Emergent Properties, an installation by Brenda Mallory

Monday, 26 June 2006 12:33

Portland, OR - Portland Modern features Emergent Properties, an installation by Brenda Mallory, in the Portland Modern Window Project during the month of July 2006.  This piece is part of a larger body of work, entitled biophilia, which Mallory began creating while she was Artist in Residence in the Sculpture Department at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Biophilia is defined as “an innate attraction to life in its diverse forms.”

"My work explores issues of duplicating forms and repetitive tasks.  I'm inspired by nature itself, and also by the microscopic images I find in biology textbooks and science magazines.  I study the images of replication and cell division, of structures and striations.  Then I work in a way that mimics nature's own slow growth, repeating the same shape, motion, or technique over and over until a new form results,” states Mallory.

Mallory began this body of work after browsing through a college level biology textbook,* whose introductory chapter, “Themes in the Study of Life,” covered basic principles of science but also hinted at answers to philosophical questions.  Diversity and unity are the dual faces of life on Earth was one theme.  Organisms are open systems that interact continuously with their environments was another.  Mallory finds solace in the “study of life,” but adds, “I’m worried that the beauty and balance of this system is being irreversibly upset by human intervention in the form of untested gene manipulation in the environment and food supply.  I express this concern in my sculptures by combining repetitive organic shapes with hardware devices to imply something aberrant, something that compromises life at its fundamental level.”