OOO

“Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.” Timothy Morton Ecology Without Nature (2007)

I’m interested in how the convention of the landscape in art embodies and enacts the notion of our living environment as the transcendent ‘other’; beautiful, fragile, out there. It is the notion of ‘Nature’ condensed into a visual form, designed to soothe or maybe excite, but always to separate us from that which surrounds us. Always rendered from a human perspective, landscape reinforces the idea that the rest of existence is made real or given life through our interactions with it.

My interest in photographing the living world is to work around the notion of landscape, creating images from non human perspectives. I work with robotic camera equipment that takes many pictures from different angles and then stitches them together to create colossal composite images. The result is an image made up from many different viewpoints and moments in time. I am also unable to see the framing or composition of the image until long after the image is captured leaving those decisions to the robot. The technique also allows for incredible amounts of detail to be captured enabling prints that stretch to multiple meters at the highest resolution. I create works of this size because for me they open up the opportunity for photography to become an experience rather than an image. For me the ability of photographic images to create bodily affects is as interesting as its relationship to cognitive thought and imagination.