PERMIAN SUMMER: CERAMIC PALEOART OF THE KNOWN AND UNKNOWN

Artistic depictions of ancient organisms and their ecosystems are crucial for informing the public’s perception of paleontology. This practice, known as paleoart, allows for scientific concepts to be represented in an instantly understandable and impactful format, advancing ideas about extinct animals. Features like body proportions, movement, feeding, and other aspects of behavior described in current research are illustrated through paleoart. However, while most popular paleoart strives to achieve anatomical accuracy, rarely does it explore abstract forms and concepts.

Permian summer is a collection of ceramic sculptures that celebrates the generative, iterative nature of lifeforms in evolutionary biology, as well as the field of paleontology, where scientists and artists alike engage in envisioning based on the evidence at hand. Compared to typical 2-D paleoart mediums, ceramic is an artform with strong connections to geology, as the clay medium is pulled from the ground itself. This creates further opportunity for science communication connecting paleontology to other geology fields like sedimentology, mineralogy, and petrology. Permian summer was created as a collaboration between a ceramicist and a paleontologist, demonstrating the possibilities created by interdisciplinary conversations—even for abstract artworks.

Permian summer is inspired by the diversification of the Permian’s most striking lifeforms, the tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates), amidst an arid landscape after the collapse of Carboniferous rainforests. The sculptures of this collection are each inspired by a Permian tetrapod (Bolosaurus, Coelurosauravus, Dimetrodon, Eryops, Edaphosaurus) but take substantial liberty in depicting their forms, drawing attention to the uncountable animal forms, functions, textures, and taxa that have existed in Earth history but were lost in preservation or remain undiscovered—the infinite unknown. This allows for a more progressive approach to what paleoart can achieve, beyond a strictly naturalistic representation of a fossil animal in its paleoenvironment. These sculptures of Permian fauna are set among landscape pieces, together displaying how natural, random processes can create the entropic splitting, cracking, and crumbling of arid land, but also the beautiful, diverse, stately creatures that roamed this ancient world.