Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian is an Armenian-American artist. She is known for conceptual works that explore themes of mapping, translation, and public space. I gathered some of her photographs from a portfolio called Uninvited Collaborations with Nature. The most famous of these is her “Mended Spiderwebs” work where she spent a period of six weeks in the summer of 1998 fixing broken spiderwebs using red sewing thread in the area surrounding her home.

Uninvited Collaborations with Nature

In this picture, the light from the sun reflects off of multiple surfaces; framing the spiderwebs. The natural light, also helps the spiderwebs to appear bolder against the dark painted wood of the house. It highlights the imperfections in the web making the details much better to look at. I liked the use of light here; so I decided to take my found objects out during the day and use the light of the sun.

The striking feature of this photograph is the silhouette of the leaves as the sun shines through the trees. I feel that it makes the photograph more that a showcase of mended spiderwebs. The positioning of the objects in the foreground also frame the spiderwebs with its horizontal line. This makes the spider webs appear interesting as your focus is drawn to it because of the frame.

Our focus in this picture is drawn to the object which sits in the centre of the frame. Its bold red colour stands out against the background which has not much business going on – it is blurred and out of focus which suits the object very well as we not usually drawn to tiny spiderwebs.

Here, Nina used an old bicycle repair kit to patch up a group of mushrooms that had small tears in this. Linking to the previous picture the background in not too busy and doesn’t draw the attention away from the object in the middle. It, however, is covered partially with shadow and I feel like this doesn’t frame the mushrooms as well as they could. The main colour of the mushrooms (the creamy white palette) makes them stand out against the green and brown background – I liked the boldness of the brown and green so I decided to use a park to create a nice background for my objects.