Dorothy L. Stubnitz Professor Clayton Merrell has a new commissioned piece “Parabolic Garlands” that will be installed next week at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center and College of Medicine, Hershey PA.
In Merrell’s own words, “My recent work complicates the old idea of the natural sublime with the recognition of new kind of entanglement between mankind and nature. Recently, we have recognized the arrival of a new era in the relationship between humans and the world we inhabit. The older notion of the sublime as an experience whereby we encounter the terrifying beauty of the natural world and are forced to acknowledge our own insignificance has given way, on a planetary scale, to a more complicated scenario in which we confront each terrifying new natural disaster with the nagging sense that we are somehow to blame. We consider now that our actions have perhaps so altered the natural order that every hurricane, mudslide and earthquake might be partially traceable to human actions.”