Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart

Thistle

"Thistle" is a piece that tells the story of a wild Thistle plant. Using motion capture technology, I photographed insects that visited the plant for a period of one hour and then layered the photographs on top of each other in post production. The pandemic shutdowns have pushed many people outdoors, to observe nature more closely than we had time for in the past. "Thistle" was inspired by my own observations of weeds living in my township. Instead of instinctively uprooting these noxious plants as I would have in the past, I began to observe the animals and insects that thrive in their presence if left undisturbed. A thistle was chosen for this piece because of their value to pollinators such as Monarch Butterflies, Bumble Bees, and Goldfinches. By compressing time and space, "Thistle" reflects on how
the world has become paradoxically more homogeneous and more polarized at the same time. It is a reminder that the human experience of time is subjective, and that it can bias decision-making and humans conceptions about how the world works.