The Human Influence On The Natural World

Edge of Humanity Magazine

2 years ago

Visual Artist Tristan Sheldon is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Golem’. To see Tristan’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Golem is a meditation on the conflicting and tenuous relationship between the built environment, the human body, and the natural world. As we relentlessly shape and mold the world to our will, we disrupt a complex and largely unseen environmental balance on which we depend for survival. The work portrays human intervention in the landscape as both reverent and destructive. Through the use of dramatic contrast in tonal range and material, as well as recurring motifs of touch and physical impression, the work suggests a relationship with the world that is as harmful and predatory as it is tender and nurturing.

Tristan Sheldon was born 1996 in Rochester, New York. He is a lens-based visual artist currently based in Columbia, Missouri. He received his BFA in Studio Art in 2023 from the University of Missouri. Tristan’s primary artistic interests lie at the intersection between the body, the built environment, and the natural world. His work explores the visual and functional tension that surrounds interacting elements that operate under extremely different terms. Among the critical concerns in his work are issues of land use, human habitation, sustainability, and the psychological experience of human/landscape interaction. Using both the highly descriptive and contextually reductive qualities of photography, he seeks to visualize the tenuous relationship between the wants and needs of human habitation and the relentless pushback of time, entropy, and the physical world.

All images and text © Tristan Sheldon