The Granary Building is an institutional structure whose aim is to encourage the creative process. The building and its surrounding area have been in continuous change, while the students who inhabit it have also undergone processes of transformation. Interrupted Landscape asks about the relationship between the spaces and the individuals who inhabit them, and how the building and its inhabitants affect one another.
Part of my research is grounded in an understanding of loss as part of the migration process. Migration involves a restructuring of identity that can produce fragility, uncertainty and fear. I became interested in how these experiences of loss and change might be transformed through art, creating new experiences and a deeper relationship with an unfamiliar environment.
Within the university, I found a sense of protection that allowed me to place my body within the architecture and consider it as a landscape. The building established a physical bond between my body, its materials, and the institution I was becoming part of. The university became a temporary home.
Photography became part of this process of inhabitation. Rather than simply recording the building, photographing became a way of spending time with it—looking, returning and forming a relationship with the space. Through the act of looking, the unfamiliar could become familiar.
The work asks how a body can land somewhere unfamiliar, and how that place can begin to become home.