How this artist wants to connect us back to nature through her roadkill inspired pieces.
Av Grannan has repeatedly garnered attention for her hyper realistic products. Through their brand, Sublime Remains, the Chicago based interdisciplinary artist artist creates custom bags, garments, and accessories which all started from her art degree.
Narratives are built and sewn together through her pieces as she picks apart and combines different materials - mainly up-cycled leather, canvas, fabrics, and natural fibres - that she gathers from couches on the side of the road, old army wear and more.
Below are a few key parts from her artist's statement.
"I have created a hyper-reality with roadkill. As a society, we are more disconnected from nature than ever. In place of our intrinsic need to connect to nature, we are becoming more dependent on distortions of reality, like virtual games and the unreal existence of Disneyland. Fantasies have come to constitute reality. With this collection, I am presenting a fake symbiotic relationship between perished animals and humans. This new relationship connects individuals back to the sublime of nature and the environment.
Similar to roadkill, I find leather couches on the street that are set to be thrown away. I harvest the leather, and like taxidermy, I adorn the skin to come alive again. I paint insects on the leather, embellished with gems and handmade glass pieces to represent the objects that lay with them on the side of the road.
While trying to visualize my hyper-reality, I researched Rogue Taxidermy. Instead of killing animals, they used animals that died naturally, roadkill, and discarded livestock. I looked at roadkill and sketched. I was reanimating nature in my mind to build characters for my collection. I rendered my illustrations and added three-dimensional qualities to transform them into a new avatar."
Find out more about the brand, via the pages.