Artists of Hawai‘i 2015 | Emily McIlroy: Wild Flesh

Leaf Graveyard, (San Cristobal, Dominican Republic)

In her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World, author and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams defines “bewilderness” as “the place where the mind wanders without certainties.” These images document some of my recent perambulations through wilderness and “bewilderness,” as I look to Nature for an archive of forms, bodies, energies and processes that mirror my own internal territory. Offering moments of beauty, violence, power and fragility, the subjects of my photographs often guide my drawing and painting process, and have provided a point-of-entry into my work for Artists of Hawai‘i 2015.

Floating Leaf Flesh, (Makapu‘u, O‘ahu)

                            Man-of-War Soma, (Waialua, O‘ahu)

Man-of-War Sutures, (Waialua, O‘ahu)

Intergalactic Soft Corals, (Somosomo Strait, Fiji)

Herniated Tree, (Southern Wyoming)

Self-Pleasuring Tree, (Southern Wyoming)

Wood Folds, (Southern Wyoming)

Hummingbird Battle, (Southern Wyoming)

Feeding Frenzy, (Southern Wyoming)

Moment of Entwinement, (Wai‘anae, Oahu)

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. –Susan Sontag