HOSTA(ge)
One day my aunt placed her favourite plant in a cage…
One day my aunt walked into her garden and placed
a cage around her favourite hosta plant. As the summers came and went, the hosta grew thick and lush, until its leaves, curling around themselves, pressed against the cage’s wire walls, blocking its own light.
HOSTA(ge) (2020-2023) is the photographic study of a plant in a cage, the latter acting as both subject and physical support for the various handmade and adapted cameras utilised for the project. Photographed during the early lockdown period of the pandemic, the hosta assumes abstract forms that invite comparisons with the human body, and by extension, emotions related to confinement. HOSTA(ge) probes the tension between protection and endangerment, trust and paranoia, intimacy and claustrophobia.
HOSTA(age) is part of a larger, ongoing photographic project entitled The Lake (2016-present).
Fifty images from HOSTA(ge) will appear in a handmade, double-sided leporello, a form that will allow the work to be read in multiple ways: as a cage-shaped object, as a single continuous line, in smaller folded-out sections, or as a traditional, double-facing book.
