Estranged Trees series
Estranged Trees is about creating (en)strange(d) images of trees, rendered strange, using traditional black and white photography practices. The aim is to question our colonising relationship with nature and landscape, where, to simplify natural complexity, we impose our patterns. These contribute towards creating a global landscape type, that taken to its last instance becomes a non-landscape, or a non-place. Through the gradual appearance of its shadow, the tree is here reduced to a simplified, iconic and manipulable object; a route that the work follows on, that end in the inversion of the tree shadow.
During the work, tight framing was used, in order to explicit on one hand, the complexity and density of nature (even nature that appears static) and on the other, to imply and grow on the referred colonising relationship. This implied relationship moves to an explicit one with the appearance of the tree shadow, an easily manipulable graphic symbol, that in the last photograph is turned upside down.
Many questions are left to further pursue, and at the present viewing the interested observer is left to find their own path through this “estranged” forest.
Data
Tittle: Estranged trees, series started in 2005.
Prints: fine art prints on fibre based paper (silver gelatin on paper, selenium toned), 28cm x 28cm.
Related works: Terra Cinza, Terra Cinza re-visited, Paisagem estranha entranha
Ostranenie