Noora Sandgren
Noora Sandgren is a visual artist and educator from Helsinki with a varied art practice centred around the Bioarts and a long practice of working in alternative photographic mediums including cameraless photography. Bioart, a term which is new to me, is described by Noora as 'borrowing from the methods of science, making invisible and unknown visible with the means of artistic expression – it doesn’t provide solutions but prompts critical questions such as: what is life, or how can we collaborate with non-human organisms.
Her exhibition Soft (becomings) shows works created in an embodied way with compost in a family garden: https://noorasandgren.com/Soft-becomings
“Their marks tell stories of ways of being, of invisible powers. Within the complex co-dependencies of enmeshment of things, human and other-than-human, I wonder: how to live well within the cyclicality of things, embracing metamorphosis and constant movement, resisting the need to harness everything?”.
She also says “To reconsider the photographic material body as a leaky container of materials with histories, gestures and meanings, a being that does things, is a work of relating; this human body and that photographic body. I turn to local household ingredients, making slow phase photographic paper bodies with natural inks, like thurmeric, blueberry, blackberry, beetroot, adding some snow water and my saliva. This photograph is about sharing chemistry. I also found a “detox mix” – we need this, I say to myself and the photograph. It consists of nettle, spirulina, wheat, lemon grass, pea protein, lingonberry, chlorella, cranberry.
I can set up the space for a photograph to grow, but it does not grow for me, but because it is a living thing. It´s interesting to create conditions though, an environment for something to happen, for us both to be exposed, to become together with the photograph. This kind of development of an image is not about separations; we leak into each other, chemically, in embodied encounters, in which the mutuality of effects lie: my gestures, digestion of materials contructing my immune system, the way the pigments change and are sucked by the thursty (sic) porous papers. This process has no clear end, this exhibition is not an end product, but a living assemblage, a space for things continuing from another.”
I copy and paste her own words here, because to summarise them in this context would be to distort their intention with my own meanings, and they stand so beautifully on their own, and are supremely inspiring to me.
The work below, and the interview quotes below it, also features a compost co-creation, and accompanied an interview with Noora in Der Greif Specials, a virtual space dedicated to writing on photography, showcasing unique content, projects and announcements.
https://noorasandgren.com/Der-Greif-Q-I
“I can thank the home garden at Hiidenvesi for a lot of things. This space has its own time, which has attuned me to be play-able. Many years ago, I found a forgotten box of older-than-me photographic papers that used to belong to my father. The garden provided the right kind of place to learn within the mix of different materialities, including photographic matter. Those found paper-beings together with the garden became my teacher. Working with cameraless photographs positions me in a tangible relationship with the body of the photograph. How are our bodies the same? We both have light-sensing skin, record happenings and touches, change in time, and share chemistry. Thinking of the analogies between myself and the photographic body has led me to consider what the new materialist theorist Jane Bennett calls “thing power”: how all matter can have an effect on others, but always within a situated assemblage of many. Photography as a thing-being, what does it do, how is it constructed? Considering a cameraless photograph as a being allows me to practice empathy towards other-than-human entities, not only seeing but sensing them as bodies, related by material flows. Working with this kind of photographic relationship is about researching and meditating on what it means to take part in a relationship and how it is always born new. I consider a photograph to be my companion, which is not always easy. Yet, there is no way of getting rid of it; it inhabits me. Then, what is left is to sit with it and consider this a practice without conclusions or frozen answers. This is an open process of living together. And with whom do I really share my life with? How much or little am I able to perceive those? Who and what processes are meaningful life sustainers?”
Finally, I include photographs of an exhibition ‘Peels, Seetalk and Bluings install at Ore21 in
Made on a residency at the island of Oro in Finland, Noora herself describes this work as “A collage holding touches of many contributors & acts, of tasting, smelling, getting wet and stung, listening, speaking, offering and receiving, leaving behind and returning, caring and being cared fore, winning some fears by relating.”.
It is Noora’s commitment to creating in sympoiesis with her natural surroundings that especially interests me, as well as her incorporation of new and non-destructive photographic mark-making.
