Jim Naughten explores the history of this complex relationship, examining how we have attempted to contain nature in both physical structures and cognitive frameworks. Our image of nature is so often partial, refusing to engage with the environment’s overwhelming power and intricacy whilst erasing traces of human culpability from the narrative of our dwindling natural habitat.  To reflect on how this understanding has evolved, Naughten turned to dioramas – displays designed to provide a discrete window onto nature, often used traditionally in exhibitions of natural history.  He uses photography to reanimate their scenes, presented for fresh consideration in a series of defamiliarised pictures. Taking the artful composition of the original dioramas and heightening their colour palette to further exoticise the settings, Naughten has charged these photographs with a sense of illusion. They play to the popular misperception of nature as something that occurs in faraway ‘wild’ places, cut off from our own reality. The camera’s capacity to compress perspective and scale into these seamless representations encourages us to question what we are seeing in the diorama vistas, where their truth begins and our responsibilities have ended.  As we come to terms with the implications of what our new age of loneliness might mean, the need to reclaim nature from its confined imaginative space on the outskirts of our day to day existence has never been more urgent. This series extends an invitation to consider what our world might look like from these new horizons of awareness.

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These works are currently on view at Home House members club in London, in collaboration with A Space for Art and The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery.  Viewings are by appointment only - please email info@offshootarts.com.