jessy boon cowler

Postcards from Pachamama is a tongue in cheek look at sensuality, exoticisation and humanity’s dislocation from nature, paper-collaging digital nudes into my 35mm images of Latin America. I am interested in the relationship between the physical versus the intellectual, specifically the common exclusion of one from the other within British culture, which leads to frustration and a need to escape. The desire those of us from cold countries hold for the Tropics, the fantasy of an island retreat; the exoticisation of a foreign land where we can let go of our inhibitions, the shame felt due to an inherited history of colonisation. I'm also interested in the relationship between the natural versus the artificial; humans are so detached from the natural world that we have come to see ourselves as something greater than nature and we are suffering the consequences. Since the growth of our consciousness we have driven an anthropogenic reorganisation of the nature around us. The need for humans to re-entangle with mother nature is getting more urgent by the day, as demonstrated by the Latin American philosophy of Buen Vivir. Worse even than our detachment from nature is our detachment from and prejudice towards one another, and my work is a campaign to see ourselves as a part of a unified greater whole. I use both analogue and digital techniques as a metaphor for these polarities of the human condition, to demonstrate that opposites can coexist and compliment one another.