My photo-based and video work deals with the transience and vulnerability of our existence and the uncertainty of contemporary life. Movement and displacement are recurrent themes made visible metaphorically through images of moving water and of all the elements that pass through it.
In 2003 I developed a unique technique of painting on water, a process that represents the fragility and ephemerality of the world we live in.
The materials I use in this process are unstable, live only for a short period of time and cannot be recreated or restored, thus parallelling our present and ongoing state of vulnerability. What I capture on film are the fleeting moments between creation and destruction.
The Gaea project is a result of my recent travels to New Orleans, where water is both nature’s nourishment and a potential source of destruction, in other words, birth and death. This double aspect is always present in the minds and hearts of those who have lived through hurricane Katrina, and haunts their ongoing relationship to this fragile coastline. Gaea presents a series of unique 8x10 inch trasparency recording oil painting on water.
As in other previous works, my research recreates a physical environment in the microcosm of the watertank with unpredictable results as they unfold naturally. The title Gaea, after the primal goddess of Greek mythology symbolizing the Earth and mother of all life, refers to the world we live in, its pristine bounty, and the profit we take from it, with all its related outcomes. This project is meant to evoke the origin (embryo) of major adverse events resulting from natural processes, with a focus on those generated by water, like the hurricanes which most recently ravaged the islands of the Caribbean due to climate change. The intent is to illuminate the beauty and yet extraordinary power and destructive potential of our most valuable and endangered of the four elements of life.
Beatrice Pediconi