My Dark Ecologies project is an ongoing series of images that explores abstracted variations on landscape and still life traditions, investigating our troublesome representation of ‘nature’, all at once beautiful, monstrous and mysterious.

Designed to evoke a sense of both outer and inner space, these images begin with close-focused photography of foliage and are built up through digitally layering multiple images over painted textures. This play with digital and painterly aesthetics, and with the recomposed image, have been a continuous part of my practice. I use these techniques here to explore what philosopher-ecologist Timothy Morton calls the “strange strangeness” of perception in the age of the Anthropocene. The saturated imagery evokes a sense of the ‘dark-uncanny’ which Morton postulates is a phase of ‘dark ecology’ as we pass from ‘dark-depressed’ to a ‘dark-sweet’ more hopeful perspective. The process of construction and deconstruction makes explicit the persistent trace of the human hand in the ‘natural’ in our precarious times.