“These photographs are images of birds such as we have rarely seen.”
Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum
Wild Surfaces is a body of work in which Edith Marie Pasquier has sought out contact with wild animals and attempted to replicate her experience using a variety of different media. Photographic images, text and sculpture are employed in the exhibition to push beyond the boundaries of traditional photography allowing her to seek out her subject matter, implying what is felt as much as what is seen.
For three years, Pasquier travelled to the famous bird observatory at Falsterbo in Sweden where migrating birds from all over the world are documented. Using a Hasselblad camera, the results are a fascinating group of intimate portraits far beyond the descriptive purpose of the scientific lens.
Each image is captured on film and constructed around a shifting focus point. Subjects are never photographed straight on, they move in and out of focus replicating an encounter in the wild. The photographs are then developed in the dark room and meticulously hand printed in a deliberate tribute to the great pioneers of photography, Henry Fox Talbot and Peter Henry Emerson. In the true sense of the term, the images occupy the Romantic tradition, half perceiving and half creating the world through imagination. The more we reflect on the wild animal the more elusive it becomes.