For the last few years I have been recreating and interpreting nature through my mixed media and fiber sculptures. I call the majority of them “biotopes”, a term coined by zoologist Ernst Haeckel to define a biological community, a “living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals”. My hand sewn and embroidered and beaded objects are my attempt to merge the natural observable world with my own inner life. I’ve always been attracted to and frightened by things that are in their fullest bloom but on the verging of spoiling. There’s a beauty and sadness to them, heightened by the undeniable inevitability of their finality. The process forces me to look at and think about what I would much rather not-the heedlessness of time, of aging, of the stealthy undermining symbiosis of illness. I started mining nature, finding elements that paralleled my private world, of life merging into life, manipulating, altering each other completely.

I need to make the invisible undermining real. My elements mimic both the microscopic and botanic forms in the human eye-scale. They grow, they climb, they take over. The one rule is that my “living things” are not corporeal,

they’re imitation, they cannot die. They diagram change and decay, they don’t experience them. It’s a fantasy of human control, impossible but necessary. My making objects does not fix things, or stop time, but it holds life still, in place, for a little while.