Alison Ruttan is an interdisciplinary artist investigating the psychology of behavior in projects often directed to the question of "what is human"? Her most recent, "The Four Year War at Gombe", reconstructs a series of events based on Jane Goodall's  discovery that chimpanzees, like us, wage war and are capable of long range planning and strategic thinking. This large photographic project was shot along the Desplaines River where family, friends and neighbors helped to piece this story together. The recent ceramic project "A Bad Idea Seems Good Again" was started while I was in the middle of editing the "Gombe" project. Goodall wrote about chimpanzee violence and saw ourselves in them, both in our ability to co-operate as well as in the kind of strategic thinking that goes into planned warfare. In these recent sculptures I am working directly from media sources that document evidence of bombings in the Middle East. I am keeping an ever expanding archive of such sites. The project is a nod to the over 200 wars big and small happening at any given time in the world. I see these two projects as linked, Goodall's research on aggression in chimpanzees often feels like an "origins story" to our own history of warfare. We refer to ourselves as the  "smarter ape", yet we seem to have little ability to change these patterns of violence.

Earlier projects often explored the  psychology of behavior though the examination of unconscious intentions found in physical expression. I have been particularly interested in the complex kinds of social exchanges best understood visually or at the level of physiological response. For this reason much of my work has focused on appetite, sexuality and aggression.

Arthur Schopenhauer in his Theory of Incongruity says, "Laughter arises from the perceived mismatch between the physical perception and the abstract representation of some thing, person or action". I actively use this mismatch as often as possible to redirect and shift the position in which you understand something to be. I try to keep a sense of humor as I try to understand "what is our human nature ?".