“To make my animals, I try to make a new nature. I don’t want to copy the existing nature.”

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who sculpts new forms of life from PVC. He calls them “strandbeests,” which is Dutch for “beach creatures,” and they cruise the coastline powered by wind, or — in certain more sophisticated models — pneumatic pressure. The intersection of nature and art always has a special appeal to me. There’s something unnervingly gorgeous about the autonomous specificity of works that combine shaggy naturalness with an imperative to aestheticize, not to mention the chaotic otherness that resists a fully conscious domestication of the work of art itself in terms of our ability to grasp it intellectually. Works of art that are primarily made from natural materials or that are inspired by natural forms retain a wildness about them that always keeps them an arm’s length away…