The importance of documenting a moving and evolving timeline within my work becomes quite clear when reflecting in the journey of my project up until this point. From the beginning of my project my work has changed quite rapidly, evolving from exploring food waste, to nature (accessible to me) to then documenting my own space looking outward onto the outside world ( including nature).
The journey although seemingly random or chaotic, actually follows the core themes of nature and the natural world within it. In the beginning my interest in food waste stemmed from a need, and want to become a more sustainable artist, for the good of the planet. I was interested in recycling, activism and artists that used their works to create beneficial changes to the natural world. Like Natalie jeremijenko’s works “moth cinemas” which encourages healthy happy habitats for moths and the pollination of local flowers and foods. Works by Jason DeCaires Taylor, whose underwater sculpture park increased local biomass by 200% through creating sculptures that double as safe habitats for marine life. These works all have a core belief in making art that is creating benefits (however small) to the natural world. This led to me become interested in food waste, and how 1/3 of all consumable food is wasted. So, instead of buying materials to create art, I began photographing and using the food waste I had. I fell in love with the intricate and almost biological aesthetic of the waste, and explored the parallels both aesthetically and physically of plant and food matter to human life. This interest led me to explore my own natural environment, becoming interested in the natural world around me, and how I could document it. Again this interest in nature deriving from my love for the natural world, and want to in some way create a benefit to it. The nature that surrounded me was particularly interesting and I began researching and archiving this information relating to its nativity, its shrub name, type, needs etc. I found myself becoming a lot more connected with the nature that surrounding me, and in order for me to try and create a benefit for it, I first needed to understand it. Around this time COVID rules became stricter and I was spending a lot more time inside by myself. With all this information and photographs, documentation of nature, I began projecting it onto my four breeze block Accomodation walls. The effect was a strange, and transformative. It reformed a cold, suburban, slightly clinical world into one with colour, life and energy. It was as if nature had reclaimed its space. I found the work to be a really effective way of both exploring and documenting my own reality, but also archiving and learning about my surrounding natural environment. Merging the two was the reintroduction of nature into a largely urban space, even if the merging was temporary and through the power of technology. After experimenting with projection I found myself, as did the rest of the uk, In another lockdown. This time however my roommates had moved out and I was completely by myself. In almost complete solitary I found myself staring out the same window multiple hours each day. Nature became an escape of forms, mentally and sometimes physically, whether that be for the once a day walks I could go on, or simply the trees outside my window I could see and longingly stare at. Through further documentation I began to explore the relationship between the two spaces. The photographs I took explored the meeting of the outside and the inside, and introduced a new space entirely, an in between. A space that’s neither here nor there, it’s untouchable, unreachable but marks the border between the two worlds. I still wanted, as I had when I started this project, to create work that had a purpose, and had benefit to its environment, however I was now in a position I hadn’t previously planned for. I was by myself, with no materials, little money or resources and also vulnerable in the middle of a global pandemic. I had to place this goal to one side, and by doing that I became closer and more connected than ever with the natural world.
I then began to create digital collages (for lack of a printer and paper) that combined multiple perspectives of my surroundings to create images that truer represent the passage of time, the spaces memory and the movement that usually only eyes, or film can capture. I took inspiration from David Hockney who documents the passage of time and movement through “joiners” as he called them which sequenced multiple realities and snapshots into one distorted perspective. These images and collages were really my introduction into how perspective can be more than just linear, both aesthetically and in regards to time, movement and life. I began to explore my own perspective, however distorted or inconsistent that it was. I ended up creating a short film. A combination of other 100 collages slightly changing in each frame to both take away perspective and receive. This is where I’m currently at, aesthetically and maybe from an outside perspective, a long way from where I began, but when you look at the core believes and values I started my project with, my work has barely changed. Moving forward I continue to document, archive and preserve what I find, my perspective with an underlying theme of the natural world.