My work focuses on the human relationship with nature. It explores our dependency on our environment and natural resources, while also illuminating our desire to remain separate and disconnected from nature in our everyday lives.
Joseph Campbell's theory of separate development explains the reason why different cultures in different parts of the world, which have had no contact with each other, have such similar myths is because certain aspects of the human psyche are common to all of mankind—what is inside us and the need to understand it. These myths share one thing in common, that through death and the sacrifice of the body, the spirit is achieved and life is achieved. All welcome death because without it there cannot be life. It is what unites all living things because all return to the earth in the end.
Undoubtedly it was their lack of technology that allowed our ancestors to have this deeper connection than that which we have today. Man created mythology out of a response to the environment in which he lived. Everything natural became sacred to him because he was a part of it and survival forced him to interact with it.
This body of work has come out of my need to understand my own existence in relationship to this world. The majority of my daily contact with nature largely consists of the use of the ingredients found in products. The social ecologist Murray Bookchin wrote that “Progress has become identified...with the technical capacity of humanity to bend nature to the service of the marketplace. Human destiny was conceived not as the realization of its intellectual and spiritual potentialities, but as the mastery of natural forces and the redemption of society from a demonic natural world.” I believe that we do not exist on this earth merely to exhaust all of our natural resources, leaving the earth void of anything but our destruction and the tools which caused it—our technology. In a world oriented towards capitalism and consumerism, I am more interested in creating work that pulls our attention back to nature on a more personal level and considers life itself.