About John Humphries

Since 2020 (using ceramics, watercolor, wood, and plastic), John has been inventing Constructed Ecologies as a way of looking into the ecological and cultural and societal environments using fictional contexts. Through the use of fiction, ethical positions and morality tales can be more readily focused and more easily engaged. His recent work investigates the influences of the human micro-biome on our psychology and the translation of this into totem-like objects through a dream/trance state, pushing to the foreground a discussion about environmental forces having influence on decision making and perception. Most recently, he constructed a landscape based upon the possible residue of human culture consisting of a ceramic ground as an analog of the cultivated landscape with plastic soft-forms “floating” above the surface on spindly wooden supports. They gently sway and bob in the ever-present HVAC. The plastic is not a recycled product. The wood elements have technological traces (bar codes). The white ceramic ground surface will take 15,000 years of erosion to return to the soil. These objects highlight the permanence of seemingly innocuous and throw away materials.

Accolades
“Third Place.” Thirty-First International Juried Exhibition. Viridian Artists, Inc. New York, NY.

“Juror’s Choice Award.” GALEX 55 National Juried Exhibition. Joanne Goudie Gallery. Galesburg

Civic Art Center. Galesburg, View single channel video at vimeo.com/494849413

“Finalist.” 46th Ken Roberts Memorial Delineation Competition, American Institute of Architects.  Dallas, TX. International. Juried.