FALON MIHALIC, ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, painting, and environmental installation. My work reveals natural phenomena through a climate change lens and provides a new way of looking at our fluctuating environment. I take ephemeral natural systems and hidden ecologies like local weather and water bodies and I give them form by mapping, making, and building their fleeting qualities into permanent sculptures and paintings.
My work is informed by deep site and ecology research and manifested through my hands in the studio as mixed media collage paintings and ceramic sculptures . My paintings are collections of site qualities, like remnants of feelings, views, or experiences in the landscape with a dense overlapping and layering of color washes and collaged imagery from my landscape photos. This is a way of recalling the multiplicity of layered natural systems and invisible actions of a place like water flow, plant growth, and cloud formations. My ceramic sculptures are primarily handbuilt porcelain with my own glaze formulations that I have made through trial and error. The resulting ceramic pieces are, like my paintings, organic forms with layers of texture and washes of atmospheric color.
My large scale, site specific public art commissions tell the stories of fluctuating site patterns and hidden ecologies. Windbloom, a 30 foot diameter polycarbonate and steel sculpture, maps the prevailing winds on a former coastal prairie site turned neighborhood park in Alief, Texas. In Miami I created Seagrass, a series of nine cast stone terrazzo sculptures as a super-sized rendition of a submerged seagrass endemic to the shallow waters of Biscayne Bay. With both of these permanent outdoor commissions, I am revealing the site’s hidden ecological qualities and placing them at the forefront of the public’s imagination.
I am interested in the wonder embodied in the living landscape and I make art to uncover that experience of wonder.
