There were several things that influenced the conception of this piece.
One was that in previous work, I frequently got the reaction from people that the rusted images reminded them of miraculous religious images. For me, this raised the issue of the supernatural vs. the natural. The materials I use and the processes that they undergo, are all natural transformations. There is nothing supernatural about it. Of course, this is no less miraculous. The world behaves in ways that are truly awesome. That life evolves, that cells reproduce, that crystals grow, that compounds change forms, that particles can be created out of energy, are all as miraculous as anything I can think of. To me, Science is about that awe of the material and physical world. So part of what influenced this work was that I wanted to use the images of people who were fascinated with the study and observation of the natural world.
The second thing that influenced The Evolution of Darwin, was that it surprised me that there is little acknowledgment in public discourse that Darwin presented his ideas 150 years ago. In the world of ideas, this is a very long time ago. Since that time, the development of the issues of evolutionary biology have been broad and encompassed fields of inquiry that did not even exist in Darwin's time. In the hubbub regarding the "validity" of evolution, there is little attention paid to what the revised states of evolutionary thinking have been and how they continue to evolve. Dwelling exclusively on Darwin at this point in evolutionary thought and history, seems a bit like dwelling exclusively on Galileo and disregarding the history and understanding of astronomy since his time!
Lastly, I might note that the processes I chose to use, seemed to lend themselves to a metaphor for evolution. The fabric image acts as a genotype. It can be copied by hand (similar in type, but not an exact replica), reused (with different filings), or "cloned" (using multiple layers of cloth to produce the same image). Mutations are formed by moving the fabric and filings being lost or relocated. The resultant images are both predictable (an image of Barbara McClintock will not appear to be Alfred Russell Wallace), and a matter of chance (the images are affected by the weather, the salt, natural or human interference, the condition of the concrete, the time it has to form, etc.).
– Esther Solondz
