Nature meets sculpture in these ever-changing works by Jamie North
Australian artist Jamie North operates at the intersection of nature and man-made structure. Columns of concrete and steel rise up with plant life sporting out of the cracks and crevices. North carefully terraforms each sculpture to allow it to support the plant life. Picking plants native to his home of Australia such as Kangaroo vines, Port Jackson figs, and kidney weeds wrap, and more. We see nature’s persistence in taking back what once was its own natural resources. The unpredictability of the sculpture’s cracks and the plant growth gives the work a mind of its own, allowing it to grow as it seems fit. Jamie uses these aspects to “simultaneously invoke ideas of progress and collapse, industry and ruin, melancholy and triumph.”
“The use of industrial materials further blurs the disjunction between the naturally occurring and the anthropogenic. The jagged edges of North’s poetically eroded forms expose a variety of aggregates such as coal ash and steel slag, which despite having the appearance of volcanic rock, are by-products of industry. This redemptive re-use of the waste generated by human activity sits alongside that most definitive of regenerative processes: the succession of nature.” – Via Jamie North’s about page
Sources The artist website.
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Images © Jamie North