Mossworks, May 2011

Moss is green and it doesn’t wilt. Those are two of my favorite reasons for working with the material.

Moss is in my studio. A lot of it. The studio is not where moss began its life, but it continues to stay alive there. It has a new purpose, to become art and not nature. It lives in an artificial zone now, a context of white and light.

From the moss, I have created a series of images, Mossworks, which strive to completely transform the moss without diminishing its naturalness. That transformation is from an element integrated within a biological system to an element integrated in a perceptual system.

Through our perception, the moss can take off, metaphorically. Recomposing within white space of the field, the moss grows back together to reflect major events far from the forest floor. These bits of moss, maintaining their low level of animation, become the birth of a star, the edge of the earth, the infinitely scaleable idea of the square. The white space provides a new context for these phenomena, a space filled with light. That lightspace is the universe, the imagination and the virtual world.