Domestic Landscapes
This work is part of a series entitled “Landscape Books”, which I think of as sculptural landscapes and artist books, a result of my travels and love of William Turner’s watercolor sketchbooks, which he traveled around with as well. Then, when the pandemic began, my experience of landscapes radically changed.
Being in the world, nature, flora, and fauna, became something to encounter now only through my imagination,
In my domestic space, a colonial home, shrunk down from the vastness of the world’s oceans, skies, deserts, plains, surrounded by the absence of others and a landscape of houseplants, furniture and the manufactured world around me,
Or through digital screens or books... representing things past, not present.
The theme of Climate Change brings about the very real possibility of only seeing things in the rear view mirror quite soon - the way nature used to be, no longer able to be experienced, or retrieved. The blackness of the books and plants portray a stark future we are already stepping into – like relics found buried in Pompei.
With all of man’s scientific knowledge and moral resolve, if we remain seated, musing, all can be lost.
Materials: Fired black stoneware clay, ceramic glaze (on center piece), found two-hundred year-old chairs on flashing-wrapped plywood platform.
Creation Year: Fall 2023
Size: 78 in x 20 in x 36 in
Link to Elephant sculpture
Photography by Tian Yang