The artist Crystal Morey believes our species are at “a pivotal moment, faced with monumental questions leading to difficult, uncertain answers.”

As she writes in her artist’s statement:

​Humankind has become the driving influence and force behind natural evolution. We are able to alter life from a single cell all the way up to entire ecosystems. Intentionally or unintentionally, we are rapidly affecting changes to the environment that would have taken natural processes millennia. Through these actions we are leaving many vulnerable species and habitats frantic, facing disruptions and uncertain outcomes.

Morey investigates these issues through her beautiful, talismanic sculptures of women with animal heads, which she sculpts from “the silken white earth of porcelain.” These delicate, fragile figures show our interdependence with the animals and landscape around us. Morey’s animals are reminiscent of the magical creatures found in children’s tales—rabbits, owls, bears, and wolves.

Having spent part of her childhood in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Morey once believed that humans were subservient to nature. But when she moved to the city, Morey soon realized that “humans are the largest variable in the changing of our planet’s ecological and environmental outcome.”

Based in Oakland, California, Morey was educated at the city’s College of the Arts, where she earned a BFA with High Distinction in 2006. She went on to study for an MFA in spatial art, at the San José State University, CA. Morey has exhibited her work since 2010. Her most recent show Entangled Wonders was held at Abmeyer + Wood Fine Art, in Seattle, Washington, earlier this year.

Crystal hopes that the viewer will come away from her work “thinking and asking questions about our role as humans on the earth and our relationship to other living beings.”

Follow Crystal on Instagram and see more of her work here.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
H/T Ufunk.