Pods 2010

My work incorporates the artistic potential of the environment around me, natural and urban. My work includes a variety of media with which I document, transform, and interpret my immediate world. I integrate personal and historical memory with the natural world to create artistic objects that facilitate a new kind of environmental conversation.
Recently, I have been building pod-like structures made of salvaged green branches, utilizing properties of tension and resistance to create globular forms. These are large and strong enough to support people inside of them. As with the ongoing Bigloo project, I explore materials abundantly available in this specific region. Working with familiar and often overlooked materials I thoroughly engage with the limits and possibilities of them. These structures reference the history of humans' involvement with the natural world. They recall a survival-based relationship to the environment, often resembling animal or early human dwellings.
My process is intentionally fluid and improvisational; I react to my surroundings and experiment within them. An important part of making my work is discovering a new material or a new approach -- I gain energy from unfamiliar territory. A pattern has evolved in my work, integrating my ongoing conversation with my environment, reflections on human involvement with the natural world and experimental objects that allude to our history and our future.

music by the Vortex Navigation Company 1998 Peter, Sean and Wes

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• contemporary
• art
• minneapolis
• sculpture
• Sean_Connaughty