Photographer and video artist Denise Batchelor creates a contemplative video installation in the Window Project Space and main gallery at Lopdell House Gallery’s New Lynn location titled Silent Wings for the Auckland Festival of Photography.There is a familiarity to Batchelor’s work, a sense that we are being shown something that perhaps we tend to overlook or not take the time to notice. With images that appear to be moving and videos that appear to be still, Batchelor plays with the passages of time and space, creating a quiet and meditative work.The viewer is encouraged to get close to the work and to connect with the nature that she depicts. These are works of contemplation that offer the viewer access to an interstitial realm between movement and stillness. The deliberate combining of the stillness and silence of photography with the time and motion of moving image provides for meditative encounters with the natural world, one that is distinctly New Zealand.Batchelor utilises photography and film to capture moments that simultaneously embrace the familiar, yet reflect the overlooked or unnoticed. These moments explore the relationships between time and place while questioning the structuralist divide of the self and other.“Contemporary Western culture can create a feeling of separateness in which we experience nature as somehow outside of ourselves and disconnected from. My work attempts to bridge these seemingly separate worlds, creating a more intimate space in which to engage and connect”.Denise is a 2013 National Contemporary Art Award finalist and has exhibited widely in New Zealand in galleries, art centres & festivals and more recently took part in the AIVA International Video Festival in Sweden. She graduated a Master of Fine Arts(Hons) from Whitecliffe College of Art & Design in 2011.