Sara Bjarland

Sara Bjarland’s artistic practice explores representations of nature. More specifically, she is interested in nature in the everyday sphere, as something close to her, personal, something ordinary and mundane, rather than something exotic, distant or wild. Working in photography, the moving image, installation and objects, she investigates ways of representing nature, using approaches that sometimes imitate or refer to scientific methods, but sometimes inventing her own methods. Often obsessively and closely observing a specific subject or material, her way of looking is close-up, for a prolonged period of time. The pre-cinematic concept of animation, as in bringing life to the dead or trying to visualize movement, also informs a lot of her practice, and manifests itself in both still and moving works.

Bjarland is particularily interested in ways of collecting, ordering and classifying nature as 'objects' or images, both in scientific and cultural contexts. Collecting is an important part of her own working method; both as a way for her to gather raw material for work and to organize the way she sees the world around her. Through ordering and presenting the collected material she tries to create new meanings or suggest possible scenarios, often in a playful and suggestive way. Bjarland usually collects nature that she finds close to herself, in the urban or domestic environment; common insects (like flies or bumblebees) that have died on the window sill or on the pavement; faded household plants that have been thrown out on the street; or pieces of plastic that look like insect wings. This domestic-ness, or everyday-ness, is an important element of her work because it shows the dull, the overlooked and discarded.

Behind these interests lies a deeper concern for the vulnerability of nature and the ‘nature deficit disorder', an alienation from nature, which is so symptomatic of the contemporary human; nature is conceived of as something external, as an object or place outside our own realm. Through her artistic practice Bjarland wants to question her own position in relation to nature, but also attitudes and representations of nature present in contemporary society.