The party grotto of the Playboy mansion—an artificial waterfall complete with blue water, palm trees and colored lights—is the perfect analogy for Kia Neill’s installation Terrain, currently up at Women and Their Work. The artist makes this comparison herself. The party grotto, she says, is like nature, but better. Similarly, Neill’s handcrafted landscape, which resembles a bedazzled cave floor, moves beyond mimicry of the natural world and into a sensational vision of nature-plus. Just like Hugh Hefner’s razzle-dazzle wonderland, Terrain plays with the line between the artificial and the natural, provoking a suspension of disbelief—that uniquely human ability to transform the artificial into something fantastical.

Terrain is the latest in Neill’s three-year engagement with visionary landscapes. Where she previously focused on the claustrophobic space of the cave ceiling, here she directs our attention back down to earth. Viewers must focus on the ground while they maneuver winding walkways of mossy stalagmites and shimmering geodes. Close attention is a matter of physical necessity, as the only light in the gallery comes from blinking LED lights beneath the installation. A smart move, this darkness has the effect of making the environment all the more absorbing. The LEDs also cast flickering shadows, which expand the environment onto the gallery walls. The shadows are often faint, and would benefit from being more defined, but the effect succeeds in incorporating the work more tightly into the space.

Overall, the installation has a distinctive handmade feeling to it, and the time-consuming intensity of the project is clearly apparent. The rocks are covered in a mossy layer of crafting fiber, the geodes are made from broken CD shards, the chicken wire construction is visible in the stalagmites and the whole thing is illuminated with slowly blinking Christmas lights. Despite the everyday materials, Neill does achieve some sense of an authentic landscape. The geodes, for instance, give off the perfect hard-edge, jewel-like impression.

Walking into the space, it’s all of these handmade details that first draw your attention. You bend down, poke your head around and just want to see how Neill actually made it all. Upon standing up and observing the space, however, the work provokes an entirely different experience: one of absorption. Within the dark room, the installation is encompassing enough to allow for a mild suspension of disbelief. Like an Indiana Jones movie, you’re skeptical but still play along. And it’s this paradoxical effect that lies at the heart of the work. You positively know that what you are looking at is faker than a playboy bunny’s cleavage. You just saw the chicken wire. And yet, you still imagine that a glitter-covered bat might fly out from the corner at any moment. Without being completely fake or completely realistic, Neill’s installation addresses the space in between—a space, it seems, that continues to become more and more relevant to the way we interact with our world.

Allison Myers is a freelance writer based in Austin. She received her M.A. in art history from The University of Texas at Austin.