2025: Strobe Apple

Strobe Apple is part of an ongoing body of work exploring altered perception, disability and ecological attention through a Phytocrip framework. The digital photograph depicts a ripe apple (growing in the artist’s garden) suspended within dense garden growth. Comfrey, fennel, bramble and an overgrown apple tree create a layered landscape of competing textures and shades of green. Across the fruit, a vivid fluorescent pink intervention introduces a visual disruption that resembles a signal, flash or perceptual anomaly. The work emerged from the artist’s attempts to understand early visual disturbances caused by a giant brain aneurysm pressing against the optic nerves. Prior to diagnosis, experiences of the natural world became increasingly uncertain as perception was altered in ways that were difficult to recognise or describe. Strobe Apple uses a digitally drawn intervention to evoke the instability of seeing and the difficulty of distinguishing between external phenomena and neurological change. The garden holds particular significance within this context. Following prolonged hospitalisation and rehabilitation in 2022/23, access to the garden became both a goal and a measure of recovery. Plants returning in spring appeared less as decorative features than as companions and way-markers, like old friends popping back to see me. Returning to these familiar environments also prompted a reassessment of earlier experiences of looking, noticing and misinterpreting visual information. Green occupies a complex position within the work. Once associated with the intense presence of surgical environments and hospital care (the colour of the gowns of the surgeons), it is re-encountered through thriving vegetation, seasonal cycles and embodied knowledge of plants. Then neon pink strobe mark interrupts this field of green, acting as both warning signal and attention device, pointing towards the fragile and negotiated relationship between vision, knowledge and the living world; seemingly synthetic and organic. Part of Genevieve Rudd’s ongoing phytocrip practice, Strobe Apple considers how disability can reshape perception and how gardens can become sites for re-learning to trust in one’s senses. The work asks what it means to look back at a landscape that was always familiar, while recognising that it was once being seen through the distortions of an undiagnosed neurological condition. [photograph with digital drawn intervention.]