What is legible when you investigate the trees, leaves, flowers, seeds, and their network in the wild?
My practice explores possibilities in photographic image-making using analogue and digital processes and aleatory techniques. Like many others, I felt overwhelmed in 2020 with a need to fill time with something meaningful, escape the confines of the home, and be in nature. Inspired by my work as a photographer documenting rare, at-risk, and native plants and trees for an arboretum, intrigued by deepfake software and experiments with artificial intelligence (AI) art making apps, I began to cultivate Content Aware Gardens – artificial greenspace imitations made in collaboration with the AI of Photoshop. Content Aware Gardens bloom in the digital realm – they begin as lens-based images of real-world plants in the garden that are then conflated with AI re-generated content from within the artificially blooming composition.
Using the ever-evolving algorithms of visual technology tools to reconstruct reality, Content Aware Gardens intend to be reimaginings of the bewitching beauty and natural bedlam that exists in the ecologies of forests and gardens and offer a visual sanctuary from the current moment.
