Plato’s Atlantis

McQueen’s explorations of natural selection inspired studies of the beauty found in strength. Plato’s Atlantis references snakes, moths, stingrays, and jellyfish, celebrating nature’s protective camouflage and evolutionary defense mechanisms. The collection’s digitally collaged textiles capture meticulous likenesses of land, sky, and sea animals, recalling life-casting techniques used in lead-glazed earthenware to achieve remarkable animal facsimiles. The style’s sixteenth-century progenitor, Bernard Palissy, was a polymath whose art practice and observation of nature led him to reject the prevailing explanation of fossils as remnants of the Great Flood in the Bible. Like McQueen, Palissy’s intellectual engagement with ecosystem change was fundamentally visual.