Finding Eden explores the tension between queer identity, anxiety, and the fragility of the environment. The work uses self portraiture, focusing on the male nude to look at vulnerability across both body and landscape.
The male body has often been shown as strong and fixed. Fergus presents it differently. Soft, exposed and unsettled. The figure shifts between subject and object. Personal, political, and environmental ideas meet here. The landscape is not just a backdrop. It shapes how the body moves and how the image is made. Highlighting the impermanence of the human and the current state of global environments.
The work is rooted in place. Landscapes tied to memory and personal history. Returning to the site of his father’s ashes as an area of reflection, through returning to these spaces, he explores ideas of change, loss, and belonging.
Reflecting on how we move through the world. What we leave behind. And what remains.
