‘Nocturnes’ in Declinazioni della Gioia’. Roma Fotografica Festival

This exhibition showed a selection of images from my current international digital photography project entitled ‘A Forest of Signs: Figuring Trees within the Contemporary Urban Environment’. It addresses the figure of the tree as part of a matrix of signs and objects in the urban environment, both as a presence in urban social life and as a site of the ‘urban imaginary’. Trees shape and are shaped by the environmental, cultural and historical contexts in which they live and grow. As such, they are agents, participants and catalysts in the social life of an urban neighbourhood.

The images produced in are treated as a working body of images or a ‘living archive’; as the street tree reveals different aspects of itself and the city through the passing of time, so these images are open to change according to context.

The work continues my research into the increasingly entangled relationships between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. If the globe is becoming increasingly urbanized, how does this impact upon the status of the tree as urban representative of ‘nature’?

The work is currently developing on two urban sites, that of London and Athens.

‘Nocturnes’ in ‘Declinazioni Della Gioia’, Roma Fotografica Festival curated by Jacopo Benci, Artistic Director of The British School at Rome. (with Crisp,Glanville, Masi, Riddy, Rideal, Wentworth) at Palazzo delle Espozioni Rome. The subject is nocturnal images of urban trees in Athens, Greece. The work develops representations of the ‘urban imaginary’ in terms of duration and light, and the play between subjective reverie and urban space.
Catalogue ISBN 978-88-89303-11-5

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