visual darwinism

Beauty can emerge from limitations: the roundness of a femur's head, the strength and hollowness of a bone. These were not designed by an artist or an engineer and then built; the design comes, instead, from a history of mutations that were either well suited to the environment or not. It is not simply the bone itself that is interesting; it is also this accumulated history of subtle adaptations that leads to its present form that is so fascinating.

The objects that I make share, in many senses, an evolutionary relationship with one another. As if belonging to a natural history museum, these objects reference Darwin's theory of natural selection and evolution serving as a metaphor for the creative process that informs their final form and appearance.

I call this process Visual Darwinism. The visual successes of one piece are expressed in subsequent pieces as the visual failures die away. My experimentations with new visual elements and techniques are like genetic mutations, variations in my visual vocabulary that may turn out to be favourable or unfavourable traits, resulting in evolutionary change. The limitations inherent in my materials reveal pathways that direct the morphology of my work.