Artisode; 2.8; Kenn Rodriguez

At times I do feel like a child in a giant jewelry box. I love keeping visual diaries because it's like a way that I can play with images. Basically this is a hybrid between an 18th century jewelry pattern and 19th century natural history engravings of Lycan. So I've been looking at the engravings of a 19th century suologist Ernst Hegel. He was accused of attempting to improve upon nature, stylising nature.

He believed that one of the underlying notions of or one of the underlying rules of nature was symmetry and as we know nature is anything but symmetrical. I've called this piece Tree of Heaven. There is a botanical species known as a tree of heaven so it was a tree that was introduced from China to the west in about 1750. It was such a beautiful looking tree that it quickly became very popular and was planted all over the east coast in the US. The tree grew quickly and when it reached maturity it was discovered that it actually has foul smelling flowers and that it's more of a noxious weed. I think my work really plays with polar opposites, things like the sacred and the profane.

In a similar sort of way with concepts of beauty and the grotesque, there's a photograph of atomic detonations which just have this uncanny appearance similar to jellyfish, this sort of mantle form and it's that terrifying beauty. Hakell really was the first scientist to start studying jellyfish. When you look at Hakell's studies of the Disc going to do so, they look like chandeliers. So for me it wasn't too much of a leap to think of constructing one of Hakell's drawings and using that as a sort of a blueprint to create a larger chandelier. It's kind of the embellishment and the misconceptions which are food for me to really work from.

What we do as humans, we attempt to replicate nature or improve upon nature which I guess links back in with Hakell.