Assessment 2 || Final Work and Concept Statement
Inhabiting this earth for thousands of years, humans have developed and built structures in the face of ever advancing industrialisation. All this built on the natural earth. Yet we still isolate and distinctly distinguish the contrast between natural and man-made. We tend to only focus on one side but never the two together. Through my series of photographs, I want to highlight the contrast of the two divisions. However, I want to also illustrate the inevitability of the two coinciding.
In the present world, in every direction, buildings and man-made objects exist. The comparative magnitude between nature and man-made is noticeably large. I wanted to emphasise this on a micro level through the perspective of nature, by the use of flowers. I also decided to use a natural medium, water, as the lens in which the side of man-made is refracted into.
My initial ideas stemmed from working with natural materials of garden weeds and using photography as my form of expression. I juxtaposed beauty and ugly by representing weeds as beautiful, though people usually regard is as ugly. However, this idea did not really spark any interesting aspects. Instead, I took the idea of using nature to form the basis of my next experimentation. I thought about contrasting and physically ‘mirroring’ the two divisions using a small mirror. However, this idea seemed too cliché, which lead me to thinking about other ways of reflecting nature and man-made in one frame.
Inspired by German photographer Markus Reugels’ refraction of droplet photographs, I used this technique as the dominant idea in which I experimented with, which later became my final implemented technique for my series of photographs. Refraction is light waves changing directions as a result of speed change when they pass the boundary between two substances with different densities (BBC, 2014). Reugels captures the droplets in motion, however only with the advanced equipment that is necessary for it to be successful. Prior to researching this photographer and his practice, I had noticed images refracted into water droplets that had nested itself onto plants but had not formally explored using a camera to capture the details. I became intrigued and as a result experimented with this firstly with any plant I could find that had the ability to hold onto spherical droplets. I explored refracting buildings and textures but found that textures conveyed more meaning.
In my work I have decided to capture the droplets without movement on parts of flowers to demonstrate the delicate nature of them. Being able to photograph the image in the droplets was difficult and I had considered utilising Photoshop to manually place and manipulate the refracted image into the droplet, however I wanted to keep it raw and natural and deterred from that thought. Within the droplets, I have captured textures of multiple man-made structures. I have photographed each texture with a different flower, which demonstrates the diversity of both the amount of man-made textures as well as naturally occurring flowers. The delicate nature of flowers also contrasts with the harsh tactility of man-made structures, with flowers being fragile to the touch, at times unable to support even the tiniest droplet of water, and man-made structures being able to support much more.
However, it is not always the contrast between the two divisions we should reflect upon all the time. As humanity progresses, we are almost becoming as one environment, and this is what I want to draw upon. We should appreciate the beauty of nature and the diversity of plants we have on this earth but also keep in mind that humanity is also becoming widespread and diverse. The droplets I have captured are blurred on the perimeters and this further encapsulates the idea of man-made and nature merging together and that it is the norm nowadays to see the two coincide together. Although I am not communicating the negative impacts of humanity to nature, I want to make aware the large ratio between man-made and nature. The two should not always be thought of two separate entities, but that they can exist together as one.
Bbc.co.uk. (2018). BBC - GCSE Bitesize Science - Refraction of waves : Revision. [online] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/triple_ocr_gateway/space_for_reflection/refraction_of_waves/revision/1/ [Accessed 18 Sep. 2018].
Feel Desain. (2018). Miniature Liquid Worlds | Markus Reugels - Feel Desain. [online] Available at: https://www.feeldesain.com/miniature-liquid-worlds-markus-reugels.html [Accessed 11 Sep. 2018].
Reugels, M. (2018). Refraktion. [online] Markusreugels.de. Available at: http://www.markusreugels.de/index.php/liquidart/refraktion [Accessed 11 Sep. 2018].
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
ellievsbear