Dianne Bos

This new body of work uses analog photographic processes to explore contrasts and echoes between the designed worlds of botanical gardens, biodiversity gardens and the natural environment. My use of low tech photographic technologies prevents this from becoming a strictly documentary project, since these techniques heighten the dreamlike, magical or even chimerical quality of my work, sometimes seeming to make the invisible visible.
Plant processes such as exhalation, transmission, photosynthesis, regeneration and decomposition cross boundaries between the human and the non-human, just as plants and gardens negotiate frontiers between the natural and the cultural or artistic. It is timely to investigate how we represent human separation from, and inclusion in, nature. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and now global pandemics are familiar parts of today’s lexicon, highlighting how some aspects of the natural world have already existed within “the anthropecene” for a long time.