Rome

While living in Oxford, England, for a short spell in the early 2000s, a regular haunt (when it wasn’t raining) was the University Botanical Garden. Looking around for what I might draw, I started to think about art that includes the element of chance, or randomness. Then the opposite came to mind, art that takes a subject and transforms it, creating a kind of metamorphosis. Could there be a way to combine these two ideas? I noticed the shadows of the branches behind me moving across my open sketchbook. I tried to capture the movement with my pencil when it occurred to me a camera might capture chance and metamorphosis simultaneously. I took random pictures of moving shadows, and after downloading the images I saw the metamorphosis of the plants turning into figures in a drama I could not have predicted. I have gone on when I travel to present my sketchbook to shadows. I am interested in the tension between the randomness of what the camera captures in changing light conditions with my desire to hold on to those fleeting images with their mysteriousness intact.

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