THE WILD AND THE EVERYDAY
The Wild and the Everyday is a collection of works created in Spring 2020, exhibited first as part of the Wilderness Art Collective’s show Wilderness for the Mind (2020) and then as part of Sustainability First’s Reconnecting exhibition (2021). The work was partly borne out of a personal response to the unravelling global health situation and unprecedented lockdown, and partly a desire to make links between our domestic actions and the global wild.
Mapping the Terrain (below) is a microscopic photograph of everyday life, imbued with anatomical and cartographic gestures to create scale-less, figure-less representations of this planet. Wilderness for the mind, from the safety of suburbia.
SRG Bennett, Mapping the Terrain, 2020, Giclée Print (Edition of 10), 16 x 12 inches, £110
SRG Bennett, On This Planet, 2020, C-Type Print (Edition of 10), 16 x 12 inches, £95
Ambiguous and scale-less phenomena, photographed on this planet (right)
The Wild and the Everyday series play with geography and scale. The works moves between the microscopic and macroscopic levels, with domestic and suburban motifs blown up to evoke planetary phenomena. By doing this, the works aim to draw a link between everyday, individual activities and global issues such as air pollution and climate change. Carol Hanisch’s rallying cry is even more important than ever: the personal is political.
SRG Bennett, On This Planet III, 2020, C-Type Print (Edition of 10), 16 x 12 inches, £95
Photos of dirt, pollutants and melting ice on car windows - blown up in scale to elicit the global processes they are intimately entwined with: climate change, air pollution, resource depletion. Microscopic images of water, dust, ice, dirt on vehicle windows - distorted and scaled to evoke planetary geography and processes like climate change (above and below).
SRG Bennett, On This Planet II, 2020, C-Type Print (Edition of 10), 16 x 12 inches, £95
SRG Bennett, On This Planet IV, 2020, C-Type Print (Edition of 10), 16 x 12 inches, £95
A data visualisation of the wilding of London, March 2020. Lighter pixels show lower levels of air pollution in March 2020 compared to March 2019. The image is a digital collage of air pollution data, map imagery and microscopic photos of the dirt and ice on the surfaces of vehicle windows in North London (below).
SRG Bennett, Same Planet, Different World, 2020, Giclée Print (Edition of 10), 20 x 16 inches, £120
“Finding the Wild in the Everyday", below, is a video of the artist Laura Melissa Williams in conversation with SRG Bennett about art from COVID isolation, car windows, hang gliding, this series of artworks and a difficult relationship with maps.