Artist Statement

My pet portraits address cultivation as a means by which we organize our relationship to the nonhuman. In Towards a Philosophy of Nature, Robert P. Harrison suggests that, “precisely at the moment when we have overcome the earth and become unearthly in our modes of dwelling […] we insist on our kinship with the animal world. We suffer these days from a new form of collective anxiety: species loneliness.” While our subjugation of the natural world appears to have irreversibly isolated the human from the nonhuman, my images represent hybrids of nature and culture and examine the ambiguous borders between reliance, interaction and imposition.