Artist Statement

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I work with once-living items and natural living networks to invite imagined futures of humans in balance with the ecology of our planet. As our current Western civilization continues to divorce humans from our natural wildness we are trapped in a kind of collective forgetting. Through foraging, decomposing and assembling objects, drawing and interrogating the patterns in natural systems-my work brings remembrance to bodies in various mutable forms of death, absence and rebirth. Utilizing foraged bones, feathers, skin, hair, and other dead stuff to construct environments and drawings of those environments, my work looks to act as re-connective tissue, inviting multiple possible configurations, contexts, and revisions to the future. My process questions collective traumas, scars and detritus to investigate ways to repair through acts of alchemy and new growth. My research investigates how holistic communities of people, trees, birds, fungi, bacteria and other life forms consume and are re-formed, and what they might teach us about living in balance with our wildness.

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Bio

 

Belle Struck is an artist/educator. She lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts where she makes stuff with teenagers. She comes from a long line of tinkerers and artists. Belle has exhibited works in Boston, Antwerp, Paris, and around the North Shore. One of her etchings is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as part of a tribute to Michael Mazur. The Print collection is called: Cognates. She has her BFA from Art Institute of Boston, an MFA from Lesley Art & Design in Cambridge, Mass. She is available for workshops, exhibitions, commissions, editions and collaborations.