Reflections on a Living Ruin

Reflections on a Living Ruin expands upon current understandings of ruins as spaces of contemplation on the past and anticipation of the future. Utilising digital photography, video and cyanotypes, this photographic enquiry explores how these mediums each allude to time, space and anticipation. Reflections on a Living Ruin focuses on my mother’s abandoned swimming pool as it was slowly reclaimed by the surrounding natural environment. Exploring transformation through processes of loss and renewal, the site is used as both a subject and metaphor as it evolved over the last few years of her life.

The ‘Living Ruin’ is a term I use to encompass an evolving entity that reflects on the fragility and resilience of natural cycles. The project explores the potential ambiguities which are found in ruins and photomedia, and uses reflection and light to manifest the previously unseen or unnoticed. Whereas the video works make visible a previously hidden micro ecology, the photographs mirror a fragmented scene beyond the frame, and the rephotographed cyanotypes manifest an imaginary world. The water surface is seen as a point of reflection, anticipation and a contemplation on the porous divide between what is made visible and covered over, and highlights how the process of revealing can be a transformative process. As a collection of still and moving images that now refer to a ruin which no longer exists, The Living Ruin contains remnants of what was, what is and what is still to come.

To access the written thesis:

Reflections on a Living Ruin: How photomedia can be used to explore a ruin as a space for reflection on time and transformation https://doi.org/10.26180/30423163