Thicket and Weatherproof

The sequence of natural and man-made catastrophes that followed one another in the first decade of this century inspired more or less apocalyptic visions of landscape. The question of what is natural and what is not raises new problems, and I developed a series of drawings and books that work on ideas of cause and effect, in small narratives where ambiguity remains: who or what invades or controls what. Bodies of work such as Thicket (2007–2008) and The Characters, the Objects and the Landscapes (2006) take up these questions. Figures in protective suits interact with forms that at times seem organic, only to merge a moment later with mechanical forms, in a two-dimensional space whose figure-ground relations remain undefined. Here too, as in other projects, I drew on a mix of references, some of them camouflaged by a superimposed imagery: scenes of war and catastrophe restaged from reproductions of Renaissance paintings.

Weatherproof was the first publication I made at the Center for Book Arts: a small catalog of images of forms alluding to equipment for withstanding bad weather and adverse conditions.