Captured Swarm
2024 car windows, porcelain, greenhouse


In the Realm of Spiders Exhibition 

Ojai Valley Museum 
Ojai, CA

image credit: Mikael Jorgensen

“The spider carries within its web a complex picture of the prey it is to capture — its web is a map of and a co
unterpoint to the fly.” — Elizabeth Grosz

This year was a spider boom in Ojai. To watch a spider weave a web is to experience material intelligence.

Umwelt, coined by biologist Jakob von Uexküll illustrates how every organism perceives the world uniquely, shaped by their distinct sensory faculties and understanding of their environment.

”… We must first blow a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we ourselves then step into one of these   bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being.”

Captured Swarm, explores bubbles of perception and relationships between macro and micro worlds. The automobile industry for example has created its own pervasive bubble, reshaping our environment in significant ways. It has contributed to largescale habitat fragmentation, clouded the atmosphere with emissions, and altered our experience of landscapes through speed. The car window acts as a both a protective shield and a lens through which we see an intricate world turned into a blur of fleeting impressions.

Suspended in a structure are hand-drawn pollinator insects on porcelain clay-coated car windows. They serve as both screens and reflections of a transformed landscape. The clay is not fixed and can be washed away, redrawn with new subjects. This work explores how human and industrial impacts alter our perception of nature and its vitality and how all creatures are intimately tied together.