Monika Dutta East Yorkshire, United Kingdom
I am an award winning cross-media artist and filmmaker, having exhibited internationally and worked collaboratively to deliver works that interrogate the role and impact of digital media practice. I have over 20yrs experience of devising and delivering participatory projects. I work with composer and musician Jake Harries developing 'a little piece of land' as a long term collaborative practice.
My practice derives from a cross-disciplinary approach to methods and materials and embraces the disciplines of moving image; photography; drawing; sculpture; constructed textiles; performance and activism, producing works which collectively map relationships between the tangible natural environment and the constructed realities of a culture driven by technology, as reflected through subtle and precarious relationships that exist between the Urban and the Rural. I am most interested in examining and finding ways to communicate the dichotomies of Rural/Urban and Behavioural change/Technological solutions, which exist within the context of environmental sustainability. In the past two decades, I have focused on the tradition of Landscape as mediated through the contemporary lens of digital media and the gestural process of drawing. By observing and highlighting the incidental, works strive to disrupt the passive familiarity with which we approach landscape and to offer glimpses of 'natural beauty' that may not be prescribed by conservation or heritage concerns. Keen to translate an experience of being in and responding to the landscape, whilst circumventing the production of works that depict landscape in an illustrative sense, I have employed methods of mapping and capture that focus on aspects of an environment that have most impacted upon me whilst present in the landscape. In various instances this may have been the quality of light; the physical bulk of the land; the specific line described by a horizon or the repetition of marking across cultivated land. Resulting work often comes to demonstrate the various ways in which we construct and impact upon environment.
Artwork
a little piece of land at Humber EcoFest, mixed, 2023
my indian stain, Animation, 2009
6 goats, Animation, 2004
Rosario live 2005, Live improvised audiovisual performance, 2005
cirrus, Live improvised audiovisual performance, 2008
kindle, Live improvised audiovisual performance, 2010
Can Eat Can't Eat ABC, site specific intervention, ongoing
Land(fill)Girlz, Participatory intervention, 2015
MesoMeals, Public sphere intervention, 2018
Wild Weed Kitchen, Socially engaged performance, 2018
Spring Uprising, Mixed media installation, 2018
What is the right question?, Photographic installation, 2018
Hedge, cross media, current