I am loving a new creative input—and outlet—these days with artist Annie Asebrook. EvanstonMade had an outdoor art initiative during the month of February at the Canal Shores Golf Club. Annie proposed figuring out an installation using only natural materials with one hour installation time.
And so began a new collaboration exploring nature and city. We share an interest in finding new ways to present and highlight the incredible variety and resilience of the natural world thriving around the built world.
psCO13 common reed Annie Asebrook + Heather Hancock 4/21
My understanding of our biological attunement to the natural world as both restorative and energizing is rooted in the idea that nature provides the perfect balance of pattern/repetition and information/complexity. City environments are often imbalanced, with an overload of implicit and explicit information alongside extreme repetition or chaotic visual noise. Approaching the natural world as information sets helps me understand why staying connected to the natural world is so important to living well in urban environments.
“My eyes have a habit of finding patterns in multitudes. The repeated patterns of nature — found in leaves, pine cones, ferns, burrs — hold my fascination. So do the massive redundancies of modern industrial life, conjuring images of large piles of batteries, or light bulbs, or tires. There’s a strange paradox to these mounds; on the one hand each unit’s individuality is rendered anonymous, and yet, if you look closely enough, one soon realizes that each unit is, however slightly, unique. At the same time, each individual piece does give up its singularity to the collective aesthetic that derives its power from numbers.
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We are approaching weekly installations as inductive explorations in re-framing or re-presenting natural elements in public urban spaces. Each installation is a new opportunity to collect and name natural elements, edit segments for arbitrary discontinuity from nature’s continuity, identify possible new contexts and discover compositions in new geometries and interactions.
We make new discoveries with each installation and hope others who encounter the work will also enjoy a moment of surprise and delight, beauty and humor.
In using natural materials and public spaces, these installations are ephemeral experiences that disappear with natural forces and elements making an entirely sustainable art making system.