Devious Powers

Nature’s changes and its disappearance and renewal are topics which interest Matya Shick as an artist who experienced some personal crisis. Shick chose the vantage point of aerial photography which she ‘re-connects’ with the ground through imprinting on ceramic porcelain tiles, and metal.

The aerial photography is taken mainly from a light, twin-engine plane, Air Cam, which has been developed and adjusted especially for National Geographic. It has no canopy and is able to fly low and slow. The shooting is done while flying, without a tripod and in constant wind, so that the photographer’s speed of reaction and steady hand are vital.

The perspective and the high angle present a broad vista of powerful and fascinating desert landscape in which geological and ecological changes take place. Shick finds inspiration in the amazing palette of colors Nature uses in order to ‘paint’ the desert landscape at the Dead Sea. She documents the dissonance between the remarkable landscape texture and the ecological process of the drying Dead Sea, and highlights the change nature goes through in order to achieve a new ecological balance, thus letting the region go on surviving.

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