A lizard is equipped with a set of powerful helicopter rotor blades sprouting out of its back and tail. A mutant giraffe’s long neck stretches skyward from its bulldozer-tracked body, a backhoe bucket sprouting from its lower jaw. A leaping dolphin is fitted out with the twin fuselage of a P-38 Lightning, the American World War II-era fighter plane model that terrified German troops called “the fork-tailed devil.” Brave the steep climb of sculptor and illustrator Collin Douma’s mountainside driveway, clamber up the tall wooden ladder that ascends to his crow’s-nest loft studio, and you’ll come face to face with these and dozens more of his fantastical cross-bred, creatures. The perplexing specimens make up just a small smattering of his eye-grabbing “UF3D” mixed-media sculpture series.
The miniature creations, which are made from discarded, puttied-and-glued-together toys and other found objects and covered with a bronze-tinted finish that makes them resemble diecast pieces, are the three-dimensional (“3D”) companions to Douma’s “United Fauna” watercolor series of equally impossible animal amalgams. In their maker’s imaginary world—the Doumaverse, he calls it—the Earth’s wildlife is rising up and adapting to fight back against the ravages of its human would-be demolishers. It’s his response to the current climate crisis that comes at the hands of exploitative industrialism that so gravely threatens the planet.
“‘United Fauna’ envisions a world where animals have weaponized human technology to survive environmental collapse,” explains Douma in an artist statement. “This ongoing series depicts creatures adapting our discarded machinery into tools of resistance…Each piece imagines nature’s retaliation against humanity’s ecological destruction.” The forested views that surround the home he shares with his family, as well as the increasing occurrences of environmental disasters in the news, were the inspiration behind the symbolic wakeup calls of “United Fauna” and “UF3D,” the latter highlighted by items like the steam-punky LocustMotive, which combines a grasshopper with a railroad engine.“I look around and see the woods dying, the trees falling,” he says. “Meanwhile, it seems like people are just la-la-la-ing through everything and not concerned. There were the [January 2025] fires in LA. I live in a wooden house—I can’t help but pay attention. Remember all that smoke that came down through here during the [May 2025] wildfires up in Canada?”
Woodstock to Woodstock
Canada is also where Douma comes from. The son of a policeman and a nurse, he was born in 1974 in the Toronto suburb of Woodstock, Ontario. “It was a pretty close community,” he says. “I graduated from the same high school my parents had gone to, and everybody knew my dad. He was a community guy, but he wasn’t really a creative guy. My mom was crafty, though; besides working in nursing she was a calligrapher. There were some writers and poets in the family, too. Both of my parents were very supportive when I got into art. I was allowed to explore, creatively.”
Douma took a summer painting class when he was 12, but by high school it was animation that was consuming him. At 17 he got a camcorder and began making stop-motion shorts, entering an amateur film festival and winning its $12,000 grand prize for one of his very first efforts. He received his diploma in traditional animation from Ottawa’s Algonquin College in 1995 and went on to study at the Toronto School of Art. “There was a lot going on in Toronto, and I was part of an artists’ group there called the Five Lovely Guys,” recalls Douma, who had a run of prestigious show placements in his homeland in the early 1990s. “It was mainly a drinking club [laughs], but it was a cool scene. Canada was one of the world leaders in animation at the time, but it was a pretty cutthroat industry to try to break into. It was kind of a closed shop. I needed to get a steady job, so I got into doing art for advertising.”
His late-’90s employment-seeking path took him to the crossroads of the ad industry: New York City, where he designed CD-ROMs and worked in the dot-com world—until that bubble burst. “Then I started working for the Detroit auto industry, doing campaigns for Ford and General Motors,” he says about the period, which paid well but found him spiritually unfulfilled. “I worked on marketing for the GM Silverado, which my coworkers and I used to call one of the ‘Four Horsemen of Suburbia’ because it was just a variation on the same pickup truck models made by the three other big automakers. [Laughs.]” Outside the day job, Douma continued to hone his artistic chops, studying at Soho’s renowned life-drawing center Spring Street Studios and creating the character-rich illustrations of Manhattan commuters that make up his “Subway Series.”
