Sarah-Elizabeth Lynch
Survival is a photographic investigation of encountering the vegetal world in an era of mass extinction. It documents a specific site (Pipemakers Park), an urban nature reserve left to regenerate and overgrow. Plants coexist and thrive, attracting bird life in its regenerative garden surrounded by housing estates in Melbourne’s western suburbs. This project invites the viewer to look closely at the fragile forms of vegetal life in the Anthropocene epoch.
The installation is a mixture of large-scale landscape photographs and plant specimens photographed in close proximity. The landscapes are juxtaposed with abstracted colours from the immediate environment that draw attention to the viewer’s visual perception of nature. These experiments reference the ecosystem’s unseen properties, such as its living organisms, soil and microbes.
This project has been informed by several artists investigating the representation of nature and culture in photography and sculpture. The aesthetic qualities in my work have been influenced by Anne Shelton’s site-specific project, Motherlode (2020), that documents a farm wishing to mitigate climate change; Herman de Vries’s eshenauer journal (2002) and his approach to collecting found plant materials and human artefacts and displaying them in assemblages; and Taryn Simon’s Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) has influenced my style of display for final presentation. Further, this project is grounded in Michael Marder’s Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Plant Thinking, on encountering the vegetal world; and Emanuele Coccia’s The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, on the importance of plants in creating the atmosphere that all life depends on.
The resulting project examines what role photography can play to draw attention to the abundant forms of nature, thereby challenging the ways we see and understand the vegetal world around us.
Wild Fennel, 2020
Photography
1180mm x 800mm
Overgrowth #1, 2020
Photography
80mm x 1180mm
Colour Field #1, 2020
Photography
800mm x 1180mm
Wattle, 2020
Photography
1180mm x 800mm
Colour field #2, 2020
Photography
1180mm x 80mm
Overgrowth #2, 2020
Photography
1180mm x 800mm
Monochrome #1, 2020
Photography
1180mm x 800mm
Stickyweed, 2020
Photography
1180mm x 800mm
