"Past Work
Reconnect people back with nature
Nature can be powerful and “reclaim the earth”,
My past work was to do with people's relationship with nature and exploring how differently we are with the earth to our ancestors.
But also, how nature was powerful and not as fragile and delicate as people think. It grows over buildings and cracks brick work.
"Preservation methods and the themes of process and decay.
Abstract photographs: material of plant life and its ephemeral state
The photograph as an object will last longer and exceeds the mortality of the subject itself"
This led to my investigation into process and decay, and how something can be fixed within the state of decaying; neither living or dead. One of these methods was casting the plants in resin. Due to the nitrogen in the soil, it reacted in the resin causing a chemical reaction. This created air pockets, in which the enviroment the piece was in was reflected. The piece as a whole appeared as an alien world with remnants of the familiar still visable.
Through this form of investigating process in decay as photograph, it erased its own context as the photograph captured the decaying substance, and the piece itself decayed. So the work wasnt ephemeral, but the photograph as an object exceeded the mrtality of the subject matter.
"Research
Different states of mentality and physicality;
Barriers between fantasy and reality.
bioluminescent life forms.
Literature, and modern culture. -Book IX of John Milton's Paradise Lost
-Samuel Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
In turn, the decay work influenced me to look at states of mentality and physicality. Ive broadened this to humans as wel as plant life. I statrted my research into this by looking at hallucinagenic drugs; focusing on barriers of reality and fantasy and where they lie. This lead into looking at a hallucenagen called foxfire which is bioluminescent. Discovering the folklore around these glowing fungi encouraged me to move my work into the realms of wanting to replicate an emotion or a state of mind.
The folklore surrounding these plants include will o' the wisps, which were thought to be souls who lead wanderers astray and even to their demise. References to these will o the wisps include Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Paradise Lost, Franz Liszts "fuexfollet" even some shakespheare.
Arguably, the spheres of light, as they have been described, appear on photograph as "orbs". There have been scientific explanantions for this but some still believe they are supernatural.
I want to replicate the the emotions of a person meeting these "beings". Taking on a phenomenomolgical point of view in exploring the conscious experiance.
[...] He, leading, swiftly rolled In tangles, and made intricate seem straight, To mischief swift. Hope elevates, and joy Brightens his crest; as when a wandering fire, Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night Condenses, and the cold environs round, Kindled through agitation to a flame, Which oft, they say, some evil Spirit attends, Hovering and blazing with delusive light, Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool; There swallowed up and lost, from succour far.
—9.631-642
Snippet from John Miltons Paradise Lost featuring Will o The Wisps
