About: Nature Leans
This body of work is driven by my deep appreciation for natural forms, my love of the natural world and my fascination with glass as a medium that never ceases to amaze and delight me.
I use glass to express my feelings about the fragility and intensity present within nature and our lives. In an ongoing effort to express these experiences I have stretched the medium to an almost impossibly fragile and ephemeral state.
Much of the work elaborates on my full time job running a nature preserve. Glass is a perfect medium to express my fascination with the forces of nature that are often invisible and hard to grasp. The temporality, invisibility and tenuousness of the medium reflects the precarious state of nature; the decline of the bee population, the importance of pollination of plants and the vital role of flowers in our lives. These themes have emerged as a subtext in my work and I have added natural materials such as flower petals and pollen as contrast to bring an organic element.
The work is painstaking to make, often dangerous to handle, difficult to ship and maddening to install. Despite the impossible nature of the work I have found myself compelled to make larger and more complicated installations and to stretch the glass to thread-like webs of barely-there fragility. I imagine that it reflects an inner desire to want to be strong or to master at least one thing in my life or possibly I am trying to accept the inevitability that things break.