Artist Statement

BONDING-

Isn’t making, in its broadest sense, a balance between impulse, intuition, and instinct? For me, the act of making opens awareness much like meditation or a good hike, putting my mind in accord with my body and the environment. Making can attune us to a natural world.

When experiencing nature and her complex relationships, I am drawn to the positive bonds that coexist with the challenges of competition. To my eye, these bonds rely on synergy and shared advantage. We humans are prone to divisiveness. By breaking natural bonds and contriving differences some of us are recast as them. But we are naturally hardwired to bond so when divisive traumas like war, enslavement, partisanship, religion, etc. divide us, new bonds are then created and new communities evolve to nurture commonalities. Humanity is restored.

Much of our bonding is through making and maintaining —making babies, making dinner, making a home, a family, a school, a settlement. Making music and stories creates beautiful bonds. The works in this exhibition explore some of those stories—stories of bonds that defy the weight of divisiveness.

My practice is one of exploration. I am drawn to exploring the mediation between intuition and reason. Dualisms like this are a persistent part of our lives but what interests me in this construct is the mediation experience. Through the window of my studio work, I look for an understanding of the effect this mediation has on me.

As a naturalist, I observe a fluid and less binary world that encourages my intuitive side and presents a deeply satisfying feeling of completeness. Complete yet full of mysteries and complexities. Crispin Sartwell proposes that the shared sense of the beautiful is evidence of a longing for this sense of completeness, for the sublime. My studio work is a conduit for insights into this beauty and sublimity and I find the best results come through an organic process, an unscripted exchange between accretion and deletion.

I am fortunate to have the opportunity to exhibit at the Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum. The installation invites the pieces to be recontextualized. My experience of the work in the studio is so different from the experience of it together, in chorus within the gallery. The exploration continues.

- Jack Larimore, 2024