Fallen Fruit

Fallen Fruit is a series created while studying abroad in Venice, Italy. Although Venice is internationally recognized for its beauty and historic architecture, I became increasingly interested in the city as one of the oldest fully constructed human environments. Built upon wooden pylons driven into a lagoon, Venice exists in constant tension with the natural world around it. Even its gardens, public spaces, and pathways are shaped by centuries of engineering, commerce, and human intervention. Despite this, nature continues to adapt and persist throughout the city in quiet and often overlooked ways. Rather than focusing on monumental architecture or tourist imagery, I became drawn to pigeons, discarded objects, fallen fruit, weeds emerging between stone pavers, and other small moments where organic life interrupted the manufactured landscape. Living near a fruit stand where cherries frequently fell onto the pavement below, I watched pigeons gather to eat them and began thinking about the fruit as a form of treasure from the birds’ perspective. Throughout the series, cherries become symbols of survival, abundance, desire, and value within an environment shaped almost entirely by human systems. The religious symbolism within the work developed from Venice itself. Surrounded by churches, devotional imagery, mosaics, icons, and architectural ornamentation, I began incorporating visual references to reliquaries, sacred vessels, medallions, and saint imagery into otherwise ordinary urban subjects. In one work, the Virgin Mary appears within the interior of a cherry, transforming the fruit into a devotional object or symbolic offering. In another, a circular opening interrupts the body of a pigeon, creating an architectural or vessel-like space within the natural form. These images reflect my interest in the ways environments shape living things emotionally, physically, and symbolically. Through Fallen Fruit, I explore coexistence between nature and constructed space, focusing on the resilience of small living systems within environments dominated by history, architecture, tourism, and human intervention.