Born 1973 in Concord, CA
Lives and works in San Francisco, CA
Laurel Roth Hope uses traditional techniques of carving, embroidery, crochet, and collage to transform ordinary materials into elaborate animal sculptures that are both playful and poignant. Her work is influenced by her background as a park ranger and focuses on the relationship between humankind and nature, touching on topics such as environmental protection, animal behavior, and species extinction.
Image Gallery
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Laurel Roth Hope, Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Dodo, 2008, crocheted yarn, hand-carved pigeon mannequin, and walnut stand, 8 x 9 x 12 in., Collection of Wendy West, © Laurel Roth Hope. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris
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Laurel Roth Hope, Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Paradise Parrot, 2012, crocheted yarn, hand-carved pigeon mannequin, and walnut stand, 10 x 7 x 12 in., Collection of Wendy West, © Laurel Roth Hope. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris
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Laurel Roth Hope, Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Passenger Pigeon, 2008, crocheted yarn, hand-carved pigeon mannequin, and walnut stand, 17 x 8 x 9 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, 2013.76.1A-B, © 2008, Laurel Roth Hope
Before embarking on a career in the arts, Laurel Roth Hope worked as both a park ranger and a natural-resource conservator. Her time spent protecting and restoring habitats inspired a body of work that examines the adaptive abilities of some species versus others. In Biodiversity Reclamation Suits for Urban Pigeons, the artist lovingly crochets "sweaters" that mimic the plumage of extinct or endangered bird species. Despite their humor and charm, these works force us to confront the futility of recovering lost biodiversity. Roth Hope displays each suit on a hand-carved pigeon mannequin as a reminder that the animals we most revile are often the ones capable of surviving in a human-made environment.
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Laurel Roth Hope, Biodiversity Reclamation Suit: Carolina Parakeet, 2009, crocheted yarn, hand-carved pigeon mannequin, and walnut stand, 9 x 8 x 13 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Joyce Schwartz in honor of Judith S. Weisman, museum purchase, and museum purchase from friends of the Renwick Gallery, 2013.76.2A-B, © 2009, Laurel Roth Hope
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Laurel Roth Hope, Beauty, 2011, mixed media including fake fingernails, nail polish, barrettes, false eyelashes, jewelry, Swarovski crystal, and walnut base, 67 x 46 x 46 in., Mike De Paola, © Laurel Roth Hope. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris. Photo by Andy Diaz Hope
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Laurel Roth Hope, Regalia, 2011, mixed media including fake fingernails, nail polish, barrettes, false eyelashes, jewelry, Swarovski crystal, and walnut base, 63 x 40 x 22 in., Private Collection, © Laurel Roth Hope. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris
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Laurel Roth Hope speaks about her work in the exhibition The Singing and the Silence: Birds in Contemporary Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition examines mankind's relationship to birds and the natural world through the eyes of twelve major contemporary American artists, including David Beck, Rachel Berwick, Lorna Bieber, Barbara Bosworth, Joann Brennan, Petah Coyne, Walton Ford, Paula McCartney, James Prosek, Laurel Roth Hope, Fred Tomaselli, and Tom Uttech.
We don’t really associate ourselves with them, but at the same time they are ecologically often associated with urban living. I think the three main bird species that are found in the cities, which are sparrows, starlings, and pigeons, are found in eighty percent of the cities worldwide.
So they live with us on a different plane, but it’s not a very adversarial relationship in general. So it’s a very interesting relationship, like they’ll build their houses just outside of our houses, and we don’t mind in the same way that we do with rats or raccoons or whatever other animals might be living in cities. So there’s a lot of room for looking at those relationships and symbols.
My background as a park ranger and natural resource management definitely influenced what I’m working on now because it sort of set me up not only looking for patterns of ecology and patterns of behavior in nature, which I kind of moved into urban environments, but also acting as a sort of intermediary between mankind and nature, trying to find ways that they can work together or where the patterns clash or how to smooth the patterns that work well together.
