Sculptures
“We can’t fight nature, John. We can’t fight change. We can’t fight nothing. My whole life, all I did was fight, but I can’t give up neither. I can’t fight my own nature. That’s the paradox, John, you see? When I’m gone, they’ll just find another monster; they have to, because they have to justify their wages. Our time has passed, John.”
Credit:
Dutch Van der Linde, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games, 2010
You Can’t Fight Nature reflects the cynical and often brutal nature of life in the wild, especially in relation to human interaction. Inspired by a viral image of a fawn taking refuge on a deer-shaped bow-target, I explore how instinctive moments in nature can evoke symbolic meaning in human emotion. The artwork challenges anthropomorphic projection, asking viewers to question their own perception of animal nature and the ideas they impose on it, whether human emotions are being unfairly projected onto animals in ways that simply don’t exist in nature. As one sits with this topic, the question becomes: “How can projecting human traits onto non-human entities for human purposes create misleading or harmful narratives about them?"
Growing up in the woods among hunters and wildlife shaped my understanding of both the beauty and violence present in nature. I was influenced by Cannupa Hanska Luger’s “(NO)stalgia” (2020), which examines our relationship with materials and ancestral connection through adapted practices. Like Luger, I aim to open a conversation about empathy, identity, connection, and how we reinterpret our relationship to nature and tradition.
Credit:
“(NO)stalgia” Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2020