Eleanor Sabin

Like most people, I do not often experience the vastness and the sublime beauty of wilderness. Instead my daily life is filled with examples of the conflict between the manmade and the natural world. I am fascinated by these zones of tension where the fabricated and the organic converge. Some of these places are obvious; a construction site for a new house, a retired landfill covered in grass, the ruin of a colonial era foundation in the woods. Others are more subtle; a field filled with bare stumps of trees cut in the clearing of land for a new building, a stream diverted to irrigate a farmer’s field, or a cultivated copse of trees foreign to the indigenous flora. These areas illustrate our relationship to the history of the places where we live, and the ways in which our impact continues to be recorded on the landscape around us.

 

Though I find inspiration for my drawings in my interactions with the landscape, I am not concerned with creating portraits of the places I encounter. Instead, I choose to depict scenes in which nature has been purposefully arranged and controlled - whether by my digital manipulation of reference photos or the portrayal of landscapes physically altered by others. In my drawings I interpret the characteristics of the made and the grown as a way of understanding our impressions and expectations of the natural world.