BIOGRAPHY

DarrickByers is currently studying at the Sam Fox school of Visual Art and Design at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his BA from Hanover college in 2007 in Studio Art.

Darrick was born in Columbus, Indiana and grew up on his parents' secluded homestead. He spent most of his childhood observing nature, building tree cabins, exploring the wilderness with his siblings, and taking apart small mechanical objects. He learned mechanical and structural skills from his father and horticultural knowledge from his mother. Like the physicality of play, his working process is very intuitive yet informed by reflection and intellectual substance.

Since completing his undergraduate degree in studio art Darrick has worked as a carpenter apprentice. This work has changed the way he approaches materials and process. "I have developed a relationship with my work that is longer lived, rather than my earlier, quickly constructed junk pieces. My work has also become more structural, but I have moved away from the carpentry process: all the tools used, dimensional lumber, and what I see as excessive waste." Darrick's current body of work focuses on using only a few hand tools, biodegradable materials, and found objects.

He continues to explore public space and what is accepted as uninvited public sculpture in parallel with already present, uninvited human waste, debris, junk, and large scale environmental reconstructions such as highways and illegal dump sites. "I feel our society has become too comfortably separated from our more natural environment. For certain we do not fully understand the impacts of our actions and usually we don't see how we are delicately affected by the nuances of the natural world; we see ourselves as separate from everything else, even each other. I don't want people to only see the disasters caused by the human race, I want them to take personal action against themselves."