I grew up in the wilds of Michigan, playing out in the woods behind my house every day and cultivating a love of animals and bird watching. Every family vacation revolved around bird watching and going to some distant place to see a bird with an exotic sounding name. I was lucky enough to have an education that also cultivated my imagination and I always had a love of fairytales and magic that I could find in the real world though nature, history, and science. It’s these experiences that have had the greatest effect on my work. I think that Nature can be defined scientifically, but it cannot be reduced to a set of abstract principles. There is a human element that is essential to our understanding of the non-human world. Scientific facts are vital and necessary, of course, but intermingling with those facts are patterns and traces, lingering echoes of childhood stories, of folklore and fairy tales. Our idea of nature, taken as such, is essentially human. I am intrigued by this anthropomorphism. I see in the process of humanizing the natural world both a desire to come to grips with the strangeness, cruelty and frightfulness of the wild as well as a means of identifying with the unknown, of coming to terms with that which is not us. My work is an exploration of this mingling of the human and the natural.
You can contact me at:
wrentit@gmail.com