Mother Nature, Eccentric Architect

Artists have always been drawn to nature as a subject for representative art. The natural world has been used to promote visions of both pastoral order and chaotic disorder. Julia Crane’s art, however, derives not from any overarching attitude toward the natural world, but rather from an observer’s fascination with the shapes and forms found across myriad ecosystems, both on land and undersea. Viewing nature as an eccentric architect, she deconstructs its often whimsical building blocks in materials like ceramic, polymer clay, wire, hemp, steel—even reclaimed satellite dishes.

Taken to large scale as an installation, Mother Nature, Eccentric Architect invites the visitor into a strange yet oddly familiar world. Are we in a woodland or underwater, or in a dreamlike environment imaginatively drawn from both?