Sarah Patterson

Over 9 weeks I have investigated the connection between nature and myth, and how mankind has used myth to assist in understanding elements of nature that are otherwise incomprehensible. There is no way for us to truly comprehend the things that have brought about the natural world we know today without simplifying it or describing it in very human terms.

This investigation led me to exploring the power dynamic between man and nature, this constant back and forth struggle for power. The battle between the known and the unknowable, the tame and the un-tameable, the defeated and the undefeatable. So, I crafted this book that collects images, stories and poems from a fictional world I built, “The Cove”. A world fundamentally inspired by the quiet rocky shores and soaring cliffs of Co. Donegal, Ireland. With characters crafted from materials taken from these locations.

The book takes these mysterious figures from this idiosyncratic environment and strips them down into diagrammatic illustrations and clinical photographs. Poems are reminiscent of the kind of power corruption we see in everyday life, to ultimately communicate a message about our habit to take unfathomable elements of nature and re-contextualise them into something to be conquered and tamed. And so, the happenings in “The Cove”, represent the thirst for power present in our own societies. It explores the blinding hunt for power that is seen so commonly throughout human history, a hunt that has turbulently effected man’s position within nature.

This book is accompanied by large photographs printed on fine linen of the models in their environments. And while looking at the images, and then to the book, there is an air of deceit, that the book has twisted this unknowable location, and mythical beings, and projected human, western qualities on to it to where it becomes a digestible and understandable book about people, for people.