movement-fields

(2016) Solo Exhibition, Red Gallery, North Fitzroy, AU. 10-27 August.

movement-fields is a series of works created during a 2015 summer artist residency in rural Finland. Focusing on the act of walking through forests and woodlands, the exhibition explores how we reorient, align and move with environmental experiences that immerse us. Each work contemplates the way we might sense and respond to movement in the forest environment. The works are both an in-situ document of Kaya’s experiences in the local environment and an invitation for viewers to contemplate the ways in which we move alongside the micro movement always already occurring in an environment.

Panoramic walking
Interactive projection.

Panoramic forest scenes move with and against dizzying stop-motion images of walking on the forest floor. Visitors are invited to interact with the projection via a wireless trackpad that moves the projected imagery. Scrolling on the trackpad moves the images move left or right, creating a stop-motion effect that follows the walking movements. In addition, viewers can walk around the room with the trackpad, which aligns the movements of the projected imagery with their bodily movements in the space. The result is a visual expansion and contraction of the landscape, where the trees, undergrowth, the legs and feet move and intertwine with each other.

Field Sketches
Finnish graph paper, pen, flagging tape, card.

Field Sketches are a series of sketches and collages made while walking in the forest. Each sketch is a distorted representation of both the visual landscape that I witnessed (the perspective sketches in pen) and the approximation of the ground’s topography that I was standing on (re-presented by the orange flagging tape). The result is a representation of practices in the “field”, surveying, sketching and moving through the forest landscapes.

Photographs of tracing movements
Digital prints.

The photographs are excerpts of my documentation of walking trips I did through the Finnish forest. The bright orange “flagging tape” is commonly used to survey a landscape, mapping out coordinates by tying the tape to surrounding trees, rocks, or stretching out along the ground. These are playful experiments of trying to “survey” a small site on the ground that was frequently walked over. The flagging tape was fed through the undergrowth in and around paths and left in the forest for several weeks. The photographs document the subtle movements of the flagging tape as it was shifted and entangled with the forest.

http://redgallery.com.au/10-august-27-august-kaya-barry/