Description
is from my series “The gods are among us in the forest”
Project statement :
I began to question why we look outside of this world to find a god, or a higher power, when the gods could be among us in the forest. I wanted to capture a spiritual world inside nature, I combined images of trees, flowers, and sunsets together to create alterior dimensions. These images create dreamlike scenes, thinning the barrier between reality and the spiritual world.
Nature instinctively is the most normal thing for us to look at, we came from nature and we did live in nature, now a days we are so stuck in our screens that we don’t look at nature nearly as much or for as long as we should and in making these images I hope to awaken that spark within people again, to remind them how calming and beautiful nature really is and that we should be spending more time appreciating it.
The blending of images explores a few things, it explores the consistency of nature, in creating these images, I have found that nature always fits in together, nature is so familiar to us that even if we are viewing it in an altered state, such as in my images, it doesn’t feel weird or un natural to us.
We are drawn to stay looking at it, the blended images mean we stay looking for longer because we begin to realise that we are not just looking at one image, we are looking at an altered world, a new world made out of our own world and in doing so we question a lot of things, for me the most pressing thought is that this is what the spiritual realm looks like, an incredible enhanced and beautified version of our own natural world.
The work is made up of a mixture of old and new photographs, which is one of the things I like about photography, I can play with time and I also use this to question our idea of time. Nature doesn’t really change much over time, it is not tied down by the limits of time like we are and it is an important subconscious subject in my work.
The oldest photo in this work is from summer 2014 and the newest photo is from summer 2023, that is a 9-year age difference, from when I was 13 to when I was 22. All these different versions of me created this one piece of work and I think that is special.
