An experiment in form, Halcyon is a visual metaphor for the excessive commodification and dominance of the natural world through socio-technical means which dangerously distorts reality at the expense of its creatures–including humans–and their connection to each other.
Exhibited in London 2011, Brisbane & Philadelphia 2015
Awards Best In Category–Design Series–The Photographers Awards 2011
Spiritually and philosophically, this work is interested in human interconnectedness with the ecological world through visual metaphors of flora and fauna. It is underpinned by concerns about technology's impact on the human disconnect from nature since modernism and the effects of technologically determined industrialisation.
The term halcyon is associated with the hedonist concept of 'halcyon days of youth', characterised as excessive leisure time, pleasure in experiential consumption, and the pursuit of emotional arousal, freedom, exhilaration, and relaxation to 'symbolically enhance self-concept, self-esteem, or otherwise strengthen one's identity' (Williams and Burns 1994, 98-103).
The visual and literal metaphors of Halcyon also borrow from the story of creation in the Book of Genesis, which contends that humans are created in the image of a God who blessed them and told them:
Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth (The Book of Genesis, Chapter 1:28).
Søren Kierkegaard, the seventeenth-century Danish philosopher, existentialist, poet, social critic, and theologian, wrote of 'desperation' in the early modern era, which was marked 169by 'the advent of mass circulation newspapers, and the rise of factories, railroads, and telegraphy' (Kirmmse 2016). According to Kirmmse (2016), Kierkegaard saw Christianity as a means for humans to confront their imperfection, weakness, and selfishness in the face of a radically transcendent God outside humanity's experience. Kierkegaard's The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, first published in 1849, used flora and fauna as a metaphor for how meaning could be made through communion with nature, silent prayer, and contemplation on the fragmented invisible world that lay beyond humans' perceptual grasp (ibid., xii-xxi). As Kierkegaard wrote:
When you become silent like the lily and the bird, then you are at the beginning, which is first to seek God's kingdom […] and even if what you suffered in the world were as agonising as anything ever experienced, you shall acknowledge the lily and the bird as your teachers, and before God, you are not to become more important to yourself than the lily and the bird (Kierkegaard 2016, 20-32).
