I Live With Birds
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Raquel Ormella, B. 1969, Sydney, Australia. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia.
Raquel Ormella has built her practice around a diverse range of methodologies and media, ranging from video, painting, installation, drawing, through to zine making. Her art is grounded in exploring the complex relationships between humans and the natural environment. With a particular focus on urban expansion and forest activism, she has consistently sought in her work to emphasise the connectedness between the two. Ormella’s critiques often examine the relationships between two social bodies as with her 2005 drawing installtion,130 Davey Street. Ormella worked to challenge the romanticism that can be found within nature activism, in all its manifestations, from grassroots societies to glossy wilderness photography. Ormella has continued to make work that draws from environmental issues with pieces such as Varied, noisy (2008) and Walking Through Clear Fells, a recent video work entered in the 2011 COAL prize. Walking Through Clear Fells is a three channel video installation that aims to make clear that our depictions of the natural world are not representations of true ‘wilderness’ or any pure state, rather they are informed by human contact and reflective of human values. Completed in 2010 Walking through clear fells took as its motivation the destruction of old growth forests on the island state of Tasmania due to clear fell logging.
Her work has been included in the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, 2003 Biennale of Istanbul, and the 2002 Sao Paulo Biennale. In 2010 Ormella participated in the 1st Aichi Triennale with a 7 channel video installation; Feeders.
