 I started in a very simple way actually, I thought well since I knew so little about the place I wanted initially to speak to people who had been around, who had been in fact combatants at the time of the start of the state. So I spoke both to Arab Israelis, Palestinian Israelis about what that time in their life meant, what their perspectives were. I was kind of interested in this idea of being a bridge or conduit, the ability to cross between one community and the other and to listen and to follow the trajectory of that message onward. Actually the Desert Bloom series that's part of this exhibition grew out of a much longer in way inquiry that was my first project in Israel which was entitled Memory Trace, which was looking at the sites of the villages that had been evacuated in 48. Following the trajectory from those villages to the people who are today living in exile in the refugee communities or in the West Bank. And so for me what was interesting was this idea that you could meet people who are now 80, 90, 100 years old and then follow their story back across the border to the village that they left that they fled 65 years ago and to which they have not returned in the time in between. So in a way looking at what had happened to those villages of 48, the way in which the land had transformed those spaces. My in a very sort of fortuitous trip in a way down south in the Negev was in a village sitting in what had been a village actually under a tent looking out across the land where the village had been raised just a couple of weeks prior. And now already were the troughs in place for the beginning of the afforestation of a JNF forest that would occupy that area. It would be entitled The Ambassador Forest which would be a green belt that would surround Bersheba. And in a way I think immediately I had the sense of it wasn't something that had struck me ever before but I had the sense that perhaps it was important to see the context to move above the land and to think about this invocation from Ben-Gurion to make the Desert Bloom. So it was a kind of open-ended questioning of what the invocation to make the Desert Bloom actually had done to the land in the intervening years. Well in terms of the research actually and the way in which I worked I worked in a very odd manner in that I thought it was important at first to experience the land from above without the interface of great research meaning that I didn't want to in essence read about a space and then fly above it and photograph it. I rather wanted to be open to respond to what the land was instructing me, teaching me. And in doing so flying many times across the southern Negev I felt as though that allowed me the opportunity to be receptive to subtle clues that I might otherwise not have been receptive to. Following on having made this set of images I then went back and determined the ones that I felt were the most effective and began to research what that specific spot on earth, the history of that place, what was going on at the moment there. So some of them are about existing villages, others are about a forestation or militarization of the land, the transformation of the landscape. And this idea for me that was very important was imagining in the spaces where you see the beginning of a forest atop what had perhaps been a village. To imagine that in 20 years from now were I to return to that same place I would see this beautiful forest but would I know what was subsumed within the land? Would I be able to access the memory of what the land holds? And so I think in a way the process for me or maybe that suited my sensibilities best was this idea of experiencing something in the first instance and then interrogating it very carefully, laterally to find out what in fact how that fit into this puzzle of the dynamics, the way in which the Negev is being transformed in the last years. And then when I started to research more carefully what those images were I looked also at the history of aerial photography of Israel and particularly the Negev finding that in fact the Bavarians had flown above the land recording the space in 1918. And in 1945 there was also an archive from the RAF, the British having photographed the landscape. Similarly in the Haganah archives there were many images of the land and this was in a way what I realized about aerial photography is the great power in one's hands when you're photographing the space from above. It's a kind of orchestrated militarization of that space and I actually wanted to turn that construct a bit on its head to try and make images that were perhaps open and a little bit more intimate with the space that I was looking at. I wanted to trim away the layers of the surface and try to allow what's subsumed within the lands to come forward.