The Tangled Bank

This series uses a loose narrative to tell the story of the  dividing line that marks the boundary of humans and nature. Here weed like plants compete with man made debris, litter, and construction equipment for equal footing.  Inspired by the edges of parking lots, slopes along train tracks, and other unclaimed public spaces, these prints use a black humor in showing the delicate balance that humans have put themselves in with regards to the natural world. 




Each print is a multi layer screenprint sized at 12"x10".  These prints were made in 2012-13.

The title "The Tangled Bank" comes from the last paragraph of the last volume of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species: ​
"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."