Liz Orton
Towards the end of our final year of university, Liz Orton came in to give a talk about her practices.
The first 15 years of work she was a researcher, working on environmental issues for charities. This eventually lead onto giving people cameras to represent their knowledge to better aid herself when it came to writing up research, it allowed her to gain a visual representation of data that wasn’t just in the form of a graph. This then carried on for the next 10 years. It was participating photography. Giving the subjects cameras to express themselves. This practice informs the way that she works.
She couldn’t take photos of people, she was not good at it, much like I am not good at photographing people. She got back into photography via her boyfriend who worked in kew gardens as a digital designer. He was working on a video of an extinct plant. She went to kew and got shown around and shown their reference library. She had a pass to the herbarium, trained to pick up and handle the objects. It represents every know species of plant.
The project that she produced was called ‘Splitting and Lumping’ – it relates to the botanists who organise the material. DNA mining on plants meant that plants had to change classification. Some plants looked similar but weren’t and vice versa, the project she created was a documentation of the plant that never really fit into any of the classifications. She said that the working conditions were not ideal and it was difficult to photograph in such a small space.
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She moved onto the palm department after this project. They have their own different system. Unsatisfied with the images, they were documented but she didn’t feel like she was showing or representing them. She started to create her own herbarium of palms through photography. She collected 4000 images of palms. The project is on-going and also features fake palms as well as real palms.
As a conclusion to these projects she stated that ‘art is to amplify what science is doing, rather than looking at it from a completely different standing point.’
Her next project involved her spending a long time in Epping forest. She took thousands of photos but deleted almost all of them. The images felt inadequate. Some sort of failing within the image which stopped her from being able to show what it was she was experiencing.
The forest was designed to represent a natural forest even though it was manmade. The forest was considered natural in the 1500/1600s. The reintroducing of cattle to roam wild to cultivate the trees in a certain manner was brought back to try and make it seem more natural. She went back to the forest after some time, never really finished this project, never been able resolve it and it just ends up as a single shot, a moving image. Filmed on a cherrypicker, vertically moving upwards through the forest. Exploring the idea of a more than human view. The view is determined via the picker and how it can get through the canopy. Ecological representation of the forest, more to do with time than space.
As this project is still in the making, she moved on to show us some of her other work. Photo-crom postcards; which are cross between a photograph and a painting was the next thing. Working with found images, not her own, created circular collages of different landscapes, they were stuck together in the old aesthetic.
A lot of her work I was able to relate to in different ways, the nature and natural element that flows through it all was what flows though mine. I was able to draw a lot of similarities between my work and her own, and I feel that a lot of the projects will stick with me through my practice.