Treading Water (2018)
This series was produced on residency at Somos Art House in Berlin over winter 2017-2018. Over a period of 3 months, I photographed various plants and wildlife located along Berlin’s rich urban canal system. Once the film had been developed, I returned to discreet location where the photograph was originally captured to submerge the film underwater for durations of up to two months. Gradually, the film became malleable, as color layers are stripped away, and the minerals, bacteria and pollution of the water slowly disintegrated the medium into an unpredictable abstraction of color and texture. After the film was left outside to dry, bacteria continued to eat away the image into material abstraction, demolishing the pictorial, and freeing the photo-object from the burden of depiction. Through spatio-temporal abstraction, Treading Water investigates the inherent disorder, chaos, turmoil and beauty of nature; qualities reflected formally in the shapes, colors and texture of the work itself.
