My work has always focused on the creative exploration of places and on how myths, legends and oral histories permeate the space around us and possibly shape the way we interact with it. These ideas are at the base of most of my installations, performances and multimedia artworks, from Raining Buddhas (2009) to Until the End of an Everlasting Day (my practice-based PhD outcome in 2012), from Edges (2011) to This is the Way the World Ends (2015).
I believe that how we perceive and contemplate the land affects the way we treat it, and ultimately impacts on how we live within it. Reconnecting with ancient myths, legends, beliefs and local traditions concerning specific spaces and places around us would help us stop, reflect on and listen to our environment and develop a deeper awareness of it, and consequently a more thorough interconnection with it.
I also believe that, in order to give strength to my visual/creative reflection on the environment and to integrate environmental issues and concerns into my artistic practice in an effective way, it is important for me to focus on a specific geographic area that is somehow connected to myself and my experiences.
From reflections on all these points, the need to start a new creative project and my life as a recently-become-Highland-based artist and researcher, the project Aqua - Uisge was born.
The main medium of the project is photography, in different forms. Photographs can then take the form of site-specific installations, according to the exhibition space(s) where the work will be shown and with the support of written texts and/or a soundscape.
The starting point of my visual exploration is black and white instant photography. Using an instant camera would enable me to catch “instantly” the atmosphere and mood of a place. Furthermore, the grained, blurred and not-highly-defined quality of instant photographs is particularly suitable to my personal aesthetics and to the dream-like images that I aim to achieve through my work.
Instant photographs will be scanned, digitalised and inverted into negatives that, printed on film, will form the starting point of the next step of the process: cyanotypes.
The choice of using cyanotypes has been dictated by two main elements. Firstly, the possibility of printing on fine art paper and – possibly - other materials which would be sourced locally. Secondly, the blue tones of the cyanotypes, which meets particularly well the subject/theme of the work (watery landscapes, myths and legendary presences).
Moving from instant photographs to cyanotypes would allow me to reflect in a creative way on that first immediate feeling caught through my instant camera, work on the pictures that I have produced during my fieldwork in light of the narrative aims of my projects and create unique hand printed outcomes.
A further and final step would be transforming cyanotypes into three-dimensional objects that reshape and dialogue with the exhibition space.