Hybrid Configurations

Danger Zones

I explore complex interconnections between man, human intervention, the land, and its use in deep time with a focus on today’s landscape. My sculpture and painting process reveals temporary, decomposed, and dissolving conditions that demonstrate the crumbling natural world that we as humans have instigated.

Originally the performance based work gives the sculptures transformative and final shapes. Using corrugated cardboard serves as a cover that once left behind leaves an empty shell of memory from previous actions.

The disintegrating forms of the body are juxtaposed with the sharper, harsher areas of bold and flat geometric spaces. These shapes are reminiscent of architectural features such as tables, walls, corners, or niches. Each provides its own site-specifity that not only roots each sculpture in place, but also activates the space marking cautionary zones. Those are highlighted in signal colors indicating hazardous or danger zones – areas no longer inhabitable – references of our daily life in traffic, work areas, or environmentally affected areas through human intervention with nature and its surroundings. These contrasting constructions are reduced to an utmost minimization of color and geometrical forms such as circles, squares, rectangles, trapezoids, crosses, or their combinations.


My new sculptures, animated through performative bodywork, recall those myths as updated versions of our current volatile and precarious conditions on Earth. It is important now and for the future to understand landscapes in a new way, to see them differently, not just from what we know. I reflect on man as a producer and destroyer of land as a contemporary landscape, as something that speaks for our current time and the future. What is left are traces of memory, fragmented, and fragile in their existence.

Treehouse: A Floralscape for Compassionate Conversation

Treehouse: A Floralscape for Compassionate Conversation
Curated by Philippa Hughes Brentwood Arts Exchange 2022
Treehouse Coalition 
Mike Guy, Artemis Herber, Adele Yiseol Kenworthy, Marc Robarge, Miriam Julianna  

TREEHOUSE invites the community to step through a portal into a beautiful space that encourages wonder about the world and each other. That asks us to imagine a world in which we can all flourish, in which we are more connected to one another and to nature. 

The Dryad sculptures by Artemis Herber are created as a site-specific room installation that can be placed in various settings of any space. Made from packing paper, molded tree branches and body parts have been fused together to create Dryads.

In Greek mythology, tree nymphs – or Dryads – were considered to be very shy creatures except around Artemis, who was known to be a friend to the Dryads. Those shy spirits express the temporary state of our existence, the fleeting and ephemeral inevitability. Through endless layers of packing paper wrapped around dead tree branches, the hybrid forms become lifelike and animated; neglected artifacts that encompass our precarious and fragile state of being.