Reclaimed

The series as a whole explores land reclaimed by the Netherlands, due in large part to its water management techniques & technologies. This a series completed first in photographic form, and delicately intervened with hand-embroidery. The prints are digital archival prints on very thin shoji paper, and all but one are intervened with hand-embroidery. They are meant to hang freely, so that the light can come through the photographs to reflect the fragility of any man-made landscape, and also so that the public can see both sides of the work, and this reflects to a certain point the level of mastery needed for the storm surge barrier structures themselves, in relation to the reclaimed land. So, it can be said that all the materials used for this series have a dialogue between each other, as well as a specific reason for being used in conjunction. The images themselves explore the asethetics of this reclaimed land, while hand-embroidered interventions depict some of the storm surge barriers that allow the land to remain stable. The last image is what I believe is the closest to what the original swamplands would look like, without any water management systems or any other technology used to reclaim land from the sea, and without any human intervention in terms of landscaping.