South Carolina-based artist Jessica Drenk was born and raised in Montana where she developed an understanding and appreciation of the natural world that has since deeply influenced the course of her artistic career. Her installations and sculptures often imitate organic shapes, patterns, and textures even when using a medium that is often manufactured by human hands. Drenk’s most recent sculptures are a series called Implements, each of which begins with a mass of standard No. 2 pencils that have been tightly glued together. Using an electric sander she then molds the piece into a form that seems more likely to have originated in a dark cave or deep within the ocean than from a school desk. Of her work she says:
By transforming familiar objects into nature-inspired forms and patterns, I examine how we classify the world around us. Manufactured goods appear as natural objects, something functional becomes something decorative, a simple material is made complex, and the commonplace becomes unique. In changing books into fossilized remnants of our culture, or in arranging elegantly sliced PVC pipes to suggest ripple and wave patterns, I create a connection between the man-made and the natural.
You can find her work at Paia Contemporary in Hawaii, or Foster/White in Seattle, and see many more images over on Facebook.
[via Colossal]
