Public Preview
Friday 2nd October
7 - 9pm
The Living Nature of the Stone-dead is an ongoing photographic and research project by Brazilian photographer and researcher Paula Pedrosa, exploring the relationship between geological time, extinct life and the contemporary landscape.
Beginning with Brazil’s rich paleontological and geological heritage, Pedrosa’s photographs move between fossil sites, geological formations, landscapes, museums, scientific collections and laboratories, alongside the many ways prehistoric life is reconstructed and imagined today. Fossils and geological formations sit alongside replicas, models and other contemporary representations of prehistoric creatures, revealing how our attempts to understand and reconstruct the past are themselves part of the present.
Bringing together scientific research and photographic observation, the project deliberately unsettles the boundaries between science and fiction, nature and culture, fact and imagination. Geological matter carries vast histories within it, while museums, scientific practices and popular imagery continually reactivate those histories through human curiosity, interpretation and developing knowledge. The seemingly inert “stone-dead” becomes unexpectedly alive.
Pedrosa invites us to look at the landscape through the perspective of deep time, a scale in which human history becomes a brief moment within a much longer story of transformation, extinction and renewal. Her photographs draw attention to things that are already around us, but which we may pass without noticing, such as traces of ancient life embedded in landscapes, buildings and everyday environments.
By pointing her camera towards these overlooked details, Pedrosa makes the familiar newly visible, encouraging us to see the world and the immense histories contained within it differently. The work reveals the vastness, complexity and unknowability of the natural world, prompting questions about our place within forces and timescales that extend far beyond human experience. What might these ancient histories reveal about our relationship with the natural world, and how might they change the way we understand our present and imagine our future?
About the Artist
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Paula Pedrosa, 1978, is an artist-biologist, based in São Paulo, Brazil, who uses photography as a creative basis.
Influenced by her educational background in natural sciences, she develops projects that investigate the concepts of contemporary nature, interweaving science and imagination, the micro and the macro, the factual and the marvellous.
Since 2015 she’s been showing her work national and internationally, participating in study groups, artistic residencies, organizing diffusion activities, and consulting for environmental visual projects.
In 2019 she published her first book, Diorama, and in 2022 she won the FCW Photography Award.
https://pedpaula.com/
Elysium Gallery
12-24 Bellevue Way
Swansea
SA1 5BY
Opening Hours
Wednesday - Saturday
11am - 5pm
Open until Thursday 31st October 2026