About
In her practice, Lorna Bauer utilizes photography and sculpture to examine human’s relationships to their surroundings. Bauer’s projects are generally characterized as site related, leading to a final result that has responded to a specific place and context, and speaks to a material and visual investigation into ideas and experiences generated from ecologies of lived environments. Bauer uses exclusively analogue technology as it provides a set of limitations to achieve an economy of form. She also understands documentary genres to be a series of conventions that can be put toward other poetic means. In relationship to investigations into particular sites, Bauer has summoned references as diverse as Le Corbusier’s conflicted relationship to documentary photography, the historically fraught Côte d’Azur villa of Eileen Gray; Arthur Erickson’s phenomenology of dwelling; Walter Benjamin’s love letters describing the flora and fauna of Ibiza; the history of mushroom cultivation in Paris’ underground catacombs; and the conservation efforts of the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and the botanical illustrator Margaret Mee. The sequences of photographs are meant to make the viewer aware of his/her presence at the threshold of the depicted space, and the exhibition site. The sculptural object becomes a middle term in this equation, although it can sometimes depart from its syntactical relationship to the images and become autonomous.