Thematically, I am interested in what should or should not be considered natural, and the complexities and absurdities that emerge from this question.

I’ve begun by collecting definitions of nature, for example “the physical universe;” “the countryside, esp. when picturesque;” “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.”

A second meaning, of course, expresses nature as something inherent to a thing, an elemental and distinguishing quality of a given thing’s character. In his “Lecture on Something,” John Cage beautifully synthesizes this definition: he describes the nature of nature as, “the accepting of what comes without preconceived ideas of what will happen and regardless of the consequences.”

This opens nature up to possible definitions that I find important, ones that make it necessary to understand aspects of nature (both physical and figurative) as anomaly, as the consistency of inconsistency, as the fear, joy, and boredom we experience in artifice; that see nature as the seed of fiction.

These works were born here – in the complicated corners of nature’s meanings, in the places where we attempt to insinuate ourselves within the natural or insist on our separateness from it; where we take what is natural and in so transform it into artifice; where we fear the natural and unnatural alike, and where we temper those fears with stories. (2011)

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