Winter Garden interactive collage, 2023

Winter Garden offers joy and solace in an age of anxiety. The viewer becomes a participant in the growth and regeneration of the interactive collage. Its concept developed out of still life photographs taken during the Winter 2021 lockdown, about a small oasis of indoor growth that evoked hope and resilience. The collage continually renews itself, growing compositions of still life motifs against a changing backdrop of winter imagery. The collage fragments play with opacity and transparency, as well as positive and negative space.

Viewers influence the composition by their location and movement. The build-up of imagery follows people’s positions, and the changing pace is determined by how many people are present and how much they move. One person standing still prompts the collage to evolve more slowly, concentrated in front of the viewer’s location; more motion makes the composition change more quickly. Several people moving around creates a complex, busier composition, with imagery dispersed across the screen following their trajectories.

See an updated version of Winter Garden at Surrey Art Gallery 2024-2025

Software development: Dave Pagurek van Mossel