RE-CRAFTED

Emily Jan creates intricately crafted installations of hand-made flora and fauna combined with found objects, mixing elements of high culture with low culture, science with mythology, and history with current affairs. Her creatures, wondrous and monstrous by turns, feel real but are entirely handmade. As a writer and illustrator, Jan creates artist’s books that amalgamate the lived research of as emi-nomadic life into works that engage broader concepts such as the circularity of time, the richness of biological and cultural diversity, and the finitude of the planet. As a wanderer, naturalist, and collector of objects and stories, she is guided in her work by the spirit of kinship and exploration.

Her oeuvre functions like the Wunderkammern of old:  a collection of oddities and marvels that beckons the viewer to reconsider their relationship to nature and to culture. In this age of ecological and social precarity, the importance of being able to envision places we may never personally see, to hold space for them in our minds and in our hearts, is ever greater. To this end, the work seeks to stretch the boundaries of our collective imaginings in order to encompass the unseen, to learn to love the unknown as well as the familiar, and ultimately to strive to weave all these strands into a larger narrative about what it means to be a human living in a world roiling with turmoil and catastrophe but yet which is still mysterious and beautiful.