While working on Petting Zoo, I often found myself grappling with interconnections: between the individual and the environment, the interior and the exterior, the artificial and the natural. Specifically, my work addresses the anthropocentric view of nature as a spectacle to inspire awe, to be exploited, to be feared and controlled by mankind, through a visual language borrowed from universal practices of caring for animals and plant life, as pets, zoo exhibits, in greenhouses, terrariums, and in pots.
By felting wool, I create flora and fauna as habitats, biomes, or enclosures. For many of these, I draw inspiration from the microscopic, combining the visual language of bacterial and fungal lifeforms with anthropomorphic attributes, with suggestions of flesh, disembodied organs, and body parts. Others are based on wildlife, combining features of different species to create an imagined breed. This sense of unreality is further heightened by saturated, non-naturalistic colors. I select colors based on harmonies, vibrations, and tensions. I exaggerate features, proportions, and scale. I also tend to work in multiples, repeating forms until they become herds or bundles, or strategically repeating motifs to suggest that these beings exist within the same world.
These bundles also serve as small-scale landscapes, environments, or nests for the creatures I create. Others find their homes within found objects, such as clothing, fabric, and carpet samples, most of which I come across as discarded trash while walking around my neighborhood in Brooklyn. This juxtaposition of found objects with the labor-intensive needle felted elements evokes the existence of an alternative realm that intermittently intersects with ours. There is a definite distance between the reality in which we exist, and the one inhabited by my imagined beings.
The habitats I make for my imagined creatures are in an attempt to acknowledge and question the undeniably anthropocentric approach to stewardship of the natural world. When viewing these felted environments in the context of an art gallery, viewers are simultaneously protected from the elements, while they come face-to-face with a simulated visage of nature. My felted creatures and plants are vibrantly colored as if to signal their poisonous nature, yet their softness negates any sense of perceived danger. These contradictions encompass the contrasting responses we have to nature: the enjoyment of its peaceful serenity as opposed to the fear of its potential threats; the eagerness to protect and nurture what is deemed beautiful in contrast to the urge to exterminate and destroy the grotesque.
