June 2007
The Garden of Eden
I have used steel, fabrics, foam, cast rubber, clay and plaster, food
and castings of real plants to create the Garden of Eden, an installation
that transports the viewer to a seductive, unknown and contradictory fantasy world that is beautiful and dangerous. The installation investigates the primal idea of the Garden of Eden, paradise or a utopia, our perennial
longing to return or escape to such a place.
The piece is made of synthetic products that reflect hours of human
labor (including the artist’s, in the hundreds of cast and string-wrapped
individual pieces) but as a whole references natural formations. It combines human-made elements of the urban landscape with the forms of nature, becoming an oasis or imaginary world within a busy city street/ neighborhood while also turning familiar objects into a strange alien world where the viewer might escape the ordinary and mundane.