Unravelling: Photographic Explorations of Mending the Forest

EDITION

2023, Shortlisted

school

University of Cape Town, South Africa

links

@emmepstudio

‘Unravelling: Photographic Explorations of Mending the Forest’ looks at the ‘unravelling’, historical and current degradation, fragmentation and fading of the Garden Route Afrotemperate forests of South Africa. Through the project, I also explored metaphoric attempts to ‘fix’ this forest. With the use of mending/sewing the fragmented pieces of photographed forest together, this ‘fixing’ navigates my relationship to the forest and desire to rectify the damage done. While being an environmental photographic project, it is also a deeply personal exploration. Having grown up in the Garden Route, wandering in these magical forests, I have a close relationship to them. In this project I reflect on this relationship and the damage I might do these forests unknowingly, by also merely being part of the current consumerist culture. To explore this I track my extensive walks through these forests as maps, tear these routes into some of the photographs and sew them back together in red. The photographs are made with medium and large format film cameras, developed in the darkroom and handprinted onto expired photographic paper in fragments and then sewn together by hand. The expired photographic paper, which is unable to make a true white or true black, results in grey and fogged prints. This speaks to the current state of these forests, as ghosts of what once was, faded in comparison to what they were. This project further explores the potential of photography to evoke an understanding of environmental degradation through working with, and pushing, the very materiality of the photograph. This is done especially through the use of film negatives, stitched together, as artworks in themselves.