Proposal

Summary

This project explores notions of embodiment and connection with landscape through the lens of the large cypress tree that sits in the park next to my apartment. Through recursive processes of research and practice the project investigates the shifting and everchanging connections made with a specific landscape. 

We construct landscape through our senses in combination with the traces of other landscapes, through veils of memories, our fears, and cultural understandings. In this way, our relationship to the landscape shifts and slips, as it is processed in dialogue between the external physicality of the terrain and our internal feelings and interpretations. Thin threads of connections and veils of memories filter and affect the dialogue you have with the landscape, indelibly changing your own feelings towards it; some pulling you close emotionally or physically, and some pushing you back. The landscape itself talks back too; towering granite walls or vast, windblown sand dunes engender their own responses that are far more than a pictorial representation can capture.

A landscape is constructed by our own embodied experience; it 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). As the world in which I stand has contracted due to COVID-19, the landscape has condensed into my embodied experience of a single, large, dense cypress tree.

The landscape of the cypress tree is foreign but familiar, it somehow feels the wrong landscape however it is the only one that is close. Projected on its needles are my own feelings of displacement and discomfort at an enforced quarantine…

This project explores a range of responses to landscape framed by a visible / external and an invisible / internal dialogue. The investigation develops artworks that engage experience of the landscape, documentation within the landscape (through photography, drawing, and painting) and construction and assemblage of artefacts and materials. Core to the project is a tension between visual representation and a more oblique or abstract translation of a landscape experience.

Context

At the core of this project is a tension between painting as a representation of, as a record of process in situ with, and as a distillation of the embodied experience ofa landscape, which, in the case of this project, is a specific tree and its affiliated surrounds. Artists of contextual relevance to my project apply these processes (the poles of the aforementioned “tensions”) in very different ways through exploring the relationship between the artist and the landscape.  

Representation of landscape can be illustrated by artists such as Brett Whiteley, Luke Sciberras, Elisabeth Cummings, John Olsen and Clifford How. These artists work in paint on canvas taking images from the landscape and creating framed views that embody a sense of distance from the landscape, back in their studios. The work that appeals most from these artists are the raw works; sketches that may be unfinished, or attempts to capture fleeting light in a particular moment.  For example, Scibberas works en plein air but then takes these works back to the studio to create a final artwork. The process further distances the original landscape and I am interested in where an index of the experience may be found in this process.

Other artists work in a process [in situ] within the landscape. John Wolseley explores the index as he records physical manifestations of the landscape printing with inks and watercolour directly from leaves and branches, taking rubbings of beetle tracks, dragging paper over burnt trees and kiln firing wasps’ nests. Artists such as Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy work with objects found in the landscape creating installations that are then photographed. I am interested in the shifting proximity and distance in both the process and in the final artworks. Wolseley’s works shift in and out of details and vistas and through veils of distances. Goldsworthy’s work is physical and tactile then subsequently photographed and so distanced from the original site. I am also interested in how terroir shapes both the process and character of the artworks; the integral role of the specificity of the site and the ”ecosophy” (Guattari, 1992 in Schuilenburg, 2011) of an experience and resultant artwork.

This project explores embodiment and landscape, the dissolve between body and landscape, and Rothko’s Seagram murals are instrumental in providing an example of how this dissolution can not only be portrayed, but can also engender an embodied experience for the viewer. The Seagram series in the Tate Modern, distil an embodied experience of landscape. I am interested in the way they dissolve the boundaries of the paint surface and the viewer, demanding that the viewer feels rather than thinks or interprets, and provoking a visceral response and embodied experience. The luminous colours resonate, and breathe, and the scale of the work encloses you in its own world.

The video works of contemporary artists Cate Consandine (Cut Colony, 2012) and Shaun Gladwell (Storm Sequence, 2000) explore the embodied experience of the Australian landscape and the physical expression of psychological states. These works introduce ideas of proximity and distance and how they affect the experience of the landscape and of the work: The artist performing/directing, the gaze connecting/averting, the natural sound magnified/removed. I am interested in the exploration of portraying an embodied experience and how this is explored via a hypnotic use of repetition and recursion in these works.

The project’s focus on the embodied experience of landscape is also present in the works of Jan Hogan, (series from the Truganini track, 2015) and Sue Lovegrove (the book the voice of water, 2019). Lovegrove speaks of feeling the patterns of the world inside her body (Hay, 2012), and both artists explore the landscape as an interpretation of the world through their senses.

Significance

This project has significance at a global and a personal level.  

On a personal level, I have recently moved to Tasmania and I am aware of my own distance to the landscapes I encounter as foreign places, where I have no connection. However, I am also embodied in these landscapes via physical proximity and experience, and through the connections made with my own memories triggered by this material, physical contact. The repeated dialogue with the one landscape that has been in close proximity during these disconcerting months provides a lens through which to view my own relationship with landscape.

On a global level, the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted our relationship to one another and the way in which we can exist in our world. My project explores ways of relating to landscape within this context. I seek to investigate how these new and shifting boundaries and connections affect our collective perceptions and experience of landscape.

The project also has significance for it posits my own artmaking practice as a form of self-reflection.  In exploring the tension in my own practice, between a physical representation and a more expressive distillation of feelings and ideas, the project becomes a way of processing my own relationship to artmaking.

Outcome

I plan to create an installation of works on paper that explore an embodied response to the landscape of the cypress tree outside my window. The project will involve: an exploration of landscape representation; an investigation of in situ processes within landscape; and enquire into a dissolve of the artist/landscape distinction.

I am currently exploring mark making with watercolour, ink and charcoal, and using ink and brushes from the cypress itself. The slowing down associated with COVID-19 isolation has impacted the project due to the various changing and shifting boundaries. For example, the subject’s terroir has changed entirely, and hence the project has adapted to reflect this change. In this contracted world, external distance and spread has only been possible in a digital realm. The project reflects this via an experimentation with digital techniques in addition to the physical manipulation of both still and moving images.

I intend to explore the traces left and the contact made between internal and external landscapes. I will work with a view to translate this process through incorporating materials found on site, using digital manipulation and image transference through frottage, grattage and printing; recursive processes of digital artmaking, copying and reworking that mirror the reciprocity of the project itself.

References

Consandine, C. (2012) Cut Colony, installation. AGNSW, Sydney

Gladwell, S. (2000) Storm Sequence, video. MCA, Sydney

Hay, P. (2012) Shape of the wind: pattern & chaos in Sue Lovegrove’s island art. Artlink. Retrieved from: https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/3761/shape-of-the-wind-pattern-26-chaos-in-sue-lovegrove/?fbclid=IwAR1lJCIX_sXUV-pvRwrkmz0gEIzH1MFHotIrKFdXSF7qP9UcbkTvB-3mnr8

Hogan, J. (2015) Membrane of Memory: Care Instructions. Exhibition. Langford 120, Melbourne

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

Lovegrove, S. & Eberhard, A. (2019) The Voice of Water: An Exploration of the Ephemeral Life of Wetlands in Miniature Paintings and Poems. Tasmania: Lovegrove, S. & Eberhard, A.

Rothko, M. (1958-9) Seagram murals, Mural Sections 2–5, 7. Tate Modern, London

Schuilenburg, M. (2011) The Right to Terroir Place and Identity in Times of Immigration and Globalization. Open (21), pp. 21-28              

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