Field photography
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British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey are renowned for their extraordinary work which is quite literally alive. Their latest pieces, on show at Slovenia's Mladi Levi festival, use grass to create photographic canvases that capture real life in shades of yellow and green.
The annual 10-day Mladi Levi (Young Lions) arts and theatre festival is in full swing in the Slovenian capital of Ljubjana and Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey's "bio-chemical photographs" are creating a stir.
The duo have used three large vertical grass canvases to create their prints, a process that Dan Harvey explains:
"The pieces were grown in the dark with a negative projected onto them, so where the strongest light falls, the grass produces chlorophyll, the green pigment. Where there's less light, it grows less green, where there's no light, it's yellow. So, you get something rather like a black & white print, but in shades of dark green to yellow."
The beauty of these living photographs is that they are temporary and transient. The grass continues to grow and extra sunlight gradually corrupts the image, as the yellow grass begins to produce chlorophyll and turns green. This also brings another dimension to the artworks, allowing them to act as a comment on growth, decay and global warming.
