Artist Statement

Scott Ludwig

As a child, I spent my days mostly outdoors in the pristine farming environment of

southeastern Wisconsin, armed with an intense curiosity about the world around me,

wandering for miles, plodding through creeks, woods, and fields, searching, catching,

and studying objects and creatures of every sort, and then resting while daydreaming

up at the sky, thinking that this world would simply, “always be”.

As a contemporary artist, it is precisely this natural curiosity that continues to fuel my

creative research. But now, compelled by taking my wanderlust further afield, and

sobered by the innately mythic, universal perspective that our world will not “always be”,

I feel a sense of urgency to immerse myself in the now-fleeting, fragile landscape and

ever-transforming global culture in which we all reside.

Over the past several years, I’ve developed a body of work that represents a confluence

of investigations initially inspired by artist residencies and travel excursions to

numerous locales, including the Netherlands, China, Cuba, Turkey, Costa Rica, British

Columbia, the Louisiana wetlands, Death Valley, and The Great Basin, among many

others.

In these works, I obliquely ponder the age-old question of humankind vs. nature. By

collecting data relative to the regions visited, and then subsequently coalescing the

various forms of documentation that take place before, during, and after the

experiential event, the goal is to create “an enlightened image”: a densely layered,

contemplative form imbued with insight and meaning, memory and experience,

inherently suspended somewhere between the earthly and the spiritual. In the end, I

strive to create a richly complex, visual atmosphere that promotes reflection, and in

some small way, contributes to raising consciousness about substantive issues

surrounding the environs, culture, and history of a particular place in time.