Joya: AiR / Lara Orawski / CAN
photo Simon Beckmann
“I arrived at Joya: AiR with the intention of documenting and observing the environment. I hoped to create images while creating no waste and find new ways of working and learning, attempting to utilize or understand but not abuse the environment itself. As I settled in, the landscape began to manifest images on my behalf, I looked for ways to capture them a while longer - the midsummer hot winds, or the stillness of midday, the sound of a fly in your ear and little else, the ash of the clay, the feel of dusty grasses, the emptiness of a dry river, or the solidness of the sun - revealing what I can only imagine would be the landscape developing images for itself in ways I would never have imagined. Using the detritus of the landscape, the clays, discarded tree fruits and dried up plants, I looked for the hidden worlds, from plant dyes to sun stains to begin to understand how they receive light and how we receive them. How does the sun trace its own image? Can a stone speak through its own strength? I came to understand the boundlessness of questions we can occupy given the access space and that time becomes constructed within its beginnings as well as it's remains. The experience has taught me immense patience and exploration but also the capacity to listen to the body in space, understanding that it can reveal relationships and languages we don't understand how to hear or see, it can allow us to consider dust or even the discarded as a new cosmos ready to be formed.
Lara Orawski is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist and educator, exploring the boundaries and paradoxes of consciousness, sentience, as well as accepted and alternate realities. She graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2019 with a Masters in Photography and Philosophy. Her previous studies were focused in psychology and political science, at the University of Ottawa. Her interdisciplinary background across humanities and politics serves as a deep influence for her current research; much of which is rooted in the concepts of manipulation, evolution, and emergent identities among ecological, technological, and political shifts.