Mary
Zompetti

The Lost Garden

The cameraless photographs in The Lost Garden series are created by exposing large-format film to environmental conditions over extended periods of time. The physical remains of wildlife and other remnants of the natural world are placed on the film's surface – a starling frozen in the depths of winter, a woodpecker electrocuted by overhead power lines, plants and flowers gone by. Bodily fluids and plant matter putrefy on the surface and these deteriorating effects are recorded into the film. Light and weather further alter the surface, cracking and pulling the delicate silver emulsion, leaving time and place-specific impressions outside of my control. Both delicate and resilient, the film becomes an imprint of the fragile body and a map-like record of time and place during this moment when our natural environment is on the precipice of irreversible change.