Bethany Sewell

The Breathing Room is an immersive installation aimed to encapsulate the rich and brimming layers of history that are written underneath the surface of my hometown: Bristol. 

This immersive experience began with experiments of creating abstract tree structures, painted with Soilscapes. These images are formed using light sensitive chemicals and soil to create abstract impressions of the land. 

These structures can be engaged with and walked in and around, as if exploring a root system. A natural web, which creates life and sustains other living beings through providing clean air from the plants growing from these roots. 

My Breathing Room immerses the viewer in the underworld. Yet, this installation analyses my ongoing research into the narrative of how photography can piece together our current concept of reality, and how past layers of history can merge with new life to form living timelines, that are always in motion. 

The work also experiments with the power of light to tell stories, captures ambiences that would otherwise be invisible and widens our perspective of greater natural processes that orbit around what it means to be human. Ultimately, the work encapsulates the rich and brimming layers of the atmosphere lurking both above and underneath the visible surface of my local landscape. 

Blue. The colour travelling in motion, bringing landscapes, dreamscapes, emotions, and memories in and out of consciousness. In a time where humanity is at the brink of transformation, this colour brings a sense of intense calm between thought, figure, and space. 

This immersive cyanotype installation aims to encourage a new understanding of landscape, especially those which we encounter daily. Showing splashes, strokes, even swathes of blue washing over the void, absorbing the landscape as if a reflected sponge, transforming blank surfaces into a window, showing a scene of constantly evolving space, unfixed, and ever changing. 

It is a view of the beginning and the end. A dreamscape ready to be moulded and sculpted into a new definition of space, atmosphere, land. But it is also a place of continuing expiration, as the tones will eventually fade on rotting fabric, as they decompose to return to the land from which they came. The blue is a view for the avid window watcher, scenic route taker and landscape lover. It defines the act of gazing, looking, and coming face to face with what lies beyond. 

I create these images by painting light sensitive chemicals onto surfaces in my homemade darkroom. Placing these large fragments in the land and leaving them coated with soil, sediment, leaf litter and even footprints, they evolve and transform over time, absorbing the atmosphere they are immersed in. 

The photographs absorb pollutants circulating the atmosphere, which create a new, precarious world. A new view, one that presents the world as a window into an alternative way of looking. This is what the blue void suggests: it is an opening of the fragmented landscape, for new realities to come into existence.