GENIUS LOCI
Responding to the Spirit of a Place
What is in the spirit of a place? This project is to select a specific place that expresses an emotion, mood or atmosphere. A place that when is seen is automatically understood. For example a bathtub could be seen as relaxing and soothing, inside a handbag could be cluttered and chaotic and waiting for a train at rush hour could be seen as dangerous and terrifying.
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The idea of a haunted house perfectly expresses the idea of what a genius loci is, for a haunted house is simply showing the fear of intrusion, paranoia or memories that haunt. The same as the fear of the dark represents the idea of the unknown, unseen and empty.
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For this project I chose Epping Forest as my a place that I will apply a genius loci to, a space which is both filled with wonder and terror. The broadness is overwhelming with the fear of being lost and alone but also the thrill of being completely in nature. The task was to create a low resolution video up to fifteen seconds long expressing the atmosphere of the place, this must capture the mood perfectly so that the viewer feels what you are communicating. The video I created I named stalk as there was a shadow captured in one of my shots which looked human-like, in reality it was a combination of tree branches and torch light but for that one minuet I caught something supernatural.
The developments went further to create two more outcomes inspired and complimenting the video. This caused me to experiment with traditional printing techniques (dry point and aquatint etching) along with analogue photography. This resulted in the outcome of a tree illustration of faces in the forest along with four photographs inspired by the phobia of texture Trypophobia.
2015
