Crafting Nature

From appreciating, investigating, and collaborating to adulterating, manipulating, and exploiting, how do humans cultivate and change nature, and what will that mean for our future? The eleven artists in Crafting Nature explore how humans interact with nature in their work.

The artists in Crafting Nature all depict the various ways humans interact with the natural world, whether collaborating, admiring, and pondering, or designing, shaping, and constraining nature. The artists ask us, what is our impact on the earth? Or perhaps more significantly, how does the earth shape and change our own permeable selves?

Beyond Inspiration

Barbara Straussberg, Christy E. O’Connor, Michele Randall, and Francis Beaty all collaborate with nature as an artistic aide in their process. Straussberg and Beaty use natural materials to create pieces that appear or are deconstructed, and mirror nature’s recurring cycle of growth and decay.

O’Connor and Randall use nature as raw material in their work–O’Connor uses fragments of nature’s bones, flowers, and chrysalis remnants in her feminine inspired sculptures, and Randall uses the sun as a developer for her floral inspired prints.

(left to right)

Acorpora I

Acorpora II

Patti Dougherty

All: 11 x 15"

Acrylic on paper

Joomchi/Corset One

Barbara Straussberg

19 x 17"

Handmade paper (Hanji), acrylic, monotype, paper lithograph print and dried hydrangea

Joomchi/Corset Four

Barbara Straussberg

19 x 13"

Handmade paper (Hanji), acrylic, monotype, paper lithograph print and dried hydrangea

Admiration of Anatomy

Karen Hunter McLaughlin and Patti Dougherty both create representations of nature that demonstrate a deep admiration for the scientific composition and symbolically impactful physicality found within nature. Hunter McLaughlin celebrates the symbiotic relationship between plant and fungi, while Dougherty studies universal forms as a symbol for the passage of time, at once both animating birth and decay.