Sara Jang

Life doesn’t have to be anything grand in order to be celebrated. My house is surrounded by trees and all kinds of flora and I feel inspired by what I see every day. There are so many ways that nature has been manipulated to recreate something that can be considered natural. With this in mind, my project is something along the lines of ‘domesticated nature’.

One project is influenced by grass that sprouts out of cracks in the street or the edges of concrete buildings and walls. It gives me the sense of nature harmonizing with human-made materials. The project consists of two plots of boxes–each of the plots is made out of 3 boxes by 4 boxes, a total of 24–and a crack carved out of them. A variety of native plants are growing out from these carved lines. The boxes, painted in a gradation of green and yellow, blend in with the outside environment from where I drew its inspiration.

Frida Kahlo had once said, “I paint flowers so they will not die.” At times we tend to only appreciate the beauty of nature in the form of decorations–when they are made into jewelry or wallpaper and the like. So combining these two elements, jewelry and wallpaper, I create this decorative looking panel. The panel looks like plants and flowers woven from one continuous wire. The iconography is loosely based on endangered/threatened species in Maryland. Maybe by making nature seem more appealing, people will become more drawn to it and want to protect it.