Petersen’s work is obsessive, exuberant, dark, intricate, and beautiful. It speaks to the complexity of what makes us human – what is hidden, what is revealed, and what our ideas of beauty, repressed anger, devotion, and desire are. She does this through her use of color and her choice of non-traditional materials.

To say Petersen simply sews would be an understatement. She “draws” in space with thread, wire, fabric, and color. She builds something that is both physically obsessive and a deliberate investigation of what we choose to reveal and what we choose to hide.

The exhibition's title, Fake Plastic Trees, comes from Radiohead’s haunting song about artificiality, emotional emptiness, and the longing for something real in a world that can feel increasingly manufactured. Which in turn refers us back to Petersen's obsessive drawing of monstrous trees with ballpoint pens on her flights during her travels. The “fake plastic trees” are not simply trees; they become a metaphor for the things around us that appear real but are not – the constructed versions of ourselves, our relationships, our desires, and even our ideas of splendor.

The song also suggests something more complicated: that we can become so surrounded by insincerity that it becomes difficult to recognize what is genuine. Love, passion, and intimacy can become tangled up with fantasy and projection. We want something to be real, even when we understand that it may not be.

This feels particularly relevant to Petersen’s work. Her materials are familiar – sometimes domestic, sometimes decorative, sometimes feral. Through her consuming process, the work becomes something else entirely. She takes materials that carry their own associations and transforms them into something physical, emotional, and alive.

There is a beauty in Petersen’s work, but it is not an uncomplicated one. It expresses vulnerability, fury, frustration, infatuation, and darkness. The work asks us to look at the things we might normally dismiss or overlook and reconsider what our definition of beauty is.

Like the song, Petersen’s work exists somewhere between the real and the artificial, the authentic, the disturbing, the hidden and the revealed. Somewhere in that tension is something very human. 

- Michael David , 8/14/26