Statement

I'm Lorel Hill, an artist from northern New Jersey, a region known for its highway ramps, swamps, and general pollutedness. I choose this landscape as a starting point, imagining new possibilities where nature and industry collide. Through sculpture, diorama, and installation, I build worlds that blossom at the edges of cities, where power plants, rivers, waste dumps, forests, and highways coalesce into a confused, palimpsestic environment.

My current series is based around a fictional real estate development company, PoND Ventures LLC (Power of Natural Degeneration). The company takes inspiration from real abandoned sites and proposes how they could integrate urban and natural systems. The work draws on overlooked local history and blends it with my personal worldbuilding process. In response to a powerlessness over urban space, it satirizes what it could mean for an opaque for-profit institution to actually address the places they have historically neglected.

When a city or private land title becomes tied up in legal limbo, the land itself often becomes a hub for other species and vibrant subcultures, from foxes to graffiti artists. These sites are bastions of freedom, where people explore, make work, and gather outside institutional oversight. They are also places of risk and strange encounters, because trespass is criminalized and animals and humans cross paths in many ways. Rather than ignore these lifeworlds, why not organize their cohabitation?

Dioramas have long been used by museums to explain battles, display natural history, and model how indigenous communities live. Architectural models visualize buildings that exist or could exist. I draw on all of these traditions but turn them toward a different purpose. PoND Ventures LLC adopts the polished language of real estate development pitches and tourist attractions to expose the political forces that shape these spaces. Its proposals are absurd on the surface and earnest underneath. They are a way to imagine what care for these places might look like, and to question who gets to provide and organise that care.

I am currently creating dioramas for the fictional Berlin Urban Wildlife Safari, based on a real abandoned hospital in the Weißensee neighborhood. It is imagined as a zoo for urban explorers, where the people who already trespassed there become customers who invest in the rewilding. By withholding a clear explanation of what is real and what is invented, I let the institutions’ authority wobble.

Underlying the work is my belief that these neglected sites are memory keepers, holding layers of mud, bones, and chemical residue from a western industrial past. Their neglect is an act of collective forgetting. Drawing on Anna Tsing's practice of open-hearted "noticing," I ask viewers to look closely and playfully at what has been abandoned, and to picture, with some humor and a lot of care, what could be there instead.