Flora’s talk was one of the most inspiring and thought provoking talks I have been to in a while. Everything she explained and the way her project are formed has really helped me to remember just why I love art so much. Her projects are very much sculpture and textile based and honestly I cannot explain how much I connected with them, even through a screen.
She started her talk by explaining how she was feeling very disconnected and not entirely sure what she wanted to do with her practice, so she went on a trip with her friend to South Africa and they went into the Sudwala Caves, where when the tour guide turned off any lights, Flora became inspired by what she saw inside of the cave. This is where she felt inspired and left her road trip wanting to make work about ‘feeling in a place’. This really showed me just how much travelling can help to inspired you and to bring out new ideas, you never know what or who you might see. This has made me want to go travelling even more than I wanted too before, as I really feel I need to find myself.
Within her shows, Flora uses a number of different materials such as bone, butter, copper plate and loads more. She originally trained in print making so she tends to use materials which would be used in this discipline.
After getting funding from the Arts council to go overseas, she went to Brazil to go to the Lydia Clarke Foundation, an artist who really inspired her in her work, where she visited more caves in São Paulo. She stated how interesting it was to have seen the same cave on the internet moments before seeing it in real life, making her think deeply about the different between real and virtual. This is something I think about quite often, as it is so easy to just look something up online to see it, however seeing it in real life is so much more intense and exciting. It made her feel as if there was a sort of portal between these two realms. I love this analogy and idea that, as she describes it in her talk, the caves felt surreal which makes you struggle to understand what it is real and in front of you and what you may have seen on a screen. I really love the piece of work she produced based on this portal feeling, as the made a sort or space in the window to create this portal feeling. As shown below.
Funnily, Flora stated that she really struggled to create work based on the experience and feelings she felt whilst in the cave in Brazil, however then she came up with this idea of creating a direct response to these feelings, so she started to think about different disciplines and how artists have always been able to inspire and be inspired and so she worked with a number of people who all had different inputs into the art work. She then made a sculpture as a direct response to how she felt and the experience of this trip which is show below. I usually struggle to connect with sculptures, maybe this is because it is quite different to my practice, however with Flora’s work, I felt so engaged and interested in, it made me feel as I was actually there in the cave.
Jump forward a few years, Flora is still interested in caves and underground spaces and again, the work does not necessarily look like caves and is mostly based on how she and others move through the caves. She started to also become interested in what could be found inside of the caves. In Germany, there were some divers who went into a cave and in there they found Loach Fish, which are really tiny and almost invisible, the divers had been going here for over a decade and had never seen these fish before, so they brought them up to the shore for scientists to look at. Flora documented this discovery through a few different ways, including stills of the bubbles created by the divers. The project was a collaboration and the images were passed backwards and forwards between everyone involved to make sure the images were right. There was also an audio, which I am obsessed with, as I also struggle to connect with audio, I usually find it quite confusing, but this audio was so intense and well made. It gave me the exact same anxiety and feeling that I get whenever I have visited a cave, I am really not sure how she managed to give me the same feeling, but ti really worked. The audio was very echoed and loud and I am in shock at how well presented it was and how much it made me feel as if I was there in the cave with them. This has really opened my eyes to how sculpture and other mediums can be executed and how I can work with more disciplines within my photography.
