Artist: Yhelena Hall

Year: 2015

My piece, called Arlandina, starting a series of sculptural objects that incorporate common indoor and outdoor plants with an elaborate composition placed into a handcrafted container. Every piece of this series will be designed as a long­ term plant habitat, well­ suited for the display in a gallery setting. For this project, I will mostly choose resilient perennial plants, able to easily adapt to a new environment. Given enough space and necessary growing conditions, these plants will develop and alter my composition over the course of time.
In this series, I will use plants that remind me of places I belonged to, people I used to know, and create a continuum of experience that gives me a chance to re­visit and re­think. By putting together plants that do not usually co­exist, I refer to the place where they can be found together ­ the memory.

By playing with the familiarity of organic and inorganic elements, I invite my viewers to share a sense of the uncanny. Ordinary things taken out of their everyday content and imbedded into an illusory composition are loosing their practical sense, gaining a metaphorical one instead.

Inorganic elements such as blank CD, cellphone cables, and electric wires, connect us to the reality of the past few decades and are slowly becoming obsolete. By including them, I convey the idea of bordering the unknown, being a part of a transition from the forgotten to the unexplored, as from the past to the future.

Organic elements, such as grafted cactus, aloe plant and English ivy, show a biological aspect of time. Currently immersed into the body my piece, they will soon dominate it, and eventually reclaim it like nature reclaims abandoned human habitats.

Artist: Yhelena Hall

Year: 2013

Descent is a model of a bizarre flying machine drawn from pre-Wright Brothers aviation history, suspended beneath a handcrafted helium inflated balloon. Through the course of the show, the balloon was descending along with the model. Video documentation of this process was included in the show after the descent was complete.

Materials: plastic, balsa wood, voile, helium

Size: 7 ’x 6’ x 4’