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I like to think of gardening as a metaphor for the way I develop various bodies of work.
Born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Andrea Ferrigno received her BFA in 1997 from the Kansas City Art Institute. Andrea will receive her MFA this May of 2012 in Painting and Drawing. Her work reflects her interest in the intersections of art, science and philosophy. She is currently an instructor of Basic Drawing at the University of Iowa. Andrea hopes to study synthetic biology in the near future exploring the changing definition of nature as well as expanding an understanding of material possibilities. I like to think of gardening as a metaphor for the way I develop various bodies of work. I have different “plants” that I am cultivating and at this point I am exited to see areas of cross-pollinations and also new growth. There is a balance of an intuitive and analytic approach to my image making. Conceptually, I am interested in our rapidly changing relationship to nature and well as unprecedented power to manipulate her, down to her very building blocks. I see my work as a by-product of my in-
quiry into the changing structure of nature and technology, bringing with it both hopes and fears as to where this will take mankind into the future. Making images in this fashion I see as an effort to reconcile my experience in the world, with a more clinical understanding of the world. The final images always are never pre-planned rather discovered through this semi-systematic approach. There is symbiotic relationship of the intuitive and analytic in my approach to image making. Working with systems extracted from science and nature, allows me a potential objective point of entry. Distilling drawing to elementary parts and having a systematic working method allows for continual discovery and new challenges, for each piece is a different variation of this approach. I assert my free will, moving materials in space in time, leaving behind a material trace of my intention, and the final image as evidence of discovery. My work is continued on page 62
