Saturday 7 February 2009
Landscape Photography
Thought Form 1 Photograph, Pencil, Charcoal, Chalk
Through contemplation of the changing and ephemeral forces of nature, my work inquires into the shifting physical and psychological nature of place. Walt Whiteman wrote that "Nature consists not only in itself objectively, but at least just as much in its subjective reflection from the person, spirit, age, looking at it, in the midst of it, and absorbing it: [it] faithfully sends back the characteristic beliefs of the time or individual" (cited in Hill, 1996).
Thus, my journey through landscape is a meditative process of self-reflection flowing in the tributaries of cultural influence that feed my artistic production. Through this process, I sift the silt of accumulated cultural memory from the streams of my subconscious. Wes Nisker writes:
"The concept of self - along with the innermost sense of what it feels like to be a person changes over time. A nomadic tribesman of 500 B.C., a medieval peasant woman, and a modern middle class corporate employee would have very different notions about their place in the cosmos, their self-importance, their personal freedom, and their relationship to the forces of nature and other people. Who we think we are depends to a significant degree upon which wave we ride in the streams of biological and cultural evolution-where and when we are born. We don’t create our self so much as the evolving idea of ‘self’ creates us" (1998, p. 10).
Romantic notions of liminality and transcendence are apparent in my work. German idealist philosophy of the late 18th and early 19th century attempted to shift mystical and theological motifs into a newly articulated aesthetic experience. "In experiencing the work of art one is brought to the limits of the self and made to look into the beyond. This signals a universal desire to escape the linearity and finitude of history, to escape time and place, to transcend the limits of selfhood" (Morely, 1998, p. 28).
Historically, representations of nature were regarded as the best vehicle for the communication of the sublime experience. Edmond Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) contributed to the development of a romantic tradition that looked for the sublime in the least reassuring aspects of nature, in darkness and storms, in the wastes of the sea and desert. Having lost favour within contemporary discourse, this aesthetic tradition requires re-contextualization, and a re-interpretation of its sublime possibilities.
Postmodern critique deconstructs the utopian aspirations of a romantic tradition that sought to exemplify edifying ideals, instead positing an absolute relativity of phenomena. This theoretical position, popularised in academic discourse by Jean Baudrillards philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation (1985), denies the art object’s claim to utopian functionality by democratizing all images within a groundless simulacrum. Subsequently, no image can claim to function as the authoritative embodiment of visionary experience. The artist Violet Hopkins “highlights this relationship between the limitations of art and the boundlessness of nature, yet proposes that there can be a reconciliation of these two positions through a self mediated experience” (cited in Choit, 2001). Hopkins makes her art, “not as a way of attempting to create the sublime within a singular representation but to demonstrate a longing for it by the act of trying to represent it within such a limited means” (Ibid).
Conversely, it is through a meditative process of self-reflection that my work celebrates a relationship with nature, following its movements outwardly and inwardly in hope of apprehending the sublime possibilities it my yield. Self is implicated in my work as a dynamic and evolving agent, with a focus on mindfulness and self-awareness. In the words of William Blake “to the eyes of the man of imagination Nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees” (1995, p. 35).
The positioning of my work is intentionally ambiguous, oscillating between romantic sincerity and cultural pastiche. Accordingly, repetition between images of form and subject matter references simulation, while intimations of a romantic sublime dislocate the artist’s intentions within an eclectic haze. This ambiguity establishes a tension between shifting modern and postmodern paradigms, providing a background from which to reflect upon changing attitudes towards beauty and sublimity, and again highlights how changing attitudes influence perception.
By acknowledging multiple parameters for interpretation, echoed in a vaporous blending of multimedia, I blur the conceptual boundaries of my imagery within a multi dimensional space in which there exists the possibility for many different readings. Thus, I make my work accessible to an audience as a means for engaging in discourse rather than rhetoric. Absence of definitive meaning allows for a state of constant flux, these mirrors of passing clouds and liquid surfaces, ephemeral as dreams, evade the grasping imposition of the rational mind. Abandoning any attempt to arrive at a final interpretation they can be regarded as an invitation to abandon all judgments and silently merge with the sensuous and mysterious unfolding of the moment.
This paradoxical position refuses and simultaneously confers meaning. Indeed, it is a principle of structuralism that all language is hinged on binary oppositions. The western Zen Buddhist Scholar Christmas Humphries observes, “when thought is divided dualistically, it seeks to favour one at the cost of the other, but as dualism is the very condition of thought, it is impossible for thought to rise above its own condition” (Humphries, 1969, p. 16). My images evidence relationships between oppositions; modernity and post modernity, mystical aspiration and theoretical deconstruction - A beam of sunlight splits the clouds dividing a seascape into opposite halves of light and dark.
Rawson notes, "one potent metaphor for the Void, often used in Tibetan art, is the sky. As the sky is the emptiness that offers clouds to our perception, so the Void is the 'space' in which objects appear to us in response to our attachments and longings."
Thought Form III Photograph, Chalk, Pencil
The employment of multimedia, blending elements of sketching and photography with painterly subject matter, alludes to the indeterminate and dream-like nature of reality, and can be regarded as an attempt to focus the viewer’s gaze on a sense of place and identity that transcends finite boundaries. It is not my intention to establish a position from which to defend or enforce a particular point of view, but rather, to fabricate a radical contingency. As the painter Simon Morley states:
Art is always a negotiation at the borderline, it can never cast us into the unbounded...art’s goal is to register the impossibility of making present again what it depicts. What art does, therefore is mirror the ways in which structure - our finite sense of self - is entirely contingent, and how this contingent self can be made into a vehicle through which the transcendent possibility can be experienced (1998, p. 33).
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