FALON MIHALIC, ARTIST STATEMENT
I’m an artist working in sculpture, painting, and environmental installation. 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 site and ecology research and manifested 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 complex 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 a rigorous testing process. The resulting ceramic pieces are,, organic forms with layers of texture and washes of atmospheric color.
My public art commissions tell the stories of fluctuating 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.
In 2013, I founded my professional practice Falon Land Studio, a landscape architecture and public art firm.
