Joel Taylor Murnan (b. 1997 Grass Valley, CA) pursued his education at the San Francisco Art Institute and obtained a B.F.A. in Sculpture from California College of the Arts. Currently, he is a M.F.A candidate at the University of California, Davis. Most recently, Murnan was selected as an Artist in Residence for Tropical Lab 2024 in Singapore, showcasing his work in a collective exhibition. Murnan’s work explores themes of land and control, drawing inspiration from his childhood memories of a pastoral landscape. Murnan’s sculptures capture the mood of the terrain, utilizing diverse mediums that offer a unique perspective on our relationship with the land.
Joel builds monsters, not in the service of horror, but of memory, myth, and warning. Humanoid in form but deeply other, his creatures feel as if they are conjured from our collective subconscious, from wood, stone, wire, and salvaged scrap materials that once belonged to both nature and industry. They rise from the mysterious void between worlds, where bark meets metal and something beautiful, yet alarming, stirs in the flux of what feels familiar, haunting even, but with a sense of empathy for these monsters.
There is no blueprint in Joel’s process. Like nature, it is instinctive, fluid—guided more by listening than by planning. He gathers materials the way erosion piles sticks and sediment, causing new forms to emerge from the shape and texture of what he finds. A driftwood spine, a mechanical eye socket, a limb twisted from broken wire. These beings feel grown, not constructed—part relic, part living presence.
The French call it terroir: the way a place’s climate, soil, and history shape what grows there. Joel’s work reflects its own kind of terroir: one marked by disturbance rather than cultivation. His works are products of altered landscapes, embodying a growth that feels uneasy, tangled, and full of tension.
At the heart of Joel’s work, there beats a question of relationship. His creatures are not only reflections of our fear of nature or ourselves. They embody something more complex: the fear of separation, of having divorced ourselves from the natural world. These monsters are metaphors for that disconnection. They speak to the quiet anxiety we carry as our impact on the environment deepens, and as we forget how to belong to the world that made us.
Joel’s figures are embodiments of genius loci, the ancient idea of a spirit of place. Each creature is a kind of mystical guardian, or an echo of a landscape altered by human plight. They invoke part warning, part witness. They emerge from the spaces we try to ignore: the overgrown edge of the path, the border where forest meets landfill, where memory meets forgetting.
These monsters confront us with our own unconscious—our grief, our estrangement, our longing for reconnection. In their gaze, we see not aggression but alertness. They watch as if waiting for us to remember something we once knew.
Joel’s work is perhaps not just about monsters, it is about thresholds between human and non-human, organic and artificial, memory and myth. The monsters are guides through these liminal spaces, asking us to look more closely at the places we’ve altered, and to recognize the blood of ecological fragility we haphazardly deny is in our hands, and also coursing through our veins.