Suicide Girls: Jul 25, 2007

Suicide Girls: Jul 25, 2007Carrie Marill InterviewBy Caryn ColemanCaryn Coleman: Two part question - Can you explain a little bit about your new series of endangered flora and fauna in newfoundland? How did you become interested in this subject and what did you learn while making the series?You say that you utilize painting as a way to investigate subjects. How do you pick what subjects you want to learn about and how does this organically shape conceptually into your work?Carrie Marill: It's usually like you had said - an organic evolution of things. For instance, with "newfoundland," I had previously been painting birds and wanted to know more about them so I took a different vein within the world of birds. I am a visual learner, so navigating an otherwise complex subject with visuals from books, movies, the internet and hands on experience are my primary ways of studying up and educating myself on a particular subject. With all that is going on in the world, I felt compelled to familiarize myself with threatened, endangered and extinct species. After doing research at the library, bookstores and online I realized that I needed to narrow my search due to the vast quantity of extinct, endangered and threatened species, so I choose to focus on birds and plants.I wanted to be as objective as possible with the subject matter so I revisited Darwin's "Theories on Evolution" and other contemporary writers who  recontextualized his ideas. Though extinction is a step in the process of natural selection, I soon realized through this research that the current extinction rate is a crisis primarily caused by humans, i.e. rapid over-development, loss of habitat, pollution, agriculture, and invasive species are some of the heaviest abusers of the ecosystem.Caryn Coleman: You recently tackled string theory in your paintings - a very intense scientific theory. Can you explain what led to your interest in combining string theory with subject matter of animals?Carrie Marill: In contemporary Theoretical Physics there are two popular schools of thought (among many others, old and new) on creation and existence. Succiently, String Theory attempts to unify the known natural forces by describing them with the same set of equations, and the Theory of Everything, fully links together all known physical phenomena. With the "String Theory" series I was attempting to merge these two concepts and create a visual representation of how I imagined these hypothesis working. I feel that there is a connection between all living beings from rocks to whales. It should be noted that I am accessing these concepts loosely and from a broad perspective and honestly, they are quite fascinating, but most of the rhetoric and content is difficult to absorb. Creating drawings from how I imagine them working has been a useful tool to dissect and digest the immense amount of information being produced on these subjects.Read full interview here.