Sofía Alrich Veytia

The natural landscape has inspired awe since ages past, but there is one plant within nature that has especially been personified and honored; elderflora. Trees have been objects of veneration since ancient times, they were associated with gods, heroes, or seers, and have often been protected in sanctuaries or sacred lands. “Plato recognizes that what botanists now define as the ‘higher’ plants, including trees, are qualitatively different from less individuated ‘lower’ varieties, such as the grasses. The higher plants were assumed to share physical substance of which humans were made” (Marder, 2014, p.8) Plato’s view of plants influences Neoplatonic philosophers such as Plotinus, In the book, The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium, 2014, Marder explains that Plotinus conceived “the Soul of All” as a gigantic tree in which all living creatures and inorganic entities represent branches, twigs, and leaves. 

Animism is a concept that is deeply rooted in my worldview and in turn in my current artistic practice, this idea of an animus mundi or a world soul that connects all living things. This connection between humanity, nature, and the cosmos or the Spirit has been the focal point of my current artistic research, specifically during this unit I focused on the symbolism behind trees and how they can represent the sublime. 

During Unit 1 I started to question ¿How can one picture that which resists depiction? and approached this in my art practice through abstract imagery, by dissecting, transforming, and modifying photographic images through digital, manual, and mechanical processes, mainly working with intaglio processes. During Unit 2 I continued approaching the printmaking matrix as a vessel to portray parallelisms of nature to the human body and the cosmos. In this unit, I continued to use photography as a basis for printmaking. The process of printmaking involved several steps that gradually moved the image away from its original source and towards a more abstract representation. 

This is exemplified in the artwork “Dimensions of a Unified Whole”, initially the photograph that inspired this print served as a documentation of an object existing in our tangible reality. However, as the printmaking process progressed, the object itself ceased to exist in its original form and took on a new meaning. The title of this print comes from the following quote: 

“If all are One and the One is all, then we must be able to identify and accept the plant in us and ourselves in the plant, the gardener in the garden, and the garden in the gardener. Interiority and exteriority are two dimensions of a unified whole, viewed under the lenses of intelligibility and visibility, respectively…” (Marder, 2014, p. 56) 

One of my main concerns in my art practice is how to make it more immersive, and started to question at the end of the last unit and the start of this one if a two-dimensional rectangular print was the correct medium for this research or if I should enhance my print practice with other artistic mediums. To explore this further, I realized that for me to create immersive artwork that effectively conveys the concepts behind it I had to engage more with nature and the topics I was researching. I extended my research methods during this unit by taking the time to absorb and observe the subject matter that fuels my research.

I started with taking walks around parks in South London such as Ruskin Park and Brockwell Park, taking with me a camera to document the experience. After this, I decided to take a trip to Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean, specifically to the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail and to Puzzlewood. I chose this area as it has inspired countless writers, filmmakers, and artists because of its fantastical otherworldly aspect, Puzzlewood specifically was the filming location for films such as The Secret Garden (2020), Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jack the Giant Slayer, and many more. Puzzlewood is said to have inspired the scenery of Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings. The environment of Puzzlewood is mystical and almost unearthly, the perfect location to collect images for my practice of depicting the intangible spirit realm of nature.  

The main purpose of this excursion was to gather visual material to create a video piece, as mentioned before I had started questioning ways in which I could make my artwork more immersive, and video seemed a logical next step as I had been experimenting with photography during unit 1 and most of unit 2, and moving image was a way to bring my prints to life. While brainstorming this piece I wondered what I wanted the central concept of my video to be, as the general concept of animism in nature, specifically trees, seemed too broad to explore. To narrow down the conceptual background for this video I decided to focus on the symbolism of the Mexican Tree of Life.

Trees in Mesoamerican mythology were often humanized and vice versa men and women could also be seen as trees. “In the seventeenth century, a Spanish priest complained that native people sometimes seemed to adore trees more than God, observing the popular belief that trees used to be human beings who even in their wooden state, retained “rational souls (Serna 1953, 1:231)” (Cited in Consentio, 2003, p.35). Trees for some Mesoamerican cultures resemble humanity as each part within is equal to a human body: the roots represent feet, branches arms, fruit represent eyes, moss/fungi are the ears, the core is the heart, and in the case of the rubber tree the resin is described as the blood. The human condition is akin to plant life: birth and death, and man and tree are equivalent as they both represent the Axis Mundi, the element that connects the cosmos. 

