Art@10gs 10 Grosvenor Street W1K 4QB London France
Smoke and Mirrors brings together new landscape work by photographer Ellie Davies. Produced over the last three years working in the New Forest, she explores her relationship to the landscape, its role in defining personal identity and the notion that all perceptions of nature are in some way mediated by culture.
The term ‘landscape’ can be seen as a socially constructed description of nature embedded in memory, history, storytelling, folk law and magic, obscuring the reality of the land, veiling it, transforming the natural world into an idealization.
Davies plays the role of a witness and a narrator as she becomes actively involved with the forest space, inscribing on it and weaving into it, building a personal experience and interaction. Introducing interventions such as pools of light and darkness, pathways of wool and paint, golden trees, and marks drawn into the landscape, she captures a trajectory or a record of an interaction like an ephemeral self-portrait. The materials weave, sew, thread and connect her tangibly to the landscape for a short time, catching and locating herself within it, as she questions the stability of ‘nature’ and landscape’ as concepts.
See her work following this link: www.elliedavies.co.uk
Ellie Davies - From the series Smoke and Mirrors