Tricia McLaughlin work explores the relationship between designed environments and human behavior.

McLaughlin’s humorous animations depict imaginary habitats that usually revolve around a strange architectural construct. Human-like characters go about their daily lives in a controlled environment that satisfies their basic bodily functions. Routine and repetition is a central theme, where rudimentary characters sometime go to extremes in order to perform the most mundane actions.

In ‘Precision Diving Wheel’, you must take a potentially fatal risk and dive off the top of a ferris wheel to make it into one of the revolving buckets of water, which temporarily means survival until you begin the process again. The aquarium of water in ‘SeeWorld’ limits the movement of its occupants, leaving them to buoy up and down helplessly. The device in ‘Home Rolled’ allows you to create roads in water while providing an all-in-one unit to cook, clean and sleep. The large-scale sculpture made after ‘Home Rolled’ allows the viewers to experience the device in their own physical environment. Obviously, this prototype is not an entirely feasible creation in real life.