Chasing the deer shadow
Analog photography, haiku
2022
Implemented within Dereenacappera artist residency in County Cork, Ireland
During the art residency in Ireland I created a photo series called “Chasing the deer shadow”. It is a collection of visual poetic images of nature, each of which is accompanied by haiku. A “Chasing the deer shadow” photo series appeared as a result of poetic connection to nature, research of Irish mythology and history, and reflection on philosophical concepts.
I was exploring fundamental questions, such as cyclicality and the wholeness of nature, its healing and mythological aspects, identity, notion of home and migration.
Through taking the soft, dreamlike analog photographs of nature I explored a therapeutic effect of life in a remote village among the Caha mountains, near the Atlantic ocean. After seeing the news about the injured female deer in the Kyiv region last spring I came to County Cork with the idea to make a project dedicated to deer mythology. So I went to Killarney National Park to be able to take photographs of deer in their natural environment there.
Besides that, I was doing research on the similarities of the Irish and Ukrainian historical contexts, and found some parallels: there was the Great Irish Famine in 1845-49, and Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-33, and also both countries' fights for independence are quite similar. Analysing this postcolonial discourse, part of the photo series I dedicated to the subject of Famine, the crucial role of potato culture in Ireland, and sad remembrance of the Law of spikelets in Ukraine.
Since I was also exploring some of the philosophic and literature concepts of the 20 century, I did weave some profound quotes of the American philosopher Gertrude Stein* and the Irish writer James Joyce** within the haiku and visual photographic narrative. Also the concept of Golden Age, theory of primordial soup and Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes became a material for the inspiration.
The final project has an intimate form of photo album, which, filled with the photographs and hand-written haiku to each of the images, became rather an art book. If there will be any opportunity to publish it, I will make it exactly in this way, copying the original form. In case there will be exhibitions in future, I can display separate photographs from the album, printed in large.
This art residence in Ireland was very meaningful to me. All the puzzle – very kind people on my way, financial support from the Artist at Risk program, sunny weather in Ireland and opportunity to stay in nature – was complete within this journey. I was able to work from a very different perspective, than I could make it in Ukraine or somewhere else in Europe.
* “Forget grammar and think about potatoes” and “Rose is a rose is a rose...” (1913)
** about the red and white roses, regarding possibility of everything in imagination and limits of the material world from his novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916)
