reWILD was shot over the last two extra-ordinary years, in French Polynesia and is a celebration of the fecundity of nature. A vision of the natural world as dominant, abundant and resilient. Humankind no longer centre stage and our unnatural creations dissolved back into the earth - back to their base elements. Becoming tomb stones to outdated technology.
While in Tahiti, I saw a healer, and as she was working on me she had visions of lush forest with rich verdure. She felt my connection and sense of home there. She didn't know that the day before we had done a trek into the Papenoo valley, running deep into the centre of the island. At acertain point during our walk I let the others continue on because I was so enchanted with a particular place. I felt the need to stay there and try and capture what I was feeling. I had the sense that the forest was alive and emitting its own light. It made me think of animism which is not just the belief that plants and rocks and natural phenomena having living souls, but it is also a way of relating to the natural world.
In these photos I try and capture not just place and time, but my subjective experience. The way I relate to these places...
I think we take comfort from the idea of a world in stasis - in a state of equilibrium. The reliability of the seasons, the monsoon rains, the cycles that maintain life as we know it. We know this balance is shifting however - creating with it a collective disquiet. It is understandable when we are faced with such global and environmental challenges.
Normal has come to mean irregular, unpredictable and uncertain. We are in a state of transition or bardo, seemingly between one life, or way of living, and another.
Amidst our anxiety, bleakness, even hopelessness are also periods of opportunity and transformation. If seen and seized.
As described in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: "There is no situation, however seemingly hopeless or terrible, such as a terminal disease, which we cannot use to evolve."