In her series Postcards from Pachamama, London-born photographer and multimedia artist Jessy Boon Cowler explores the relationship between nature and artifice, and the human connection to both using analog and digital techniques. Using paper collage, the artist combines a collection of her 35mm images taken in Latin America with a selection of digital nudes, creating new forms that marry the two elements in a playful, celebratory symbiosis.

The warm allure of Latin America holds personal significance for Cowler. In her own words, as someone from the cold climate of her South London home, the exoticism of a foreign land holds the fantasy of a place where “we can let go of our inhibitions” while also speaking to “the shame felt due to an inherited history of colonization”. Cowler has been deeply influenced by the Latin American philosophy of Buen Vivir, which centers on the subject of well-being as more than the individual, “but the individual in the social context of their community and in a unique environmental situation."

The images in Postcards are forward in their sensuality, capturing faceless figures clutching their own naked bodies in appreciation and apparent rapture. Cowler is selective in how she crops and edits her subjects — in one image, the arm of her subject is pasted over with a tropical sunset, the burnt sienna hues spreading through the muse’s fingertips to clutch at their backside. In another, the torso itself has been replaced with an image of the ocean’s horizon flipped sideways, while the hands grasping the waist retain their original human form.

This melting of the natural world with the nude body is intentional. Many of Cowler’s projects have focused on themes of dislocation between the natural and constructed world, and she has commented that our detachment from nature is tantamount to “our detachment from and prejudice towards one another”. Yet, while she sees her work as an important statement and “a campaign to see ourselves as a part of a unified greater whole”, the series is unequivocally tongue in cheek, unburdened by the sobriety that so many works calling for social action often carry. The colors are vibrant and joyful, the figures liberated and enraptured in their poses.

Named one of Firecracker’s “10 Women to Watch in 2020”, Cowler supplements her artistic projects by facilitating photography workshops intended to educate and empower. If dualities and opposing forces are common threads throughout PostcardsFromPachamama, Cowler uses her practice to forge connections between them — blending nature with artifice, analog and digital — proving that seemingly disparate polarities can not only coexist, but complement one another.

For more of Jessy Boon Cowler’s work, visit her portfolio here