Proposal

Summary.

A landscape can refer to a single view of expansive natural scenery, or an artwork that depicts a natural landscape. A landscape can also be defined as an interaction between human bodies and the land or environment, a conversation shaped by memories and experiences (Johannesdottir, 2010). In this project I take the term landscape as being a natural environment that I inhabit and so exist in and/or with. We (as humans) construct this type of 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.

Our experience of landscape takes place at varying degrees of proximity and distance. We take in snapshots from car windows, vistas from lookouts (from a distance) and study specks of quartz in pebbles (in close proximity). Our emotional distance varies too; we can feel that a place is connected to us, through generations of experience, through the memories that it invokes, or the threads of connections that it generates for us. Alternatively, our experience of landscape can emerge and then pass as something insignificant and unnoticed. Most landscapes though, fall somewhere in between, and their significance remains in flux, tempered by physical forces and our own shifting interpretations. My project explores this shifting of physical and emotional proximity, how it affects our experience of landscape and how it can be represented.

The backpack of myths and recollections that we carry (Schama, 1995) affects the dialogue between external landscapes and internal feelings, shifting our proximity to a landscape. As you experience a landscape, a certain view looks just like the brochure said it would, you brush against a flower that conjures up your grandmother, and a sense of solastalgia[1] layers a sea view with dying kelp forests. These 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.

This project explores a range of responses to landscape framed by a visible / external and an invisible / internal dialogue. In considering the consequences of diverse degrees of proximity and distance, 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 basis of this project is a tension between painting as a representation of a landscape, as a process in a landscape, and as a distillation of the feeling of being in a landscape. Artists of contextual relevance to my project work in these very different ways in 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. 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 this process where traces of the experience remain.

Other artists work in a process [in situ] within the landscape. John Wolseley prints with inks and watercolour directly from leaves and branches, takes rubbings of beetle tracks, drags paper over burnt trees and kiln fires wasps’ nests. Artists such as Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy work with objects found in the landscape creating installations that are photographed. Again, 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 but then photographed and so distanced from the original site.

Rothko’s artworks, in particular the Seagram series in the Tate Modern, distill the feeling of existing in a 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. The luminous colours resonate, and breathe, and the scale of the work encloses you in its own world. Representation has dissolved and the viewer is immersed in a distillation of an internal landscape.

The video works of contemporary artists Cate Consandine (Cut Colony, 2012) and Shaun Gladwell (Storm Sequence, 2000) explore the human body in dialogue with the Australian landscape and the physical expression of psychological states. I am interested in how ideas of proximity and distance can be read in these works, 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.

Significance. 

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

On a personal level, I have recently moved to Tasmania and am finding my relationship to landscape, and the experience of exploring the state, to be profoundly affected by the fears of climate change. I am also aware of my own distance to the landscapes I encounter as foreign places, where I have no connection. However, I also generate and feel a closeness and immersion in these landscapes via the veil of my own memories and connections triggered by a material, physical contact. The project explores how these changing proximities and contacts shift my perception and ability to respond.  

On a global level, we are currently faced with significant environmental concerns. My project explores new ways of relating to landscape within this context.  I seek to explore how these concerns and fears, and the despair felt at increasing environmental devastation, affect our collective perceptions and experience of landscape.  

On a personal level, 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 10-12 large scale works on paper that explore a physical and emotional proximity and distance in relation to landscape.

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 working with watercolour, ink and charcoal and beginning to experiment with techniques of digital and physical manipulation of 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 sites, using digital manipulation and image transference through frottage and printing. 

References

Albrecht, G., (2012). The age of solastalgia, The Conversation, August 7 2012

Creswell Bell, A. (2018), A Painted Landscape: Across Australia from Bush to Coast. Australia: Thames & Hudson

Jullien, F. (2009). The great image has no form, or on the nonobject through painting, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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

Jullien, F. (2016). The philosophy of living, USA: Seagull Books

McFarlane, R. (2016). Landmarks. UK: Penguin

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

Schama, S., (2006). Power of art, USA: Penguin Group


[1] Solastalgia is “an emplaced or existential melancholia experienced with the negative transformation (desolation) of a loved home environment” (Albrecht, 2012).

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