Erin La Bonte-Natasha Johl/ Este Aire No Está a la Venta/ Septiembre en RC



















THIS AIR is NOT for SALE


I have spent my time in Argentina considering the weight of things, the weight of myself in time and space through new materials. Away from my routine way of life, and my routine way of working, I have aimed at creating a sentiment through objects and photography.
Disconnection has become a strong element in my work. This idea of ideas and the physicality of ideas, that art has become for me a connection in itself.
Erin----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




My time at Residencia Corazón in La Plata represents the first stage of a much bigger trip and a wider personal experience for me. I have come to South America for one year to experience different cultures and to encounter new creative challenges, far away from my home.
With this is mind, this is the first step of a very long physical and psychological journey and this automatically fills me with the sense of being woven into a very small piece of a much larger and ever changing tapestry. In turn, this fills me with new emotions, seductions and ideas.
I arrived in Argentina with various ideas for my residential Project most of which revolved around nature and relationships with nature. This was partially due to my time in Bolivia seven years ago which encouraged a strong interest in the thought of ‘Pacha Mama’ (Mother Earth) and beliefs surrounding the concept of Pacha Mama. Similar belief systems are also held in certain parts of the UK as well, particularly in the Western rural parts of the UK, such as Cornwall. I continually find myself drawn to these places in order to feel content. Therefore I felt strongly about including a natural dimension to my work here.
Another influence on my work was ‘Chronicle of a death foretold’, the last book I read before leaving the UK. From this book I took a quote:
‘A poor woman devoted to the cult of her defects’
This quote became my mental springboard for looking at the relationship between womankind and nature. Asking myself the question ‘As women, have we become far removed from Mother Earth and perhaps our natural instincts?’ As a rule, we associate natural destruction and disaffection with masculinity, however, when looking at the female obsession with materialism and fashion, I also wonder ‘Do these obsessions now feed into our abstraction and removal from nature, potentially removing part of the female ‘Raison d’être’?
From these questions I developed a series of photographs revolving around modern female motivation and abstraction of natural forms.
THIS AIR is not for sale, but unfortunately today THIS EARTH is.
Natasha