“Ecocide = Suicide”
Natalie Field
The Hole in your Soul is a series of abstracted self-portraits in which I utilise photo-manipulation to morph the human body with natural textures and organic forms to reveal our human-nature connection.
These narratives were created in response to 2019 world events like the Amazon rainforest burning and Okjökull glacier melting. Using performance art as a means of self-expression, the emotionality of the photographic process becomes a form of catharsis, through which I convey fears of a dying world. The female form not only a symbol of life, but simultaneously the personification of the Earth herself.
For underneath the veneer of skin, we are Nature. If you peel away the varnish with which we have painted our lives, Nature. Everything you breathe, eat, buy, own, use, abuse, discard in unrecognisable form, Nature. These images are intended to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” (Finley Peter Dunne, 1902), to remind the viewer of the substrate of their very existence. They are a call to action to OBSERVE (step outside and rediscover the Nature) and ENGAGE (be the change you want to see in the world).
Only when we can reconnect with our environment on a deeply personal level, can we begin to live with an ecocentric, rather than anthropocentric, attitude towards life on this planet.
