The relationship between the built environment and the natural world is one of mutual encroachment, a cycle of stasis and decay. Life cycles are thwarted by the intrusion of built components, upon which the forces of nature work inexorably to corrupt, destroy, and ultimately reclaim. Urban trees cast their seeds upon the concrete and asphalt to rot, unfulfilled. The same concrete, meanwhile, is cracked and heaved by roots and weather, slowly taken back to dust by lichen and mold. Concrete, asphalt, steel, wood, plastic -- they act on nature and nature acts on them.

My work treats this cycle as a means of commenting on the social priorities of modern machine culture and the unavoidable role that cities play in speeding the degradation of natural environments by desensitizing citizens to the presence and importance of nature.

Both aspects of this cycle are profound, but my work has tended to dwell on the imagery of fallen and rotting seedpods. My concern in this work is our recognition of the importance of trees and other flora coupled with our total disregard for their processes. We go to the trouble of artificially planting them within our constructed environments, where they are thereby cut off from any ecosystem and bear no ecological resemblance to trees in nature. We appreciate these trees in an aesthetic sense while paving the ground beneath them and truncating their lifecycles. This basic, fascinating problem is one that I have continually revisited.

The broader focus of this work is the detrimental progress of urbanization. The denial of nature is reinforced by all aspects of urban expansion, from the sociopolitical to the economic. But the exchange system that calls for bulldozing and flattening a wooded area in order to recreate hills and plant new trees before building tract houses is deeply problematic in basic psychological and social terms. This work seeks to question practices such as these as well as our own personal understanding of our place in the world around us.

a framework
destination (thwarted)
(urban) artifact
rust portrait I
the lifecycle of the urban hackberry
slab
sweetgum | bitumen
onan's legacy
absorption/rejection study no.1
waste (purpose)
purpose (waste)