HELEN SEAR
Becoming Forest
“ There are human becomings, animal becomings, plant becomings and so on. As they move together through time and encounter one another, these paths interweave to form an immense and continually evolving tapestry.”
Tim Ingold - Being Alive 2011
Becoming Forest is the title of a series of pictures that explore the experience of moving through a marked forest landscape and the altered/heightened perception of surfaces, forms and space that this embodied experience entails.
Returning with photographic images this experience is revisited in front of the computer screen, with the manual gesture of tracing the lines of the new growth in the forest, using a pen and tablet. The chaos and entanglement of these hand drawn lines that follow the actual forest growth in the photograph, contrasts with the geometric neon pigment marks spray-painted by the foresters, and simultaneously echo the lines of the skin of the hand, or the veins of the interior human body.
The static nature of the photograph is reanimated through the process of touch, and references dye, used in medical imaging, to enhance that which is hard to see, or scarcely visible to the human eye.
This work continues my ongoing investigation of bringing the body back into the act of looking by enmeshing figure/body and environment and rendering them inseparable.
100 x 100 cm image | 110 x 110 cm print
Archival Pigment Print
Edition: 5+2AP