The Color of Decay by Inga Hendrickson
This body of work explores the experience and time: the weight of time and urgency of the now. Our lives are marked by our experiences. The fruit becomes a way of looking at these marks as time weighs on them.
I began noticing and then photographing the fruit and plants in this project when I kept noticing it dying around me. I would buy flowers and two weeks later notice them dried and wilted in the vase or discover molded fruit in a bowl on the table. This decay awakened an awareness of how slippery time is. One cannot grasp it, save it, control it. These little heartbreaking domestic casualties began to speak to me. They are symbols of time, fragility, injury. Ripeness is naturally connected to decay and in turn became a focus as well. Fruit and flowers in ripeness seem exceptionally alive and notably vulnerable. I felt compelled to photograph them.
Color is as much of a subject in these works as the objects themselves. I was immediately attracted to the interaction of color between the objects and their environment. I am fascinated with color’s ability to produce pointed emotional responses in us. We all have a powerful and immediate response to color. Because of this, color can be used to express and project basic human emotions. The color punctuates the emotions I am projecting onto the flora.
Inga Hendrickson lives and works in Santa Fe, NM.
To view more of Inga’s work, please visit her website.
