Lorna Bauer

Lives and works in Toronto, ON, Canada

Artist statement

In my practice, I utilize photography and sculpture to examine humans’ relationships to their surroundings. My projects are generally characterized as site related, leading to a final result that has responded to a specific place and context and speaks to a material and visual investigation into ideas and experiences generated from ecologies of lived environments, often seeking out specific architectural sites and legacies. I almost exclusively use analogue technology, which presents a set of limitations, to achieve an economy of form. I also understand documentary genres to be a series of conventions that can be put toward other poetic means. In relationship to investigations into particular sites, I have summoned references as diverse as Le Corbusier’s conflicted relationship to documentary photography, the historically fraught Côte d’Azur villa of Eileen Gray; Arthur Erickson’s phenomenology of dwelling; Walter Benjamin’s love letters describing the flora and fauna of Ibiza; the history of mushroom cultivation in Paris’ underground catacombs; the conservation efforts of the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and the botanical illustrator Margaret Mee and and, most recently, the legacy and techniques of the Blashka father-son duo, renowned for creating over 4,000 species of glass flowers for the Harvard Natural History Museum. The sequences of photographs are meant to make the viewer aware of his/her presence at the threshold of the depicted space, and the...

Artwork