Lynn Dennison explores our relationship with our surroundings and how we see and experience our environment. She works across several disciplines, including still and moving image, installation and collage. Her single and multiple screen videos are often based on the documentary of place, exploring themes of memory, history, nostalgia, and the boundaries between the real and imagined. Her work is often semi-narrative and contains elements of mystery and the surreal.
Lynn Dennison’s practice is research-based, and frequently made in response to sites of cultural, historic and natural significance. She works with historic buildings, and in response to natural locations, and has produced a body of work which connects with natural and material culture, past and present.
The natural world overwhelming the built environment
“My work inevitably touches on the subject of climate change and my moving image installations have often been concerned with the natural world overwhelming the built environment. A cross disciplinary residency at Birmingham University, working with David Hannah, Professor of Hydrology, has been instrumental in informing my subsequent work. His co-research paper, ‘The Summer After the Floods’, was an examination of the social, economic and environmental dimensions of flood recovery and resilience. “
“I’m interested in …. the dichotomy between negative and positive aspects of nature”
The idea of a fear of the landscape, and an anxiety about our environment, has led Lynn Dennison to investigate how we might work to combat feelings of unease about ourselves and our surroundings. Several of her video installations explore how we use an engagement with the natural world to benefit our mental and physical wellbeing.
“I’m interested in the interplay between the natural world and the mind, and the dichotomy between the negative and positive aspects of nature. I have explored these ideas with other artists, writers, composers and professionals in different disciplines, and also with the public, whose collaboration has encouraged exciting new material to work with.”
Dress: Sea
Lynn Dennison has made many dramatic site based video installations. Often these involve weather and water phenomena. She has shown them at a number of locations including the De La Warr Pavilion (see still from ‘Waterfall’, above), Bexhill-on-Sea, Caernafon Castle in Wales, and the Lookout Tower at Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
She has showed the video ‘Dress Sea’ at GroundWork Gallery in Water Rising in 2019. The cover image here is a still from this work, featuring the artist in costume as the main character. Of this work she says:
This film explores the trajectory of the body moving between land and sea, and between culture and nature. A woman, wearing a paper and wire dress sculpture, walks slowly into the sea, until she disappears….submerged underwater. The work references the merging of culture and nature; the unwieldy and inflexible dress signifying a cultural encumbrance developed to distance ourselves from nature, and the desire to allow natural elements to destroy it. It serves as a reminder that the sea has claimed much that humans have made. At the same time, there are resonances of old fashioned bathing dresses, conjuring up ideas of the history of bathing, and the fetished concealment of the female body, identified with the sea itself.
