The Woods
2021 - 2022
In the series The Woods artist Elizabeth Ransom draws from her own experience of migration to investigate the intricacies of place attachment in relation to her own experience of transnationality. This cognitive emotional bond to place, also known as place attachment, informs an immigrant’s sense of identity and can have a bearing on such diverse issues as rootedness, belonging, and displacement.
The artists returned to a site of her own place attachment to create a record of this personally significant location. As a child Ransom walked the same route from her house to her school every day. While living abroad it was this place that held a significant space in her memory and a site that she was drawn to upon returning home.
In The Woods Ransom retraces her childhood footsteps collecting soil and plant samples. She then uses the soil chromatography process to create abstract representations of the space. Soil chromatography is a photographic process that is often used by farmers to assess the quality of soil. Soil chromatography is also a photographic process that uses silver nitrate and capillary action to create an image of the plant solution. The resulting images map this site recording the changes in the environmental make up of this landscape over the period of a year. Each ecological sample captured on to the light sensitive surface of the chromatography print.
Soil chromatography prints are unable to be fixed like regular photographic prints and will forever change and adapt over time the more they are exposed to light. This process reflects the experience of transnationality. An immigrant’s identity is never fixed, it is forever impacted by this experience and will continue to develop and change over time in the same way that the soil chromatography prints do.
2021 - 2022
In the series The Woods artist Elizabeth Ransom draws from her own experience of migration to investigate the intricacies of place attachment in relation to her own experience of transnationality. This cognitive emotional bond to place, also known as place attachment, informs an immigrant’s sense of identity and can have a bearing on such diverse issues as rootedness, belonging, and displacement.
The artists returned to a site of her own place attachment to create a record of this personally significant location. As a child Ransom walked the same route from her house to her school every day. While living abroad it was this place that held a significant space in her memory and a site that she was drawn to upon returning home.
In The Woods Ransom retraces her childhood footsteps collecting soil and plant samples. She then uses the soil chromatography process to create abstract representations of the space. Soil chromatography is a photographic process that is often used by farmers to assess the quality of soil. Soil chromatography is also a photographic process that uses silver nitrate and capillary action to create an image of the plant solution. The resulting images map this site recording the changes in the environmental make up of this landscape over the period of a year. Each ecological sample captured on to the light sensitive surface of the chromatography print.
Soil chromatography prints are unable to be fixed like regular photographic prints and will forever change and adapt over time the more they are exposed to light. This process reflects the experience of transnationality. An immigrant’s identity is never fixed, it is forever impacted by this experience and will continue to develop and change over time in the same way that the soil chromatography prints do.