Britt Ransom’s work explores human, animal, and environmental relationships through sculptures and installations created using digital fabrication processes. Using 3D scanning and 3D printing, her work extracts elements from our shared environment to question how humans observe and engage with the natural world. Translating data gathered during regular walks, her work originates from scans captured on a smartphone and travels through many forms of software mediation to arrive as enlargements and adaptations of other species.

Often utilizing insects considered to be pests as part of the work, her sculptures and installations engage these often-unwanted species as collaborators, ultimately using their building structures and societal patterns as metaphor to explore our own human systems. Ransom proposes humanity’s analogous existence as the largest and most complex pest-network on the planet.

In a spectacular eruption, billions of noisy insects emerged from underground in April 2021, and their arrival consumed headlines. Periodical cicadas, who spend the majority of their lifecycle underground, are once again emerging across much of the Southeast and Midwest this summer. The title of this work, XIX XIII, refers to the 17- and 13-year cicada broods that are beginning their synchronized emergence for the first time in 221 years. Humans have utilized the cicada as a marker of time, seasonal change, and transformation. From Homer’s Iliad to early motifs found in art from the Chinese Shang Dynasty, the cicada has always been a symbol of renewal, rebirth, transformation, and immortality.

Ransom’s 3D-printed cicada forms, found on a scaffolded abstract and skeletal tree trunk, suggest the adaptation humans face amidst a moment in history of an eruption of environmental and societal change. The miniature figure of the artist emerging from the back of a cicada, rendered in a glow-in-the-dark filament, evokes the way in which cicadas emerge in a backflip motion from their shell. As cicadas shed their old exoskeletons for new beginnings, humans too must navigate and transform within a world continually reshaped.

Biography

Britt Ransom (b. Lima, Ohio 1987) is an artist and educator based between New Orleans, LA and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (2011) and her BFA from The Ohio State University (2008). Ransom is the great-granddaughter of civil rights activist Reverdy C. Ransom and currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Emma S. and Reverdy C. Ransom Foundation. She is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including of the Heinz Creative Development Award, Hopper Prize, Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator (LACI) Residency, and The Arctic Circle Residency. Her work has been shown internationally, most recently at ), the Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans), and Schering Stiftung (Transmediale, Berlin). Britt is currently a member of the New Museum’s New Inc. Y10 cohort. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in the Sculpture, Installation, and Site Work Area.