Terralapsus questions how closely the art object can approach the natural object and to what degree the human-made form can merge with the physical reality of the soil. It explores the possibility of boundaries dissolving and art merging with nature.

 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “flesh of the world” emphasizes that human perception and the body are reciprocally intertwined with the world and mutually reversible. James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis defines the Earth as a living, self-regulating system in which all living and non-living elements influence and balance one another. Arne Naess’s deep ecology, on the other hand, proposes humanity’s complete identification with nature, transcending the narrow ego boundaries of the “self” to merge with all life.

 

The core is formed by the unity of two forces that belong to nature and transform nature: Inside the terrariums, clay sculptures “left at the mercy” of a piece of nature slowly merge with living plants, dissolve, and transform into new life. At the same time, in the paintings, natural and human forms overlap and intertwine; the human figure dissolves into soil, leaf, and root. What is solid melts, boundaries disappear, and a new body emerges. The body sometimes asserts its dominance and sometimes allows its existence to dissolve. The viewer watches this strange tension between the human being as a natural entity and as an individual entity.

 

Terralapsus tests the limits of art’s merging with nature and questions a unity in which these limits disappear. Can the art object be natural? Is it possible for nature to belong to the human? Or, to put it another way:

 

Is the human being truly a natural entity?