Jody Guralnick / Statement / October 2023

As an artist I attempt to serve as intermediary, merging many worlds: the world of insects, animals, plants, fungi, microbes and the man-made. I invite indoors the creations of the outdoors in order to form a new hybrid made by hand, paw and claw.

I am engaged in a partnership with these materials, alternately transforming, observing, seed saving, elucidating. I am studying them botanically, naming, categorizing. By using both the tools of science and art I hope to explicate a time and place in three dimensions, a time and place that is rapidly undergoing climatic change, social change, change at the human level and change planet wide.

By applying traditional rules of taxonomy overlaid with new combinations, I am making hybrids that speak of both past present and future.

In my practice, I attempt to collaborate with the world rather than create something with no past, no history. My work is about dissection and classification in order to transform, to disrupt in order to know, to join two things that do not easily cohabitate.

This work is about memory and amnesia, mosses and lichens and fungi, alchemical plants and the rapture of the tiny. It is about amazement, longing, definition, and comprehension. It is about the forgotten detail, and blurring the line between the microscopic and the macroscopic. It is about shock and the quotidian, just as it is about the space where nature and domesticity rub up against each other. I try to work at the point where two worlds touch; where there is a call, and a response.

I am not taming wilderness, I am making new introductions.