So much of my work is focused on breaking down the opposition between the artificial and the natural by imagining a sort of ‘artificial nature’. However, there is another side to this which is thinking about an idea of naturalized technology. For many of us, technology is a natural part of everyday life. Even animals and plants – e.g. cows or soybeans – are really just components in massive industrial processes that use them as components or inputs. I am not condemning this. I don’t think it’s that useful to imagine a return to a pre-industrial past. Instead, I’m interested in how we might use the possibilities of this particular hybrid world we live in to create a future that will be better for all of us, including the other species with which we share the world rather than at their expense. This will necessarily include technology. We cannot remove technology from humans any more than we can take hives from bees or nests from birds or tools from orangutans.
The glossy ‘Shoeforms’ in this room are a group of new works that are also related to this idea of naturalised technology. I'm very interested in looking at ways of representing fertility in the most expanded sense. Life, abundance, diversity, fecundity, reproduction, parenthood — all these ideas animate the world that I am trying to make — just as they animate the world around us. I am especially interested in looking for ways to represent this that don't fall into the traditional clichés and associations that belittle the mother or reduce sensuality to obscenity. In much of my work, I am looking for different ways to celebrate life and a different kind of beauty. These works suggest all these ideas in their surreal blending of elements that never quite settle into one category.