Another Green World
But for Collin and his wife, fiber artist Danielle Holke, and their young son, Finn, the daily commutes and claustrophobic confines of New York eventually became too much. In 2017, the family purchased their forested house in Woodstock-adjacent Boiceville for weekend escapes; by pandemic-plagued 2020 they’d transitioned to living there full-time.
On the coffee table in their living room sits a deck of the problem-solving Oblique Strategies cards created by artist, musician, producer, and activist Brian Eno, an admitted influence of Douma’s. “One of the things that Eno points out about climate change is that the poorest people will be hit the hardest by it,” he says. “That’s already happening, there’s no denying it. Look at the droughts in Africa or the [2004] tsunami in Sri Lanka.”
The equipment-enhanced animals of the “United Fauna” drawings, which he describes as “a cautionary art exhibition,” date from 2009 and were inspired by the writings of Canadian conservationist Archibald Stansfeld Belaney AKA Grey Owl, an English-born pretendian who preached respect for nature. “One day I thought, ‘Grey Owl needs an air force!’” recounts Douma, whose initial piece for the series pairs an owl with a 1930s racing plane. He began making the figural “UF3D” works—collectively his first foray into the sculpture medium—in early 2025, coming up with hismodel-making method out of necessity. “I tried using a 3-D printer, but ultimately I just found it easier to work by hand,” he says. “So I just started sourcing materials and putting the pieces together that way.”
It took a bit of time, though, to find a spot to show his art locally. “The gallery scene up here was a tough nut to crack at first,” says Douma. “But I started entering in group shows and showing my pictures in libraries, and then one thing just kind of led to another and I started getting my stuff into galleries. I’ve definitely become more creative since I moved to the Hudson Valley.” A 2024 solo show at Poughkeepsie’s Cunneen Hackett Art Center was a milestone, as was his being given the 2025 Lisa Williams Social Justice Award by the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum last month.
“Collin Douma’s work confronts the escalating environmental crisis through vividly imagined creatures—half animal, half machine—that repurpose the world’s discarded machinery into tools of resistance,” says WAAM’s executive director, Nicole Goldberg. “His colorful drawings and mixed-media sculptures may appear whimsical at first glance, but they ultimately serve as apocalyptic warnings of the future that awaits if humanity fails to curb the accelerating dangers of climate change.”
Keeping It Together
“Art is defiance against entropy,” reads the mission text on Douma’s website. What, exactly, does he mean by that?
“I think of art as being like Saturn’s rings,” he says. “All of these particles being crammed together for a finite amount of time before they get pulled apart and, hopefully, something else comes along to take their place. Nothing lasts. The most we can do as artists is step against that and try to have our say, at least for a moment.” Although, unsurprisingly, he’s wary of the environmental impact of AI, which utilizes unsustainable amounts of water to cool its attendant data centers, when it comes to its artistic use, he’s less anxious. “I’m not afraid of AI art, bring it,” he says. “Like with any tool, how creatively it’s used depends on the user and their motives. AI can never exactly match what we do by hand, and I actually think it’s only going to force artists to get more creative.”
Some have suggested to Douma that, given his background in animation, some kind of animated series centering on the lives and exploits of his “United Fauna” characters would be a no-brainer for him to concoct. But, at this stage, at least, he’s not interested. “I don’t want to tell the stories of the individual animals,” he maintains. “I want to tell a bigger story, about how everything in the natural world is connected to what humans are doing to it. With my art I want to leave something behind.”
It seems he is. “Last week I did a craft show where I sold some of my stuff,” says Douma. “There was this little kid there, and he was really intrigued with one of my pieces, Tranquility Sting, a scorpion retrofitted with an Apollo lunar lander. It was priced at $50, which of course he didn’t have. But he was obviously just fascinated with it. So just told him, ‘Keep it.’ Maybe he’ll use it as a toy, maybe he’ll lose it or forget about it. Or maybe he’ll keep it forever. Who knows? Whatever happens, though, for me having that connection was the best part of making that piece. That makes it worth doing.”
Douma’s work will be exhibited as part of the group show “All in All” at the Kleinert/James Art Center in Woodstock, February 27-April 14.
