Thought you guys might enjoy my most recent artwork.
Emergence.
Made from Curly Maple (shell), Black Limba (spiral), Bloodwood (cells), and Wenge (frame).
Full price: $3250
Sold to Carter Phipps.
Pretentious artist statement:
This is a piece that I felt “needed” to be made. Once the idea popped in my head, I knew it wouldn’t go away until it was allowed to emerge. That is always my favorite kind of art to make — where it feels like the inspiration is coming from someplace beyond me, and I’m just using my hands to guide it into being.
My ultimate goal here was to create something that feels “alive” and organic — less like a dead fossil hanging on the wall, and more like a living creature that extends into the space beyond the frame.
To me, the piece represents emergence itself — that strange process where the micro becomes recapitulated as the macro, layer by layer, while the macro remains fully infused in the micro. This evokes a sense of harmony between scales. You can see this in the structure of the 114 different “cells” themselves, as well as in the spiral reflection of the “outer shell” and the “inner shell” (the white pieces).
I also wanted this piece to represent a polarity of simplicity and complexity, where an incredible amount of intricacy is being organized into a much more simple structure, and the observer can oscillate between one view or the other.
Another creative tension represented in this piece, in my eye, is one between a “growing edge” of emergence, as well as a much greater sense of wholeness, as if something has already emerged that stretches beyond the borders. There are two cells in particular that capture this tension, I think — the top-most red cell, which represents the growing edge (“here is where future emergence will take place”), and the single red cell in the lower left corner of the piece, which suggests that this future emergence has somehow already occurred, and this is simply growing into itself.
