Inside Outside
A photographic exhibition
by Sasha Bosbeer and Kevin Collins
in support of the Green Sod Land Trust
December 13 – 23, 2008 Galway City Museum, Galway
Opening 2pm, Saturday December 13 All are welcome.

Sasha Bosbeer

Sasha Bosbeer is a photographer and potter based in the West of Ireland. Her work relies on the feel and focus of being in nature. Sasha started taking photos at a young age with a simple box camera. Sasha studied at Yale University in Connecticut, where her photographs were used in the yearbook and in college directories and art magazines. She also held two one-woman photography shows at Yale.
After college, Sasha continued to take photographs while working in international exchange work in Siberia and in Washington, DC. She studied forestry in the Netherlands (accompanied by a borrowed Nikon F50) and focussed on plants as well as people. She moved to Galway in 1995, a year with a summer full of sunshine and good light on wet bogs and blue seas. Since then, she has earned a PhD in botany, lectured at Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, and contributed photographs to several publications on forestry and biodiversity. She also donated herimages for several series of greeting cards. In addition, Sasha developed her interest in hand-built pottery with visual textures and rustic forms. In 2007, Sasha held a one-woman show of portraits of people affected by the tsunami in Sri Lanka, in order to support the Galway Sri Lanka Project.
Artist’s statement
Nature encompasses us. It cradles us humans in a surround of smells, sights, and sounds. Even when we build to forget nature, a daisy winds through concrete, or the river may rise. But let’s enjoy nature. A walk through fields or woods is full of colours and flowers, the rustle of a breeze among tree leaves, the whistle of a bird, the smell of spring flowers or autumn leaves. The more we stop to look, the more we see, hear, and smell.
The camera can only capture part of this experience, but these focused images are to remind us of the fresh feel of a breeze lifting your hair and fluttering through the leaves, how soft a moist cap of a mushroom feels, glow of winter sun on a lake.
I remember being nine, Alice-banded hair and red plaid trousers, clutching my first camera and shooting frame after frame of the lambs in a field – viewed over a ditch and through a fence in an urban park in Holland. I still have photo albums packed with pages of those woolly dotsin white-edged, slightly mauve colour prints. I treasure the black-and-white crocuses, the ducks on the canal, the memory of the wonder of a child at views we adults have forgotten are not mundane.
We are rich in Ireland – rich in being able to leap the ditch and dodge the hedge and feel with bare toes the gentle heat of sun-warmed soil on a summer’s day. We are rich to be able to climb a mountain and admire a green view below. It is a privilege to lie in a meadow and watch the waving heads of grass against a light blue sky. Even to look closely at the sparkling stars of the ordinary dandelion ready to let its seed float anywhere on the wind. Turn up your face and feel the small massage of staccato rain drops on your face. And think about the richness of Ireland.

Kevin Collins
Born and reared in Dublin, Kevin trained as a forester at University College Dublin, graduating with a Masters in 1995. He has since worked extensively in both the environmental NGO and State sector in Ireland, in the areas of urban forestry, forest recreation, native woodlands and the growing of willow for bioenergy. From 2003 to 2006, Kevin was chairperson of Sculpture in Woodland, a group running various initiatives in Devil’s Glen, Co. Wicklow, involving artists, foresters and young people and focused on promoting the use of wood as an artistic medium.

Kevin has been a keen self-taught photographer for over a decade, and has provided images – both technical and artistic – for a wide range of forest-related publications.

Photographer’s vision

In approaching this collection, I delve into the sense of being wild places have, regardless of whether or not we observe them. Places behind mossy rocks, under dripping forest canopies, beside trickling streams, places out of view, hidden away from us, and yet busy living their own lives, functioning as ecosystems, providing a world for plants and animals. As a child, I was always fascinated by such places, albeit in the urban landscape. What goes on in the far corner of the empty carpark, where windblown icecream sticks and spent matches gather? What happens in that overgrown laneway, beneath the impenetrable thicket of bramble?

Through my work in forestry, again and again I see these wild places within our landscape, richer and more varied than their city cousins, and lying just outside the triangulation of human activities, associations and sightlines. These places exist, regardless of whether or not we experience them. They are no Schrdinger’s cat: they have no need for observation to validate them. They just are.

In many cultures across the globe, people resist being photographed in the belief that the process traps something of their soul. By the same token, in photographing these wild places, I feel that harsh flashlight ‘robs’ the place of its image. Instead, I tread lightly, using only natural light, long exposures and a sturdy tripod to allow the scene to ‘paint’ itself onto the film surface, in its own time.

I hope these pictures offer glimpses of these other places, a world just beyond our own busy lives, yet busy ‘being’ in their own right, following their own beat. Perhaps this will encourage us to think off to one side of ourselves, and to listen out for the often forgotten rhythm of nature, a rhythm we must now relearn if we are to overcome the challenges our world faces.

Inside Outside
A photographic exhibition
by Sasha Bosbeer and Kevin Collins
in support of the Green Sod Land Trust
December 13 – 23, 2008 Galway City Museum, Galway
Opening 2pm, Saturday December 13 All are welcome.