Artist Statement
Gina Glover’s early work ranged from documentary photography to the exploration of family life. Today her personal work focuses on our relationship with nature. Her imagery symbolises our complex struggle to make sense of the world and our place within it.
She makes site specific artwork for hospitals and lectures on themes such as ‘Creativity, Photography and the Mind’.
The work shown on this website is from a new series called Forest/ Forêt. Glover’s has photographed La Gresigne, France; an isolated forest spread over 3600 hectares of land surrounded by small mountains in the north west Tarn. This is one of the oldest oak forests in Europe, some of it planted by Louis XlV for hunting wild boar and deer, which in season still continues today.
Bruno Bettelheim writes of our making sense of our lives through our relationship with the forest: “Since ancient times the near- impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolised the dark, hidden, near impenetrable world of our unconscious. If we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past lifes and must now find our way to become ourselves, and have entered this wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with much more higher developed humanity”
For Glover, like Bettelheim, the forest is both a place of nature and a place of mind. The forest stands as a metaphor for the complexity of consciousness. She wants the viewer to become entangled in its branches, leaves, twigs and undergrowth. In doing so one becomes captured by fears and revelation. When alone one can be shaken by childhood fears prompting long forgotten fairy tales or the simple matter of being lost without direction with the night closing in. Both sources of fear become part of her image making experience. It determines her field of view as being denied a sense of place she places similar limits on the viewer. Trees are cropped at their midriff; we see no further than the middle distance. Revelation too. Where the light exposes new shapes in our mind.
Her images capture the transitions of mood, atmosphere, and colour palette. The changing seasons transform the forest canopy and floor and the mix of flora and fauna.
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Gina Glover was born in London, England. She trained in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art and later obtained a degree in Photography at the University of Westminster. She is co founder and director of the Photofusion Photography Centre, London.
She is a freelance photographic artist and lecturer and is external Examiner, BA in Public Art/Fine Art, Middlesex University London.
She makes site specific artwork for hospitals and lectures on themes such as ‘Creativity Photography and the Mind’
She was winner of the 2003 and 2004 Medical Research Council/Novartis/Daily Telegraph Visions of Science award for her picture ‘Chromosomal Stripy Socks’ and a portrait of a dialysis patient. These photographs were created during her artist in residency in the Genetics Department at Guy’s Hospital, London and in Northwick Park Hospital London.
In 2005, Des Santos gallery, Houston, Harris Interiors Gallery, Poole and Inside Space London have exhibited her pinhole images.
In 2004 Shirley Read interviewed her for the British Sound Archives. Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Northamptonshire showed her exhibition, Telling Tales from a Garden. Nottingham Castle Museum showed her series ‘Double Pleasure – petals preserved in ice’. Her sea photographs were exhibited as part of Fotofest, Houston 2004.
A portfolio of her work appears in Dislocation magazine Toronto 2005, AG magazine (issue 29) and Portfolio magazine (issue 36).
Photofusion picture library distributes her social documentary photography, Millennium and Corbis her art photography. Her fine art prints are distributed by Des Santos Houston Inside Space London and Harris Interiors Poole.
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