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Zanny Mellor Harvest prints spread.jpg

CHASING THE HARVEST

November 2022

Chasing The Harvest is a series of 8 individual photographic editions where playful colourful shapes celebrate the ripening summer crops and productivity of the fields. Created while living at her family home during the summer, this series is a poetic response to daily walks through field and forest, an engagement with the changing seasons and local wildlife.

 

Zanny took the family of paper shapes into local fields of barley and wheat, creating temporary assemblages hovering within the crops to be captured as photographs. Painted and cut by hand, the shapes’ warm colours reflect the crops ripening and drying.

 

Working with the unpredictable nature of the weather, changing light and wind meant revisiting certain sites on multiple occasions, and as combine harvesters approached their annual goal, an urgency was created to complete the project before the crops were cut.

 

This visual language builds on Zanny’s shapely gestural painting and recent move into collage. She sees them as playfully existing between the mediums of painting, collage, temporary sculpture and photography. They fulfil a desire to reintroduce representational elements back into her abstract artwork, to make connections to places of meaning more present within her practice.

 

This print series is a reflection on the nourishing mental and physical effect of being immersed in nature, an appreciation for the slow, seasonal processes of the earth gathering energy to produce the food that nourishes us. Rooted in time, these artworks also document the consistent and extreme temperatures of an acute heatwave in the UK, that is recognised as a result of climate change.

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