Still from Nacht Spiegel Series

The River Eden had just flooded with devastating consequences. Trees had been ripped out, material and fish dumped in fields and hundreds of people made homeless overnight. The river had always meant a lot to me, having grown up alongside it, but something in the atmosphere had changed after the flood. Great pieces of sandstone had been washed away from where we used to swim and bundles of flotsam were left high and dry.

In this piece it was this new atmosphere more than the power of destruction that I wanted to communicate and so I chose to photograph a tree that had been long dead and had probably witnessed many such changes without itself ever changing. The photographs were taken at night with the tree lit by a fire and by an high power electric lamp that was moved erratically across the scene causing slight variations in the photographs, all taken from precisely the same place.

I decided to display this sequence of photographs in the form of an installation in order to reinforce the atmosphere I wanted to recreate. So I filled a small room with sand, pebbles and twigs from the river and painted the walls black to transport the viewer to the site where I took the photographs. I then projected the near identical photos at a rate of one per second onto a mirror, hung in the middle of a tree like structure, to match the scene depicted in the photographs. The image was first visible on the surface of the mirror and was then reflected onto a purpose built screen. I asked people to view the work in solitude as I felt this might increase the feeling of intimacy and allow people to let their imaginations wander deeper into the artificial world I had created. The final twist to the piece was the entry. A large suspended branch blocked the doorway and had to be moved or at least brushed to enter the room. This was connected via strings to a great number of other smaller branches that sprang from a stump in the corner forming a tree like sculpture. The movement in the larger branch caused the other branches to rustle gently as if in an undetectable breeze.

	Installation