Alex
Witteman

Hull

For the Lynden Winter Carnival myself and collaborator Lily Wilke-Jones created a piece where people came and helped us build a naturalistic sculpture while we photographed their interactions while building. We used Polaroid to give participants an actual keepsake of their time helping us. Polaroid was a unique choice because it does not perform the best in below-freezing conditions. The flawed Polaroid images became a document of the piece, exemplifying the weather that day and the cold conditions we had to work in.

Lily and I built an initial wooden structure for this piece that acted as a skeleton, and then provided a large collection of found branches and sticks for people to fill in the structure using a traditional method of building fences called wattling. Our main job during the project was not oversight, but documenting interactions with the piece, taking a closeup of everyone's hands holding branches that they placed. These photos asked for them to pause and consider their relationship with the natural environment by showing them literally holding the branches.

While gathering the sticks for the piece, we found an oriole nest. This unique nest dangles from a branch and happens to be roughly the same size as a polaroid picture. We decided to put this at the back of the structure and place an image of Lego flowers in the nest. This image was blurry, further using the limitations of Polaroid to our advantage. This image combined with this naturalistic structure calls for us to consider our relationship with the natural world. We have a fascination with it while we simultaneously do very little to help vital ecosystems. This blurry picture of artificial flowers became a metaphor for the artificial way we treat natural environments.