The peacock sculptures came from both – it was kind of the park ranger thing again. I was looking for patterns of ecology and human behavior. When I moved to the city, you know, I had to adapt, and so I had to kind of try to find a way to do that myself. So they’re based on mating plumage. I became really interested in the way humans have choices in a lot of things that there are still ecological patterns, but we can make choices as to how we’re going to involve ourselves with them, like what we’re going to eat, who we might mate with and when, all these things that animals do more instinctually. So with mating plumage, birds will just in the right season change their plumage, or, you know, start doing different dances, or build different houses, or whatever they happen to do.
We can make the choice of how we present ourselves and how valuable we are as a mate, and so I started thinking about that and thinking about the way people present themselves in public and also just kind of the both beauty and kind of – there’s a little bit of aggression sometimes in a lot of those relationships, like who is the more valuable mate? So I wanted to bring that in as well with those.
I tried to keep it a little bit so that you can’t quite tell whether they’re mating or they’re fighting or one of them is going to win or not, like neither one is entirely dominating the other one because I wanted to leave all of that up the viewer and how they were going to interpret it.
The materials for the peacocks came about pretty intuitively. I think I saw fake fingernails in a package and was looking at them and the way the patterns of them and the shapes and started thinking that they would make very good feathers but, you know, set it to the side for a little while while I was figuring out how I wanted to work with that, and why, and what themes would actually fit. But once it came together, it came together very naturally other than the immense amount of labor, but there’s that sort of like Fibonacci sequence of feather patterns that can happen pretty easily with the different size nails.
I think I do tend to go towards labor-intensive work. Sometimes I try not to, and I always go right back to it. It gives me time to think about the next thing that I’m doing and really make sure I’m doing it for good reasons, and, I don’t know, I’m so interested in evolution which isn’t the fastest process, so it kind of makes sense that I’ll slowly sort things out, sometimes go backwards a little bit, and start over. So it just seems to be the way I work.
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Laurel Roth Hope uses traditional techniques of carving, embroidery, crochet, and collage to transform ordinary materials into elaborate animal sculptures that are both playful and poignant. Her work is influenced by her background as a park ranger and focuses on the relationship between humankind and nature, touching on topics such as environmental protection, animal behavior, and species extinction.
Peacocks have been a symbol of beauty and also just well known for their extravagant mating plumage. Mating plumage is a way for birds to communicate their health, their ability to find resources, and basically their value as a mate, and these are all things that humans do as well but just with very different cues.
I partially was inspired to do the peacocks after seeing some of the drag community of San Francisco and the way they choose to represent themselves. The materials that I ended up using for these are all beauty products: fake fingernails, barrettes, costume jewelry. They're all things associated with human beauty and that kind of communication.
So with the peacocks, I wanted to make sculptures that both look as though they're in a natural history museum and have elements of the natural environment. That's why I created the live bases for the top, live-edge bases, but I also wanted to have the birds in positions that it's slightly unclear as to whether they're fighting or mating. In the cases where there's two of them, which one would be the dominant and which one would be the submissive? I wanted to leave all of that up to the viewer.
These four other sculptures, these are part of a series called “Biodiversity Suits for Urban Pigeons.” For each one of those, I carve and create a pigeon mannequin and then crochet a suit for it that disguises it as an extinct bird. Here we have a dodo, a Carolina parakeet, a paradise parrot, and a passenger pigeon, all of which are extinct.
With this series, I was trying to find a way to approach concepts of extinction but without beating people over the head with the idea too much. I think that both beauty and humor are ways to cross ideological divides and to communicate without having people close their minds down too quickly. I used crochet because it both has a really nice math to it—each row builds on the row before it—and it's very similar to the math you find in nature. Also, crochet has a long history of being used for comfort, for warmth, and for ornamentation, very much like feathers.
Living in the city has definitely influenced my work. I think it's made me focus more on adaptation and, to some degree, on synanthropic species, those that are ecologically associated with mankind because at this point, those are the ones that are headed towards being successful, where I think the natural environmentalist tendency is to focus on the things that are heading towards extinction. That's very important, but we can learn a lot about biological patterns by studying both.