Impressed by nature’s myriad types and relationships, Minneapolis-based artist Sonja Peterson creates sprawling scenes from intricately minimize paper. Working intuitively whereas specializing in the atmosphere and our place inside it, she merges natural motifs and animals with people and historic references.
The inherent simplicity of a clean piece of paper is a compelling attribute for Peterson, who’s fascinated by the chances of texture, sample, and the connection between constructive and detrimental house. Initially, the artist made drawings on giant sheets, which she started to chop into with a view to rearrange compositional components. She grew to become more and more within the artwork of the incision and eliminated different media altogether.
“My choice of paper echoes the idea of the fragility that I want to convey as I look at the precariousness of ecological systems,” Peterson tells Colossal. “The works’ structural integrity is, at times, reliant on its interconnectivity; if elements disconnect, the entire system is in threat of collapsing.”
An overarching theme in Peterson’s work revolves round interconnection—each pure and human-made—highlighting how our world commerce techniques, manufacturing, and agriculture are basically reliant on the environment, at the same time as they contribute to an ever-growing local weather disaster. She usually combines human interactions with botanical particulars, like a sunken ship in “Lost and Searching” or the salient historical past of European colonialist enlargement in “Empire Builder.”
The artist is interested by our “global systems as something of untamed wonder, a gaze that was once reserved for the natural world,” she says. She usually juxtaposes botanical particulars with human-made buildings, akin to ships or buildings. “Nature is now often seen as contained patchwork or a constructed binary to a technological world that is now the wild frontier.”
Peterson’s work is at present on view in Nordic Echoes — Custom in Modern Artwork at Scandinavia Home, which runs from April 5 to August 2 in New York Metropolis. The present celebrates up to date folks arts from the Higher Midwest, that includes greater than 50 works by 24 artists. Discover extra on the Peterson’s web site and Instagram.
