Rotax: photographic works by artist Lloyd Godman 1984 - 2023
About this ebook
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Rotax project 1983 - 2023 is a series of black & white landscape photographs which play visually with the photograph as a means of creating graphic motifs. The project moves beyond the concept of traditional photograph as a single frame, and instead, photographs of a particular scene are taken, in a landscape format and then the same scene is captured again in a portrait format. The two images are printed twice, and the resulting four images are assembled as an intriguing mandala. While there are artists who have utilized this technique via Photoshop in recent times, Godman is among very few artists that used the concept in the 1980s, when analogue photography required film, darkrooms, and specific skills. Within the new asymmetrical photographic geometry emerges a new imaginative image.
Rotax represents rotational axis and the ebook presents a full suite of images in both landscape and portrait formats. Some images were taken of the Clutha River while the artist was working on The Last Rivers Song, some at Blackhead Dunedin while working on Secrets of the Forgotten Tapu, some at the Pyramids and a few at the Grampians in Victoria. Its monochromatic photographs are bold and graphic, maintaining a delicate balance of gravity and weightlessness, and are infused with a gestalt aesthetic that fuses multiple images into a single entity to offer a new insight of the landscape we live in.
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, for a further 9 years. From 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.
