The precarious state of the natural world served as a starting point for Generativity. Environmentalist John Reuter introduced me to a palette of “generative” forms that appear again and again, as nature shapes itself. These “architectural” structures suggested a vocabulary and syntax with which to approach the installation space. In searching for a way to make work about the generativity of nature that didn’t contribute to its destruction, restoration and archiving, became key studio processes. 

Ivy vines with their dendritic growth patterns (characteristic throughout nature) are big, beautiful and destructive. Properly removing them extends a tree’s life for many years. Vines I harvested and cleaned by hand, along with monumental projections, became the big landmark gestures shaping space. Collecting native seeds and sounds, vital activities in preserving diversity, brought me into a physical intimacy with nature I hadn’t experienced since childhood. Archives of these seeds and sounds were housed in glass vials in a plethora of generative forms that hopefully evoke some of the astonishment I felt collecting them. More than anything I wanted viewers to experience a connection to nature in their bodies. 

Sensual performance footage suggested the animating principal “Eros,” and our inescapable entanglement with life’s proliferating forms. Entwined bodies fade in and out of imagery drawn from nature, at times mirroring the physical structures of the installation. A transparent scrim bisecting the gallery varied layers of moving images as they are visible from different points in the space. Projections both appeared on the scrim and passed through it, painting the floor and one end of the exhibition space with distorted echoes of the main scenes. This transparency, along with creative coding mixing the video in real time, produced an endless unpredictably, mirroring both nature’s generativity and the layering our minds produce in dreams. A sound installation using three parabolic speakers that focused sound in specific regions of the gallery and a fourth “colony” of hand blown glass speakers reinforced the sense of entering ever more fully into our own biology and its entwinement with the natural world.