Matzke Fine Art and Design

Mike Adams

We tend to talk today about our separation from nature. Indeed, it seems to be the case that we see nature as literally outside ourselves: the out-of-doors. We damage the environment without regard for the fact that we are in nature, destroying the very earth of which we are an integral part”like setting fire to a house in which we still want to live. Even very early in the 19^th Century, but really before the Industrial Revolution affected Germany, Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) wrote about nature as having two aspects: unconscious forces, what we would call the natural world, and consciousness–including our own sentience–still part of the natural world, but enabling us to be (or to think we are) autonomous. Perhaps this seeming autonomy, our ability to think and act, makes us feel that we are beyond unconscious nature, when we are merely an extension of it.

My own sculpture is an exploration of the balance between what I would have previously called the natural world and the man-made world, but there is an inherent opposition. Instead,  like to follow Schellings lead and project ourselves within a unity of nature of which we are part. Obviously this does not solve the obvious problem of the divide in which we often find ourselves as humans: seemingly opposed to everything else in the world (and subsequently alienated).

Yet the connection we have with art is an example of how we actively engage in a positive way with our world. My work is ultimately optimistic in that it offers a kind of harmony. I juxtapose incongruous elements, not necessarily to cause a clash, but to create something mythic, something that exists outside of time and the normal rules. A work of art ought to be a bit strange, that place in the world where something new happens.

View Page