OUT OF NATURE project evolved from shifts in my perspective during a three-month lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. I was living in Warsaw and my view of urban life had changed. Warsaw’s parks and wooded walkways were closed and I felt alienated and longing for a natural environment and context.
As soon as I left Warsaw I began to experience an immediate connection to the natural landscape. During the first two months, my husband and I lived in the countryside of southern Poland, then in a rural village in Germany, and since August we have been settled in Grožnjan/Grisignana. In each place, I’ve immersed myself in nature and been absorbed photographing plants, flowers and vegetables. I feel I am creating an archive for the future, one which will enable us to remember our natural world.
Perhaps I’m worried that it will disappear, that I may be deprived of it again and be deprived of its memories, for nature retains a record of everything. For example, a 300-year-old tree is a living, unbiased observer of human history. It bears witness to the terrible and the beautiful: violence, virus and death as well as birth, blossoming and love.
But simply establishing a record has felt incomplete. I find myself compelled also to transform these photographic images, a process that I experience as calming. So I photograph nature, multiply it and then print it in a large format. I examine it closely, deconstruct its images, create and archive a permanent memory and multiply it to make nature more plentiful. I want to catch the viewer’s eye, to surprise and thereby provoke the memory of the original. I feel that not only am I looking at nature, but that nature is also looking at me.
Most of my photographs were taken in Istria in the area of Grožnjan/Grisignana and Umag. I’m in love with this region.
