Zilu Lin

The first section nest mainly focuses on me staying in the home for a long time during the lockdown. I re-observed my living space in detail and gradually developed illusions about different corners of space. I was thinking about finding the infinite plasticity of domestic space in a limited area, so I used an analogue visual diary to record my observations and think about my nest. "Stuck" is my redefinition and reflection on the space I am in.

“See, hear, eat, touch, curl up in a shell, become a dot floating in every corner. Breathing, breathing, a flower is growing out from the drawer. Light shapes continue to change; I caught the air and swallowed it. I’m the line, the circle, the cube, visible, invisible. One, two, three, what time is it? No one cares, neither do I. Dangling from left to right, spin.”

(Materials: dust, hair, cloth, earplugs, sesame, sewing thread, cream….)

In the second section, woods, I explore the way people have lost intimate contact with others because of the epidemic. I turned this desire for intimacy to a desire for nature — I chose woods. Intending to explore this intimate connection from physical to emotional, I make images to reconstruct this connection using natural materials brought back from woods, and working with them using analogue media. These images are my reflections, emotions, memories about the places that I visited. I transformed these elements back to my body and mind to create indirect connections. These connections may be imaginary, fantasy, or real. 

"Roots, stems, leaves, lines, rhythm, observation, reflections, me, nature, strangers - connected."

The third section, ‘Unsettled places’, focused on travel photographs that I took in different places before the outbreak. These analogue images contain my previous memories in different locations. But for me, some memories are clear, and some of them are ambiguous. Therefore, I was thinking about how to use different methods of treating the analogue material to reconstruct my memories, and attach new emotion to old freedom days. I mixed chemicals to treat the analogue images, enlarge their features materiality, also I collaged processed images with objects and marks, by using digital processing.