Fragile

Ulrike Veith uses photography as a means of exploration of herself and the social and political world around her. In her current project, Fragile, Ulrike Veith comments on the current environmental crisis that earth and humanity are facing. She explores humans’ relationship to nature and the idea of home and shelter not only for humans but also for animals and plants alike. She shows the fragility and co-existence of human shelters, animal nests and seeds which are sheltering the genetic information for the next generation of plants. The vibrant colours in her images seek an uneasy and dissonant aesthetic meant to question the status quo. She often works in a surrealistic manner and appreciates the artistic freedom within this approach that encourages a subversion of reality, envisioning new ways of being and imagining new worlds. She regularly work with still life and narrative tableau photography and finds that her process of exploratory construction combined with the materiality of the objects she uses, does have fresh elements of discovery and surprise for her. To build her images, she uses photo editing techniques and an extensive collection of small, natural materials and man-made objects that ranges from tiny bird eggs, branches, rubber flies to Meow Reo houses. She is influenced by the literary genre of science fiction that always questions perceptions and expectations of reality.