Us humans have a tendency to consider ourselves superior to all other living creatures, ruthlessly slaughtering animals and destroying the beauty in nature without ever really thinking about what we're doing, or the impact our carelessness is having on both us and our environment. The truth is that we're destroying ourselves and our environment more and more with each passing day, a frightening thought that most unfortunately choose to ignore. The meat tastes good, so who cares how the animal was treated? It's easier to throw out garbage than recycle it, so to hell with the environment!
Artist Kate MacDowell beautifully taps into these topical real world issues with her incredible porcelain sculptures, which oftentimes fuse together human anatomy and skeletal systems with other living creatures like trees and animals, reminding us that we're not all that different from the things we so often destroy. As Kate writes in the opening statement on her website, "the union between man and nature is shown to be one of friction and discomfort with the disturbing implication that we too are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices."
Check out a few of my favorite pieces of MacDowell's art below, and then see more over on her website.
