Hazel's Flower

Everyday we engage with patterns and images of the natural world. However, this natural symmetry and beauty is often taken for granted due to either its macroscopic universality or its microscopic invisibility to the human eye.
My collage illustrations aim to interrupt this tendency by transforming images from vintage scientific illustrations, charts, and diagrams into surreal dreamscapes. My collage work explores the possibility inherent in the constant flow and rearrangement of visual information through the juxtaposition of disparate images and materials. Seemingly random bits and reconfigured imagery engage the possibility inherent in new combinations of the seemingly most common things. Similarly, in my mixed media abstract work, I piece together with textile materials and discarded papers in my painting compositions. In this way, my art strives to enact the process of defamiliarization, a literary term that means to “make the familiar unfamiliar in order to see it in a new way.”