I’ve been compiling a list of people that I’ve run across over the years, and filing them into a folder together, along with the various terms they use to describe their work, like “pyro-chemography” or “photomicrography”. There is even a competition held every year to determine who made the best petri dish art, using bacterial cultures. I just had to wait like a sea anemone for some of them to float by, and I grabbed them. The only requirement was that the artist must use or depict one or more natural processes in their work. I envisioned some of them and could search for them (like eco graffiti for instance), but others were more elusive. I don’t think I ever would have thought of someone mixing chemicals and setting them on fire like Von Cotu! Science at times seems every bit as limitless as the imagination to me.
As I was trying to find my own identity in art, I realized that I actually shared large parts of that identity with a lot of other people. I grouped us all together, but today that seems to me to be rather presumptuous. For instance, after contacting one fractal field painter I was told that he did not want to be associated with it, nor natural process art, because that “wasn’t what he was doing” (it was). I politely obliged, but it made me sad. I wasn’t trying to assimilate him, I was trying to focus all of us into a beam, based on what we were already doing. Later on he understood my intentions better and allowed his own inclusion, but his reluctance can’t be unique.
Sorry for the rant, but I say all of that to say that I kinda stumbled across the idea of natural process art in the process of explaining what I was doing, although I was far from the only one actually doing it. I was also being grouped in other people’s categories at the same time. An artist named Derek K. Nielsen had already done the same thing with fractal field painting, which put my artwork into that box with him, and many other people. Then I put that box into a larger box. It all kinda felt like a “citizens action” moment, in lieu of any real academic or cultural direction. Is any of it “official” or “definitive”? No, it was just a way of amplifying our collective voices in the process of finding our own individual voices, and this all might get supplanted by someone else’s ideology tomorrow.
I’ve been compiling a list of people that I’ve run across over the years, and filing them into a folder together, along with the various terms they use to describe their work, like “pyro-chemography” or “photomicrography”. There is even a competition held every year to determine who made the best petri dish art, using bacterial cultures. I just had to wait like a sea anemone for some of them to float by, and I grabbed them. The only requirement was that the artist must use or depict one or more natural processes in their work. I envisioned some of them and could search for them (like eco graffiti for instance), but others were more elusive. I don’t think I ever would have thought of someone mixing chemicals and setting them on fire like Von Cotu! Science at times seems every bit as limitless as the imagination to me.
As I was trying to find my own identity in art, I realized that I actually shared large parts of that identity with a lot of other people. I grouped us all together, but today that seems to me to be rather presumptuous. For instance, after contacting one fractal field painter I was told that he did not want to be associated with it, nor natural process art, because that “wasn’t what he was doing” (it was). I politely obliged, but it made me sad. I wasn’t trying to assimilate him, I was trying to focus all of us into a beam, based on what we were already doing. Later on he understood my intentions better and allowed his own inclusion, but his reluctance can’t be unique.
Sorry for the rant, but I say all of that to say that I kinda stumbled across the idea of natural process art in the process of explaining what I was doing, although I was far from the only one actually doing it. I was also being grouped in other people’s categories at the same time. An artist named Derek K. Nielsen had already done the same thing with fractal field painting, which put my artwork into that box with him, and many other people. Then I put that box into a larger box. It all kinda felt like a “citizens action” moment, in lieu of any real academic or cultural direction. Is any of it “official” or “definitive”? No, it was just a way of amplifying our collective voices in the process of finding our own individual voices, and this all might get supplanted by someone else’s ideology tomorrow.