Martha Cattell
‘My work responds to exploring tensions between nature/culture, through memory and material. I am also concerned around the ethics of representation of environmental and animal trauma. My work typically revolves around artist moving image and photography; either curating or making, and often incorporates or questions notion of the archive. I am also interested in socially engaged methods that make green space and critical ecological themes more accessible.’
FEN
2021
This image is part of a wider project exploring how to represent the environmentally haunted landscape of the Fens, where I grew up. It is a landscape that was drained for agricultural reasons, and is now a patchwork of fields, where exposed peat soil is a large contributor of carbon dioxide. There are however plans underway to re-wild certain areas back to its original state.
This is a contact print of an eel basket I made with the assistant of Sue Kirk Willow Baskets. Eels, once prolific in the Fens are now an endangered species, due to over fishing and habitat change. The basket in the print is an object now beyond use, it acts as an empty vessel for a shrinking landscape, past ways of life and a declining species of eels.
