Ellie Davies is a UK based photographic artist, making images in the woods and forests of Southern England. Her work explores the complex relationship between the landscape and the individual, how our notions of landscape are formed and how they define our identities.
The understanding of landscape can be seen as a construction in which layers of meaning that reflect our own cultural preoccupations and anxieties obscure the reality of the land, veiling it, and transforming the natural world into an idealization. Forests are potent symbols in folklore, fairy tale and myth, places of enchantment and magic as well as of danger and mystery. Against this cultural backdrop, Davies' work explores the fabricated nature of landscape by making a variety of temporary and non-invasive interventions in the forest which place the viewer in the gap between reality and fantasy. Creating this space encourages the viewer to re-evaluate the way in which their relationship with the landscape is formed and the extent to which it is a product of cultural heritage or personal experience.
Her recent work is concerned with climate change and the pressing need to alter our behaviours to protect the natural world.
b. 1976