An Echo Between
An Echo Between is a queer ecological project that treats the body as part of the environment rather than something separate from it. The work thinks about skin as landscape and intimacy as a shared ecology. It asks how our bodies are shaped by the places we live in and the people we live with.
I have always been drawn to the edges of things: the outskirts of towns, thresholds between public and private, blurring between figurative and abstract. These margins feel like places where new forms and new ways of being can appear. In this project, I work with fragments and slithers of detail to explore those possibilities.
The images are made using a small handheld scanner that was originally designed for office work. By using it on bodies, plants and domestic materials, I am queering the device, taking something built for efficiency and turning it into a tool for touch. I drag the scanner slowly across skin, leaves and surfaces. Because it is unstable, it creates distortions and slips. These marks become part of the image, showing movement, hesitation and the time it takes to scan. They create a visual language that feels alive and in transition.
From these fragments, I build collages. I piece together human and nonhuman surfaces to create hybrid bodies that do not exist on their own but come into being through connection. This way of working reflects the project’s queer ecological approach. The creatures that appear are shaped by touch, memory and environment. They blur the boundaries between body and landscape, past and present, self and other.
The project also sits in conversation with my lockdown project - Exquisite Corpse. That earlier work explored fragmentation and the unpredictable logic of assembling meaning from separate parts. An Echo Between continues this interest but shifts the focus toward connection. It traces a move from isolation to relation, from a solitary figure in empty suburban spaces to a body that is present and entangled with another.
The plants, textures and objects I scan carry their own histories. When they merge with the body, they create a layered sense of memory. The images hold both the lonely landscapes of my past and the intimate domestic world of my present. They suggest that home is not a single place but a network of relationships with land, with others and with the stories we carry.
An Echo Between is a celebration of interdependence. It recognises that we are formed through our connections and that our bodies are always in conversation with the environments that hold us.
If you'd like to see this work on the Aesthetica Art Prize site:
Comments