Eve McGovern Miller, a recent graduate from Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, works with the waters of the land to make her art. Interested in how the human body relates to the landscape, and considering the tensions at play between humans and the ecologies they seek to manipulate, Eve’s work inspires us to contemplate how we relate to the natural world around us.
Utilising sculpture, drawing and film, Eve McGovern Miller is predominantly interested in the paradoxical relationships between human, non-human, and land. Coolly minimalistic, their work uses aesthetics as a tool for subversion, highlighting the strained relationships in which humans seek to control ecology by placing themselves beyond and above our biosphere. Engaging with vital questions about it is to inhabit a damaged planet, and how to understand, and process the trauma that comes with holding an ecological awareness within a capitalist society.
Working with materials which a landscape of their own, McGovern Miller’s research-based practice considers how time relates to and further strains the relationship of human interference and response to the land and non-human species by offering alternative approaches to making kin, or familial connections with land and non-human, therefore re-becoming part of the multi-species entanglement within a functioning ecology.
By choosing how they move with and alongside land and water McGovern Miller is forming a slow relationship with the Tay River basin and those who live alongside. Seeking an alternative method for living within the Anthropocene, the work displays the kinship formed between an individual and the environment they inhabit, traversing from the foinse in the west, to the firth in the east.