Impressed by nature’s myriad types and relationships, Minneapolis-based artist Sonja Peterson creates sprawling scenes from intricately reduce paper. Working intuitively whereas specializing in the setting 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 probabilities of texture, sample, and the connection between constructive and damaging area. Initially, the artist made drawings on giant sheets, which she started to chop into with a purpose to rearrange compositional components. She turned more and more within the artwork of the incision and eliminated different media altogether.
“My selection of paper echoes the thought of the fragility that I need to convey as I have a look at the precariousness of ecological techniques,” Peterson tells Colossal. “The works’ structural integrity is, at occasions, reliant on its interconnectivity; if components disconnect, all the system is in menace of collapsing.”
An overarching theme in Peterson’s work revolves round interconnection—each pure and human-made—highlighting how our international commerce techniques, manufacturing, and agriculture are essentially reliant on the environment, whilst they contribute to an ever-growing local weather disaster. She usually combines human interactions with botanical particulars, like a sunken ship in “Misplaced and Looking out” or the salient historical past of European colonialist enlargement in “Empire Builder.”
The artist is curious about our “international techniques as one thing of untamed marvel, a gaze that was as soon as reserved for the pure world,” she says. She usually juxtaposes botanical particulars with human-made buildings, akin to ships or buildings. “Nature is now usually seen as contained patchwork or a constructed binary to a technological world that’s now the wild frontier.”
Peterson’s work is at the moment on view in Nordic Echoes — Custom in Modern Artwork at Scandinavia House, 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 website and Instagram.
