EarthSeptember 2008 An installation and video piece created
collaboratively This is the second collaborative work by Romain Forquy and Philip Lee, a collaboration started with the series of photographs Segments (2006-7). Earth has developed from Lee's series of live body performances called Slip. In all thirteen process-driven Slip performances Lee is covered in liquid clay, so becoming the sculpture. For Earth the live action is removed from the gallery. The intervention takes place in a forest, a place where the natural may become uncanny. A beautiful landscape is presented as the life-sized projected image, to which only the feint humming of birds gives a sense of time passing. Is the viewer looking at a photograph or an uneventful film? The holly tree in the background gradually imposes its presence within the frame and the action unfolds with the birth of an indigenous creature. In a time when humanity's senseless domination over its environment seems only to lead to ecological disasters, this piece evokes in a romantic and poetic fashion an alternative vision of our relationship to nature. The piece metaphorically points to a symbiotic relationship between human beings and nature, rather than the taming and eventual destruction of one by the other. The installation is available for exhibition. |
