Through the media of painting, sculpture and installation, my work investigates a personal connection with the natural world. This interdisciplinary approach allows me to create works that play between seeing oneself as an intrinsic part of the natural landscape, as well as an observer of it.

These gathered and reclaimed objects of nature become re-contextualized with crocheted thread coverings in an attempt to “prop up” or “put back” what has been abandoned, broken. The attentive caring and support structures that surround the objects investigate the relationship between nurturing and controlling nature. The meticulous act of crocheting mimics the instinct to nurture and protect what is viable, what is becoming precious. As in gilding, these false “skins” imbue the objects with an assumed desirability or value; the wrapping becomes an act of veneration. Although futile in its attempt at archiving and preservation, there is the desire to suggest optimism. My interest in the objects extends from the notion of landscape and how we not just experience, but also negotiate with the natural world. Do we feel warm and fuzzy, or do we distance ourselves? How do we “care” for that which we depend upon?



Esther Traugot received her BFA from the University of California Berkeley in 2005 and her MFA from Mills College in 2009. Traugot’s work has been exhibited in the Bay Area at venues such as the Mills Building in San Francisco, the College of Marin Fine Arts Gallery, and the “Cream, from the Top” exhibition at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, the David Brower Center in Berkeley, the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, and the permanent collection at Neiman Marcus in Walnut Creek. Internationally her work has been exhibited in “Florilegio” in Bogota Columbia, celebrating the UN’s declaration of 2010 being the year of biodiversity. She is represented at Chandra Cerrito Contemporary Gallery in Oakland, CA. Esther Traugot currently lives and works in Sebastopol, California.