Pam Purves: Ingenuity

Part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival 

This multi-media series offers a reflection on humanity’s ingenious use of nature and our interaction with the basic building blocks of material design: sand, water, and clay. From the earliest use of clay in communicating and creating functional vessels to using it to tell stories through sculpture, humans have imagined and manufactured inspiring objects to help us ease the course of our daily lives and engage us in further leaps of imagination.

Ingenuity features eight digital images of nature set in shadow boxes. Ceramic shards are applied over each landscape to prompt the viewer to reflect upon history and the complexity of our relationship with nature. While paying tribute to humanity’s cleverness and the instinct to create, learn, and progress, each piece serves as a distinct reminder that the ‘materials of ingenuity’ and the ecosystems they support are being challenged, and of the need to preserve them.

About the artist

Pam Purves is a Canadian photographer born in Guelph, Ontario. She received a Fine Art degree from the University of Guelph in 1972. Her early work in landscape photography led to large-scale soft focus works of both landscape and cityscape inspired by such artists as Uta Barth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Mark Rothko. Her current work derives from an interest in the roots of abstract painting in nature. Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Italy. She lives and works in the GTA, Nova Scotia, and Nevis, West Indies.

Header image courtesy Pamela Purves