Futuregen - FotoFreo 2012

Artist statement – James Horne I live in Tasmania where much of the “natural” environment has been and continues to be a subject of contention and exploitation for a variety of agenda. Through a process of re-investigation of spaces across a diversity of scales I hope to better understand my place in the environment. This series comprises electron micrographs of material that has been sampled, explicitly or semi-randomly using a vacuum cleaner, from my own home environment. Samples were mounted on 10 mm diameter adhesive discs on removable microscope stages and spray-coated with Platinum metal (2-10 nm thickness) to improve conductivity and reduce charging artefacts. Images were composed in the microscope frame with some manual light-microscopic arrangement of elements during mounting. Abstraction of material through mechanical damage and via the enormous degree of magnification possible within the EM technology permits representation of forms that can be evocative of macro-scale landscapes and creates objects that are shorn of identifiable context. The association of these ambiguous objects and scenes with my intimate, private spaces provokes a visceral reaction and appreciation for the myriad worlds that are ordinarily beneath my notice.