EARTH SKY TIME - FRANCESCA WHYTE 2018
Artist Biography
I seek to capture light and air. Weather, wind, clouds, mist, a track that will always take us on. Nature constantly presents us with moments of ephemeral beauty, and my aim is to capture the feeling of light and wind that I experience when I am standing out there in it all. The challenge is bridging the gap between seeing and feeling. We can all see nature, but my goal is to capture how I feel when the wind is in my face and the sunlight covers my arm like the touch of something solid. I hope I have achieved that.
My work is in direct opposition to over edited work. I'm not trying to heighten or intensify, I am capturing moments that already exist that I see beauty in, that I want to share. We are all aware that mainstream society is losing connection to nature. Nature is our life force, nature in all of it’s imperfections. There is nothing to hide behind. I have not gone out looking for the perfect shot, I have taken the majority of these photos with my phone, instinctively desiring to capture a moment in it’s purest form, in order to live it again.
These photos have the greatest effect when hung together enhancing the viewer’s experience of being overwhelmed (in a good way) by a sense of space and time/lessness, and be transported to where the earth and sky fill our soul. Time in my photos is everything, or nothing. I aim to strip away the modern world where I can exist in a place that has changed little. There is a bleakness in the Australian landscape, the subtle colours of the bush, the rawness of the desert, and the moodiness of our mountains.....in a sense I am time travelling and want the viewer to be able to do the same. To experience what I experience. To be able to escape for a moment or two.
I spent a lot of years on a sailing boat and hitchhiking by the side of the road, forever moving forward to the horizon. Maybe this is my way of balancing a domestic life with the life from the previous chapter, the one that was lived predominantly outside rather than inside.