Sensitive
This installation of lightboxes is a document of the plants living in northern Utah. The lightboxes house glass cyanotype photograms—images made by placing an object directly onto a light-sensitive surface. Photograms are unique documents, capturing the exact size and shape of an object, and the process has been used since the invention of photography by botanists wanting to record their specimens. This body of work is specifically inspired by the first photographic book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, by Anna Atkins (1843). Each lightbox is activated by a motion sensor which must be activated by the viewer. I hope to inspire questions about what it means to be native, to belong, to survive, to outcompete, and to cause unintentional harm. All of these questions arise from studying ecology, and in Utah these themes are also seen in the State’s political and social history.
