Excerpt from my college senior thesis show artist statement: 

I grew up roaming outside in the surrounding land, climbing trees, and splashing in creeks. As the years came and went, life became increasingly busy with school and work. The fondness of nature eventually faded into a mere memory of the past, no longer a constant of the present. It was over this past summer during a hiking trip in the Santos de Cristos, gazing out into the horizon at 12,000 ft while engulfed in a cloud, when the memories of my childhood and my love of the outdoors returned to me. 

Aesthete reconnected me with the affinity for nature that I had lost. This body of work explores the relationships found between the human figure and objects found in nature. 

The prints are made by combining gum arabic, dichromate, and water color pigments to create single color layers that can be built upon to create full color images or left single to make any-color monochromatic images  when exposed to sunlight. Each layer must dry before the next is coated, exposed to light through a negative and in this case, object and leaves (photograms) placed in-between layers to create the effect of the image. The images are one-of-a-kind handcrafted artworks. 

-2015, Christi Wiltenburg