The Return of the Native is a series of short digital animations that ‘reintroduces’ formerly indigenous insect and bird life to the contemporary agricultural landscape of the East Anglian Fenland. Over the last fifty years in particular, the volume and variety of birds and insects in this part of the country has declined dramatically as the land has become even more intensively farmed. Highlighting extinct or endangered species such as the Marsh Warbler or the Swallowtail butterfly, Best reintegrates them digitally into archetypal fenland locations — the slightly studied and stylised nature of each composition, in which the respective elements somehow don’t quite fit together, eliciting a haunting and disquieting sense of loss. This feeling is doubled by the mode of display, in which each of Best’s delicate animations are shown on miniature plasma screens and sealed within vitrine-like glass cases.
