The Fens: A Study in the Derelict Fetish is a work in progress. For the past several months I have been exploring the Back Bay Fens in Boston, extracting objects of note from the polluted mud of its banks. After extraction I sterilize and alter each object into a fetish. I am interested in addressing notions of Kitsch in an attempt to appeal to a society that places little value on the natural world. I wish to illustrate to an audience, the undiscovered narrative of each object and the beauty and uniqueness of its origin.

The natural environment, as I am using the word, is a system that despite the nature of individualism and survival inherent to most plants and animals, can be defined as an equilibrated system; a harmonious system. Qualities I believe to be largely absent in the man-made manufactured technological environment. The direct juxtaposition of these two environments has always interested me and is now commonplace in an over crowded planet.

I have always gravitated towards the Back Bay Fens ever since I first moved to Boston in August of this year. Though I don’t dare refer to the Fens as an example of such a harmonious natural environment, it is however, the closest thing to one in the city of Boston. The Back Bay Fens is an environment of dualisms, both a dumping ground and a garden, it is a place of fear and of sanctuary, a place of death and birth, and to me it is a stage for my dreams and a model of our potential environmental future.

"The category of nature is not something that the field of science has a monopoly on. It is something that everyone has a say in what gets to be nature at a particular time for a particular group of people. And I think that in order to motivate people to care about the natural world around us, one of our chief tools is going to be an aesthetic sensibility." - Mark Dion