Entropy: A visual exploration of fire in the Australian landscape
About this ebook
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Entropy is Lloyd Godman’s photographic response to the devastating Victorian Black Saturday bushfire in Australia of February 2009, near where he lives at St Andrews. It does not deal with the impact on humanity with photographs of burnt cars and destroyed houses, but focuses entirely on plants and the regeneration of the bush.
His ongoing intrigue with light and photosynthesis is fully engaged in this project photographing the revival of the bush from grey powder ash and black tree trunks to thick verdant green bush over a period of years. The ebook follows the evolution of the project from taking a few single photographs, through to the many thousands of triptychs, and beyond to the giant photographic intricate mosaics and the innovative and complex self-generating video projection work. It documents the creative process from taking a few photographs to the realization of a significant body of work and a major exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography. In the process it offers information on creating triptychs and panorama images, the power of wide angle photographic perspectives.
For the botanist it offers a visual insight to how nature can respond after an extreme fire event, which species of plants recover and the rate of recovery, while for fire fighters it presents a visual clue to how the bush burns.
The project is a metaphor for his concept of the planet as a gigantic abstract photosensitive emulsion.
“the largest photosensitive emulsion we know of is the planet earth. As vegetation grows, dies back, changes colour with the seasons, the “photographic image” that is our planet alters. Increasingly human intervention plays a larger role in transforming the image of the globe we inhabit”. Lloyd Godman
The work acts as witness to the green spirit within the earth that overcomes a grey ghost. The macro becomes micro and visa versa, forbidding monotones are replaced with subtlety of texture and colour, simplicity is replaced with complexity. Paradoxically, both order and chaos is found in ash and regenerated emerald bush.
About the author
Lloyd Godman established and was head of the photographic section of the Dunedin Art School, New Zealand, for 20 years and then taught at RMIT, Melbourne. His projects have always pushed the boundaries of what photography is. In 1989, his work moved from camera-based images to camera-less photograms with projects like Codes of Survival, Adze to Coda. He began exploring light sensitivity and evolved to where he grew images into the leaves of Bromeliad plants. Then followed a series of interactive gallery installations with plants which evolved into his current work with Tillandsias and the built environment.
He is now seen as a leading ecological artist integrating Tillandsias into the built environment in a fully sustainable manner, with The AGE newspaper referring to him as an extreme gardener.
Artist Lloyd Godman is at the forefront of a modern trend to bring an appreciation of the natural world into our structural domains. Buildings do not rest ‘above’ or ‘outside’ a landscape, separated from the surrounding environment. On the contrary, structures interact with the natural world as objects that cast shadows, consume resources and provide rich habitats for life.
Godman’s living, plant-based artworks reinforce the necessary connectedness of buildings and the wider environment. Not only do these artworks convey powerful messages and philosophies of sustainable and ethical physical interaction, but they also reach out beyond ideas to become part of the actual structure – as physical objects, Godman’s artworks are purifiers of the air as well as the soul, suppliers of colour as well as calmness, and filters of water as well as the human spirit.
...... it is highly unusual for an artist to forge new aesthetic, philosophical and architectural directions through his work; Godman, however, has managed to use his diminutive plants to convey global concepts, and in the process participate in a new wave of appreciation for plants in the built environment.
John Power
Lloyd has a Masters of Fine Art from RMIT
