Re-visiting 2011-

In 2011 the Natural History Museum London commissioned me to make new work inspired by a collection of anonymous glass negatives depicting the British landscape, from the beginning of the 20th century.
After extensive research, a name scratched on a glass plate revealed the identity of the photographer, the famous British botanist and ecologist Sir Edward James Salisbury (1886–1978).
E.J. Salisbury journeyed through Great Britain with a notebook, a vasculum and a camera, meticulously documenting landscape and its flora with utmost precision. In these photographs, the endless pine forests,
the ‘wandering dunes’ of Scotland and Norfolk appear rugged and empty, just as one might imagine these places to be, though in actual fact, nature in these places is under active management of public and
private conservation and environmental organizations.
Walking, searching, GPS in hand, I attempted to find the exact locations where Salisbury stood when he took his photographs at the beginning of the 20th century. I was not so much concerned
with a literal comparison between the landscape as it was then and as it is now, but more with defining my own role and vision as an artist alongside that of the scientist Salisbury.
‘Re-visiting’ combines photographs, texts and moving image work that highlight complex issues in relationships between humans, plants, and environment in Salisbury’s time and now.

Visiting the places Sir Edward James Salisbury photographed between 1914 and 1933 in Scotland, Norfolk and Devon, I looked at how the landscape has changed over nearly ninety years.
A complex quest as nothing is as simple as it first appears. I gathered evidence from Salisbury’s photographic records and his notes, local information, botanical sources and topographic evidence.
Changes in the landscape can be caused by climate, humans and/or animals (for example, a bird might be carrying a seed from A to B hence a new species might appear in an unfamiliar habitat).
Is all this valuable information enough to account for what has happened to these landscapes in the intervening years?

The photographs are accompanied by texts extracted from Clive A. Stace, New Flora of the British Isles, the botanist’s bible, and Salisbury’s own lyrical writings where the poetic meets scientific accuracy.
A map shows the locality and the global positioning system shows the precise point where photographs were taken.
Walking the landscape with Kath Castillo (biologist and botanist assigned to the project by Dr Mark Spencer, at the time Senior Botanist at the Natural History Museum in London)
was key to the project as we worked in parallel to understand what constitutes the landscape.
Looking closely at the botany and identifying locations, Kath explained basic notions of botany and introduced me to new words including locality, habitat, specimen, and plant community.
It is only when I started to work along side scientists that I began to understand that my remit was very different from Salisbury’s.
He was, after all, a photographer disguised as a scientist. Was I becoming a scientist disguised as a photographer?

Chromogenic prints from colour negatives, variable sizes and gelatin silver prints printed from Salisbury’s original glass plate negatives