Sara Bjarland (Helsinki, 1981) was schooled both in art school and at university, as a photographer, as a fine artist and as a conservationist & curator.
Her work is grounded in a fascination with nature and explores different ways of representing this 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.
Bjarland is inspired by the work of Mark Dion, who mostly works with organic materials directly from nature, and the highly intriguing and meticulously crafted insect sculptures of British artist Tessa Farmer. She lives and works in Amsterdam and occasionally London. When we met up with her in her huge studio in Amsterdam, we saw many installations of plants.
At the moment I’m working on a project with dead & faded plants that I find on the streets. In Amsterdam people throw away so much stuff on the street, it’s really crazy. I’m collecting the dead plants and bringing them to my studio, where I photograph them. I see them a bit like tragicomic characters and the photographs of them are bit like portraits of people who have given up. At the same time they are the remains of a consumer society where objects are easily discarded and replaced.
In Bjarland’s photography, moving images, installations and objects, she tries to imagine and visualize ways of representing nature, using approaches that sometimes imitate or refer to scientific methods, but also inventing her own methods. Often obsessively and closely observing a specific subject or material, is her way of looking in close-up, for a prolonged period of time.
Below you find the first and last chapters from her piece Grass in Four Movements which will premiere in January. Grass in Four Movements, which consist of four short films, is a journey through the sand dunes in Northern Holland, made during a residency in Den Helder earlier this year. The grass, ‘helmgras’, is one of the most characteristic aspects of the dunes, one of its essential elements. Bjarland filmed the grass, close up, with a strong depth of field, to show the landscape only one small bit at a time. First close up, then at a distance. Each part, each shot, is a journey both through the image and through the landscape.
Her work can be seen at C3 Gallery in Amsterdam until December 23rd, 2011.
Grass in Four Movements and photographs by Sara Bjarland unless otherwise stated. copypasteculture.
