Taxonomies and Collections
Over the last ten years my work organizes imagery and content around themes of taxonomies or collections on the one hand, and on the other on relationships within the natural world based on some notion of a kind of system of meaning. These latter can look somewhat like landscapes, but they contain a web of convergent form or ; while the former may look like still life as they are collections of things with some underlying taxonomic or categorical order. The ones that look like landscape are simply using the convention of landscape in order to explore the underlying relationships between living things; while the ones which look like still life often eschew traditional spatial relationships for reference to pages in a book or other ways to organize information.
I engage with science in the way that a non-mathematical person loves science, which is to say in a taxonomic and descriptive way. I love the 18thcentury version, with its categories and collections, and the earlier version dating back to the Greeks, with its emphasis on the visual correlations and, often strange to us, webs of meaning which have internal consistency but are based on ideas now deemed deeply unscientific. I see parallels to modern scientific understanding of systems like ecosystems, various forms of mutualism, and our own bodies as consisting of colonies of microorganisms. For this body of work, I have done some reading about Renaissance science, and the beginnings of an attempt to make a rational order of things based on their visual appearance.