Klea McKenna

“My work explores our relationship to nature, myth, and the fictions that are produced through the act of reflection. I use photography to investigate the role of nature and myth in our private lives and the collective impulse to find meaning in our average surroundings and daily patterns. I often use found materials or text as a starting point, which I then loosely translate into photographs. My interest in translation is about the gaps in interpretation, the way in which elements are lost and new ones revealed. 

In my recent project The Butterfly Hunter, I photographed hundreds of specimens from my father’s butterfly collection including the scraps of newspapers, magazines and letters that the specimens had been wrapped in nearly forty years ago. Through this inherited material I was able to tell my father’s story as well as create a conflicted portrait of the time period, the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Initially this project took the form of an interactive, photographic installation. Gallery visitors were invited to engage with the archive by taking an image from the wall, disseminating the collection as an experiment in preservation. More recently, I’ve re-interpreted this project into a limited edition artist’s book.”

See more of Klea’s work and studio