06 Jun Landscape

The term landscape can refer to a single view of expansive natural scenery, an artwork that depicts a natural landscape, or the features that are important in a particular situation. Etymologically, the word landscape can be broken into land and –scape or –ship. The word land describes a belonging of and to place.  The –ship has two meanings, it is the –ship of friendship or relationship and designates the sharing of something abstract. Ship also shares an ultimate Germanic root with shape. Within the word itself are the roots of landscape being shaped through representation and perception (Olwig, 2005). A landscape can be defined as an interaction between human bodies and the land or environment, a conversation shaped by memories and experiences (Johannesdottir, 2010) and through culture and inherited myths (Schama, 1996). To further extend this, a landscape is not something we look at but “the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings” (Ingold, 2000, p207).

The world (my world) has shifted dramatically due to COVID-19. Where my project began with a view to moving through and responding to the Tasmanian landscape, it is now concentrated in a small domestic space over which a cypress tree looms. In this particular situation, the features of landscape are held in the branches and needles of a cypress tree. The project explores the reciprocal and interstitial relationships between this landscape and my experience of it.  In the tree branches hang half remembered fairy tales, postcards from travels and early European paintings of a stolen land. Projected on its needles are my own feelings of displacement and discomfort at an enforced quarantine. The landscape of the project is entwined with my ongoing experience of dwelling within it. As Merleau-Ponty describes, landscape is the world we live in rather than a scene to view (in Wylie, 2007, p149).

The landscape of the cypress tree is read from my own position, through my own stories and senses, from inside my body. Underneath the tree and up close, I can touch the rough bark and hear the birds in the tree branches, and it becomes another tree entirely – a concrete landscape, rooted in place. Watching this tree from a distance; it is a landscape of a single conifer, a sign of a forest, a memory of other distant forests and a marker within a broader neighbourhood.  

References

Ingold, T. (2000) The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill, London: Routledge

Johannesdottir, G.R. (2010). Landscape and aesthetic values: not only in the eye of the beholder. In: Lund, K. A. (2010) Conversations with Landscape, 1^st ed. New York: Routledge

Olwig K.R., (2005) Representation and alienation in the political land-scape. cultural geographies (12) pp. 19-40

Schama, S., 1995, Landscape and Memory, Toronto: Random House of Canada

Wylie, J. (2009) Landscape. Oxon: Routledge