For the main sculptural unit of our placemat piece, we had Kate MacDowell as an artist reference. In her statement about her hand sculpted porcelain pieces, MacDowell sources her work as being a “romantic ideal of union with the natural world conflicts with our contemporary impact on the environment” with the pieces being “in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops.  They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones.  In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world.”