Artist statement
Scientific but gentle and filled with wonder
I’m a birder, a photographer, a writer and a storyteller. Through writing, photography and drawing, I tell stories about a nature that is all around us but to inattentive human eyes too often hides in plain sight.
My work encourages the viewer to abandon the anthropocentric filters we apply to all things around us and look at birds, trees, flowers and insects, learn and remember their names. Too often humans relate to nature like something that was erected for their own appropriation and benefit, when in fact we are passengers in fleeting transit. Nature exists, grows and evolves beyond us, despite us.
My creative practice is rooted in the notion of ‘backyard nature’. I use this phrase with two meanings, closely intertwined in my visual work.
One refers to the nature we walk through in our everyday life, often without even being conscious of our closeness with it. This part of my work focuses on birds as the epitome of the proximity of nature. Birding sharpens our perception of the environment around us, alerts us to colours, sounds, movements we may otherwise overlook. Common species we encounter in the places we inhabit every day are exemplary of the quiet beauty of the nature around us.
The other meaning of ‘backyard nature’ is not connected with localness, but identifies nature we grow familiar with as we keep returning to it. When built over time, a strong connection with a place reverberates in the words and images we choose to narrate it. Familiar landscapes evolve into portraits – ‘portraits of places’, as I like to call them. Distance does not lessen familiarity. As my local bird walk routes are familiar places, so is the Arctic, with its raw yet delicate colours and lines, its unique scenery and wildlife.
Acknowledging the tight connection between the human and the non-human is the first step toward restoring a balance that too often seems compromised. There’s something desperately nostalgic about walking through nature in times of climate crisis. Through a combination of melancholy and solastalgia, every act of nature takes up a new meaning – it becomes an act of respect, a homage to something infinitely greater than us. This is how we get to shift our outward look and retrace the ancestral foundations of the intimate relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world.
By showing the quiet, complex simplicity of the natural world and the non-human species that populate it, I hope to convey the vital importance of protecting nature and wildlife, as well as raise awareness of the threats the climate crisis is posing to the ecosystems we all inhabit.
