Artist Statement

For this piece, I drew inspiration from the mermaid chimaeras of the eighteenth-century and how they were connected to art and nature through being man-made art objects made out of natural materials. With a foothold in the real world due to the natural materials, the mythical mermaid chimaeras are not quite naturalia or artificialia. In de-materializing the creatures, a wonder arises in the viewers that can spark conversations about the connections between art and nature. Curiosity cabinet collectors such as Tradescant collected artefacts of both classifications to allow for the curation of said objects to start to inform each other and shape stories within the curiosity cabinet or museum.

As an artist, I am fascinated with the real and unreal in art and nature. The materiality of my work also informs this since, in some cases, there isn’t a physical object as it is perceived. Through working with holograms and projections, my work creates illusions that allow the viewers to think that they are real. The very nature of the hologram projects adds to the concept of the mermaid chimaeras being mythical beings with a foothold in the real world. Though the holograms are not physically real, they are visible to the human eye.

This piece is meant to embody a curiosity cabinet and make the viewer question the real and unreal. By pairing the chimaera hologram with physical objects that come directly from nature, the artefacts begin to tell a story about what can be deemed real. The hologram itself is a photoshopped mermaid chimaera that is mostly blended to appear seamless but there are certain parts, such as the left monkey arm that has a cut-and-paste style to it. Though the mermaid chimaeras were occasionally thought to be real to the European coastal villagers, the chimaeras were far from seamless.

In the future, I would like to animate the holograms and I had tried to create a chimaera gif for this piece, but was not happy with it yet. The animated gifs will be something that I continue to work on and develop going forward.