Inter·Act // Unfamiliar Intimacies

www.markweaverart.net

“I was born within view of the Pacific Ocean and have felt connected to it all my life. I feel equally connected to the desert Southwest, with its wide-open vistas and resilient plants, and to the deciduous forests and rolling hills of the Northeast. These landscapes shaped my childhood, and my heart has always leaned tenderly toward the more-than-human world. I’m an artist with an education in science. I think about the ways humans have interacted with the more-than-human world throughout our evolutionary history. I’m interested in how those relationships shaped our cultural values, and how they continue to influence our behavior today. My work is autobiographical. I explore my own reactions and experiences and use them to connect with viewers.

My research lately has focused on microplastics, which has led me to think about the ways plastics permeate ecosystems. While teaching a human genetics course earlier this year, I found myself thinking about the advent of agriculture, when we began selecting plants and animals with traits that benefited us. Several years ago, I viewed a collection of birdskins for the first time and still think about my emotional response to seeing fellow living beings transformed into objects of study.

While these experiences may seem unrelated, they all reveal the same cultural tendency to see the more-than-human world as separate from ourselves and existing for our use. Ironically, it’s my scientific training that brings me back to the worldview I developed as a child: that all living beings share a common ancestor. We are all kin. My work creates opportunities for viewers to reconsider our relationships with other living beings and to imagine what it might feel like to recognize them not as distant others, but as the kin they have always been.”