Brian Andrews

My Fixed Landscape series represents an attempt to define the line between what is and what’s perceived. The pieces strive to provide a map of human experience, tracing the relationship of man to nature.

When we look at nature, we see what we want to see, finding evidence of our primacy with a sort of collective solipsism. Humans are natural pattern-seekers. We try to impose an order, externalizing our collective systems onto the world in order to draw order from chaos. This explanatory framework is a starting point from which we build a collaborative worldview, and it permeates every aspect of human culture. We are what we know and what we do.

The Fixed Landscape series explores real and imagined landscapes, combining traditional ornamental styles with topographical symbols to create a new language of terrain and our place within it.

This series works toward tracing the intersections between diverse cultures, as well as the roles of self and other in the creation of a perceived social reality. It examines the ways cultural phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition, constructing a sense of Alterity, or otherness, bonding one group together to the exclusion of all others.

My love of craft, and wood carving in particular, leads me to illustrate these ideas through the lens of world carving traditions, ranging from the indigenous carvers of the Northwest Coast to Europeean chip carving.

I’m fascinated with typography. As an undergrad, I studied cognitive linguistics, and how different writing systems utilize different parts of the brain.

The ampersand originated as the Latin word ‘et,’ meaning ‘and.’ Over time it was condensed into a symbol, and the word ‘et’ became the logograph ‘&.’ A logograph symbolizes an entire word, while letters in the alphabet represent sounds.

Ampersands uses the dual nature of this character as a symbol of the dual nature of language and communication.