Concept:
Our work primarily concerns itself with the meeting point of nature and culture. That is why we have engaged with the Eden Project in Cornwall UK. Eden focuses on the relationship between people and plants and the environment. The imagery there is very striking; a lush tropical rainforest enclosed in a sci-fi architectural wonder.

The installation, Past Is The Future, will feature a dramatic 14 metre long by 3 metre tall panoramic photograph taken inside the Humid Tropics Biome (see above). This image will be evenly lit but, in addition, a series of figures will materialise in light, appearing and disappearing, in different areas of the image by means of powerful projectors. The figures will illuminate the parts of the image onto which they are projected.

We intend to create work that is open-ended, giving each viewer the opportunity to react individually, based on his or her own history of personal experience. However, our installation does suggest that people are both a part of and apart from Nature.

"While culture used to be a counter to nature and a liberation of humans from the random chance of nature, today the idea of nature is a counter to culture and a liberation of man from the restraints which he created himself. Yet since nature is no longer something given, but something made, the presumed release from the restraints of culture becomes a utopia. That which we generally call 'nature' is to a great extent culture, and is controlled and constructed by man."

Philipp Oswalt Curator/architect/journalist
Quote: Published in Thesis, Wissenschaftliche Zeitung der Bauhaushochschule, 5. Heft | Weimar | 1998

'Based on work already done as part of their (Maslen & Mehra) residency at the Eden Project in Cornwall, it features a pair of figures - one male one female - who magically appear and then disappear in a jungle of foliage. The installation suggests that if human beings are in any sense god-like, it is only when they are most fully integrated with the idea of nature.'

Edward Lucie-Smith

Excerpt from Art & Australia magazine September issue

Limited edition giclee prints available