Linda Leslie Brown: Survival Mode

Artist Statement

I have been thinking about connection, response and mutation: the ways that we and all our fellow beings are entangled, as Mr. Darwin noted so vividly in his "Origin of Species." Darwin's notion was that sexual reproduction, by providing access to greater genetic variation, ensures a broader set of genetic capabilities for survival. Natural biological communities or biota have regulated life on this planet for billions of years.

Today's human-modified Earth environments have produced massive extinctions, as well as a rapidly developing new set of possibilities for connecting, responding, and adapting with genetically modified organisms and technologically mutated life forms.

My recent sculptural work suggests the plastic, provisional, and uncertain world of a new and transgenic nature, where corporeal and manufactured entities recombine. These works serve as relics of possible futures and of the effect of human actions on earth systems. Today, one million species are at risk of extinction. How will life forms adapt and survive in a hot ocean of poisoned plastic?

Sometimes you start by taking things apart. In my work, I combine disparate discarded plastic parts and other found materials with handmade ceramic forms to create these somewhat creaturely, hybrid forms-implying today's technologically altered genetic schema and the struggle for species survival in the Anthropocene era. I imagine that such adaptations may be occurring even now: in the depths of mother ocean, among our gut bacteria, or nested in mycelium tendrils wrapped around the roots of trees.