For the video “Axis Mundi” I wanted to explore the tree as the axil of the world, the connection between the spiritual realm, earth, and the underworld. The video follows a cyclical narrative of life, creation, regeneration, and death. Visually I attempted to allude to the parallelisms between the human body and natural life, modifying videos of trees and water to resemble skin, blood, cells, and organs, at the same time as stars or particles. I sought to create an unsettling sensation by creating images with colors that hint at concepts of nurturing or tenderness, at the same time as frames with high contrast bold colors, and cuts to absolute darkness. Red is the color of the vital fluid, of blood, and pink is a variation of that color it alludes to the skin pigmented by blood, this is the reason pink is the main recurring color throughout the sequence. I used sound as an important tool to convey that nature is at the same time beautiful and terrifying, it is something that creates and destroys, the sublime can be both awe-inspiring or cause a sense of uncertainty, as that which we cannot explain can unsettle us.  For the music I collaborated with musician Santiago Barron, I asked him to create a sound that would allude to nature being alive, breathing, growing. He reacted to the visual inputs by contextualizing sounds of nature mixed with samples of human voices, modifying them using synthesizers, as the images themselves were abstractions of something no longer completely there, he tried to do the same with the music, creating a sound palette that matched the images.

“Burke then goes on to treat the sublime as a special kind of experience in response to objects and conditions such as the ocean, darkness, obscurity, the vastness of heights and depths, and above all, the forms of power which cause danger or pain and threaten self-preservation.” (Des Pres, 1983, p.4)

The main artistic influence that veered me toward the use of video during this term was Bill Viola. His artwork touches upon subjects that greatly interest me, as he is concerned with the representation of the sublime and the evocation of transient states. While observing everyday life his artwork often serves as an expansion of firsthand personal observations of ordinary life, presented as poetic representations of the awe-inspiring elements found in our daily existence (Ross, 1997, Foreword). His use of fleeting disappearing light in artworks such as Tiny Deaths and The Darker Side of Dawn greatly inspired the experimentation with light within the video Axis Mundi. 

An important development with my work in this unit was that I started to embrace the digital as an art medium, before this I only used photography as a starting point for artworks, and through making Axis Mundi I realized that it can be an important tool to enhance and develop my practice. I reflected on the digital/ the artificial as something that is taking over the natural world, but at the same time, it is something that allows us to get a closer glimpse into the unseen aspects of nature and the world in general. For this video, I used the synthetic as a means to interpret the intangible. The layering of imagery and the use of digital technology allowed me to explore ideas that I would not have been able to do with conventional photography or print. 

Throughout this unit I realized that experimenting more thoroughly digitally on the imagery I use as a reference before taking it into physical media can be a path towards creating larger and more immersive artwork, as the digital realm is not limited by size or space, and in case of two-dimensional photography, by time. After exhibiting Axis Mundi at Bargehouse in April I received positive feedback on the video installation, some spectators told me they felt enveloped by the piece, that they were transported to another world, and others mentioned that they felt uneasy and that the video caused a sense of anxiety though they could not pinpoint what, and most people understood the visual connection of nature and the human body as they told me they perceived cells or particles, some even said the small flickering lights looked like insects. I was quite satisfied with the overall response to this video installation, as previously it had been difficult to convey the ideas I wanted through print, as the reactions to my unit 1 artwork were sometimes very different from what I wanted to achieve.

Moving on to unit 3 I will delve deeper into moving images and installation-based artwork while continuing to explore intaglio processes. I have taken the first step towards merging these art forms in my practice by creating etchings out of frames from the video, these are still work in progress and will form part of the unit 3 exhibition in July. The next step is to capture more content and explore digital software to dissect, transform, abstract, and modify the source. And most importantly I will start to look deeper into video and installation artists to fuel and inspire my practice.