Words on Moss

I have lived in Los Angeles for all of my life. It is a city which, while thoroughly urban and manufactured, is surrounded on all sides by rough, diverse nature. I have spent my life flitting between the margins of the city and the mountains that have surrounded me, and have always been fascinated by the interplay between the two. As a result, I began my investigation with the question of how we mesh our understanding of the artificial world with the natural one. The written word does not necessarily belong to either the artificial or the natural world. Words categorize, and we use them to distill our experiences of the internal and external world. It is this plural capacity that so interests me about writing, and why I have utilized it as the primary thread between works.

As I moved forward through the investigation, I realized that the written components of the works allowed me to tie all the disparate aspects together, and I focused on incorporating them into a central theme. I utilized wood as the primary representation of nature, with words and writing representing the human-borne world. I put an emphasis on wood into the work, based on the chaparral around me, and the history of carpentry within my family. The timeliness that was required whenever I used living objects, such as living leaves or moss, forced me to treat the pieces very delicately, and forced me to deal with their fragility. Initially, I tried to combat this by preserving them, but as I continued on, I realized it was more coherent to incorporate this fragility into the intention behind the pieces.