Rock 2010

Second Nature

‘In short, by means of our hands, we create a second nature within the natural world’ (Cicero)

For some time I have been focusing my attention on the ways in which humans interact with the environment and exploit the natural world for their benefit. I have recorded landscapes that have been drastically transformed by industrial activities, such as mining and quarrying, ruined and polluted by man’s carelessness and that are kept under control by traditional land management techniques such as grazing and swailing.
This visual exploration has led me to a better understanding of the dichotomy between man and the natural world.
The boundaries between these two realms are even more blurred than I believed them to be.

Wilderness Ideal

Swailing

Grazing

Becoming other…

Blurred Boundaries

Reclaiming the landscape

This set of photographs explores the idea of how nature is slowly reclaiming the landscape, no longer used for mining purposes, by silently swallowing the traces of man’s presence.

Diptychs

The landscape I work in and the interventions I make are closely connected. A particular intervention can only exist once, in a specific position, in a specific landscape.
I found it interesting to present the work as a series of diptychs physically connecting the images of my interventions to the images of the landscapes in which they originated.

Man-altered landscape

Some of the locations where I made my interventions (previous post).
These drastically transformed landscapes are simultaneously disturbing and beautiful to see.