural systems and the environment. This has led to over-exploitation of resources and environmental destruction which affects both humans and other parts of the biosphere equally. By celebrating both highly processed synthetic “human” materials and organic “natural” materials, I am able to address the two as integral parts of a holistic system, in which both the raw and the refined can coexist and compliment each other.