Prince of the Poisoned Well

Born in 1986, Caitlin Hackett is a Bay Area based artist, illustrator and creature concept designer. In her work, Hackett explores the relationship between humans and animals; the idea of the human denial of our animal nature and of humans as the dominant species, as well as the mutation of the animal created by the human interpretation of the animal.

“I invent creatures, anthropomorphic, mutated, or pseudo mythical in imagery, using my imaginary world and bringing it into the physical world in an attempt to create a language that speaks about the human animal relationship and the natural and unnatural elements of it. I am faced with the fact that we live in a planet in decline, where almost every natural ecosystem in the world is slipping away. Human kind has created a planet of refugees; animals forced to flee ever farther from the insatiable encroachment of urban development, victims of a war for space which they cannot hope to win. My drawings refer to this decline and to the refugees it has created. I am left with the question of what is natural; are we (human beings) still a part of nature? If so, does that make all that we have created, cities, vehicles, factories, all technology, part of nature as well?”

Hackett creates her large-scale drawings on paper using ebony pencil, ballpoint and micron pens, coloured pencil, and watercolours. Her “anthropomorphic creatures, which are installation pieces, are a balance between the power and physical presence of the life sized and the intensity of the dense, delicate, and time consuming detail of the ballpoint pen and ink. By installing these animals cut out on the walls they are released into our world and become characters that must be addressed in terms of our physical space, and must be granted an identity.” ~Via Daily Art Fixx