Lichening

Hide #5 (Lichening) | Digital photograph | 2020

“To be one at all you must be a many – and that’s not a metaphor.” Donna Haraway*

This is the latest in a series of experimental photographs concerned with the idea of the hide – a camouflaged structure that seeks to efface the presence of the observer and encourage 'natural' behaviour in those observed. I am interested in the hide as a means of surreptitiously entering the territory of another, but also in the hide as skin, a notional boundary between self and the world.  

When Haraway says you must be a many, she is referring to the way we are intimately connected with other things, that our bodies are not singular things but whole ecosystems. I am particularly interested in the lichens in this image, which are a symbiosis (a mutually beneficial relationship) between fungi and algae or cyanobacteria. As amalgams of multiple organisms working together, they make with. We are all created by multiple relationships. 

Hide #5 was made following an invitation from Gail Flockhart to respond to the theme 'Selfies together in isolation' as part of her PhD research at the University of Plymouth.

*Donna Haraway Anthropocence, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble (University of California, Santa Cruz, 9 May 2014)