Restless nature

This single screen video work involved footage shot from a helium balloon. The camera rose up from the forest floor into the oak leaf canopy and down again, as if floating on water. The visual and audio tracks played with the ways that landscape is, and has been imaged; creating unsettled footage which seems hunted or pursued, instead of the steady crane shots of woodland canopies seen on TV wildlife programmes.

The soundtrack included footage from news channels around the world reporting on inundation, and the affects of climate change. With the exception of the first three sound-bites relating to the flooding in the Lake District in winter 2009, all other reports were recorded over two weeks in late January 2011, when there was severe flooding in Australia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Brazil, Pakistan, and Benin.

Restless Nature aims to test our capacity to articulate climate change with temperate as well as tropical forests ; and ways that forest landscapes might be re imaged - and possibly re imagined- in the future.

Edwina is a London based artist. She is currently Course Director for the MA Fine Art Course at Wimbledon College of Art. She is involved with Creative Transitions, a cross CCW group of artists, researchers and students who aim to develop new models for a sustainable university.

Research statement
Edwina is a U.K. based artist, whose work explores the living environment. Her artwork involves mutability and change.

The art projects explore what happens when 'grey' and 'green' environments intersect, and how human interactions have and are affecting the nature/culture/ecology of a place. They also reflect upon how climate change may affect this delicate balance.

The art projects are created through research and discourse. They celebrate narratives and conversations, and are often deeply informed by the history of a place. They are inclusive through the involvement of local individuals.

Edwina also collaborates with experts across a range of disciplines. To date these have included horticulturalists, biodiversity experts, engineers, architects, perfumers, foresters, and composers.

The artworks shown on this website are presented both on site (as permanent or temporary installations), and in galleries.

Edwina's PhD was undertaken with Glasgow School of Art and the Forestry Commission at Grizedale in the Lake District, to explore the mutable and transient nature of artwork which is sited in, or references, the green environment. Edwina’s research is driven by practice-based experiments, using the strategy of becoming and being lost herself, in order to explore what may be lost.

As forests are both carbon sinks and carbon stores, part of this research is looking at how anxiety about climate change is influencing both artists’, and their audiences’ engagement with sited work, particularly in a woodland context. Her findings will be contextualized by international research into sited art projects, which reference the green environment.

• http://www.edwinafitzpatrick.co.uk