Nature Suits
in collaboration with Charles Bourne
You are in a lush forest, and a pile of leaves rustles to life in front of you, stands up, and walks away. What is happening here?
Nature Suits is a video installation exploring the space between seen and unseen. Camouflaged in a forested scene, artists reveal the undeniable likeness of humans and nature—natural and artificial—through acts of making, performance, documentation, and display.
Borrowing from an adapted method of military camouflage, Nature Suits are constructed on-site by artists using a mix of found natural items and manmade materials, placing artists in a liminal state of hiding and revealing, shifting viewers’ perception of the forest.
Nature Suits reimagines camouflage as an instrument for revealing the hybridity of the human and the “natural,” working within the layered qualities of biological and social ecologies and the liminal, in-between spaces between humans and nature and the seen and unseen. Re-imagining a military tactic typically used in scenarios of offensive violence, the work attempts to combine the human and the natural as a protest to unite these two worlds.
Nature Suits Installation, photograph. Nocturne Art Exhibit 2021, performance still, Oct 2021.
The video of Nature Suits was projected life size on the corrugated steel exterior of Seven Bays Bouldering Gym in the heart of Halifax NS with a secondary "making of" video projected on a fence next to it. Both videos played on loop for the duration of 5 hours for Halifax's Nocturne Art at Night Festival, Saturday 16 October 2021.
The "Making Of" Nature Suits. Nocturne Art Exhibit 2021, video documentation, 5 minutes 1 second, Oct 2021.
Nature Suits was sponsored Sweet Squish Farms and The Veteran Farm Project Society (VFPS) as part of Nocturne's 2021 Community Projects. This is a secondary video that documents the creation of the suits and the journey to the site. It is a “making-of”, including commentary from Jessica Miller, founder and director of VFPS, on who and what the VFPS is and how they connected with Nocturne's 2021 theme of Liminal and Jessica Wiebe and Charlie Bourne's project, Nature Suits.
Nature Suits. Nocturne Art Exhibit 2021, video performance, 16 minutes 11 seconds, Oct 2021.
Documentation of Installation at Seven Bays Bouldering, Halifax NS.
