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| Felled #3 Version #1 |
This work was initiated as a response to the sense that much environmental issue based photography is problematic, in that it tends to rely too heavily on the sublime, alienating the viewer with an over reliance on the depiction of environmental degradation and the use of methods such as aerial photography, distancing the viewer and leaving them with a sense of dis-empowerment and disconnection, lacking any understanding of the dynamism of land as a site of constant change that we are participants in and affected by in our lives.
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| A deer in the woods |
By drawing on phenomenology, the philosophy of the senses, in the works of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, this project has sought to apply an understanding of the mechanisms of perception in the formation and communication of senses of connection to and resonances with land.
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| The Cage #1 Version #2 |
The work has concentrated on how we understand a scene we encounter through a combination of optical information from the eyes and the constructive processes involved in the mind of interpreting this scene. I investigate this perceptual gap that Merleau-Ponty (1968) describes as the chiasm, through photographic com-positing techniques.
Rather than making the work seamless, I deliberately include distortions, breaks and repetitions of elements resulting from both automated and manual digital construction, thereby reflecting on the actual and durational construction processes that occur in the mind of a scene.
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| A Fox, I thought version #1 |
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| A Fox, I thought version #2 |
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| A Fox, I thought version #3 |
The work does not take a site specific approach, rather, it examines woodlands as a site type from Britain and Ireland. This multi-site approach involves many revisits and the use of time-lapse imaging to emphasize difference and change both of the scene and of my perception of it. Although this process is a form of place-making for myself, the artist and participant in the environment, as Lucy Lippard and Hamish Fulton point out, the experience of place cannot be expressed in an artwork. Hence I am not documenting sites, but interpreting them as a generic environment of perception and change. To do this I approach each scene as a dynamic space with many elements of interest, a coherent environment, rather than a specific place.
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| Tree-fall #1 version #1 |
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| Tree-fall #1 version #3 |
One recurrent and common element of the woodland is the tree-fall. These works were made as a result of the confluence of stimuli from the environment and from my own personal memories of excavating the remains of tree-bowls as an archaeologist. When I first encountered a tree-fall I was reminded of three instances in three different locations across two countries and spanning ten years. I was also reminded of the prehistoric sites I had excavated and the imagined lives of those living there on the basis of the evidence gathered through excavation dating from 2000-6000 years ago.
Although these multiple memories prompted me to make these works, It is acknowledged that the viewer of these works are not going to respond in the same way, they will bring their own interpretations to the scene as they participate in the viewing experience.
This emphasizes the ambiguous nature of photographic visual communication, leading to multiple readings that are not unilinear or temporally chronological, neither are they geographically fixed.
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| Blue Land #1 |
This ambiguity was highlighted when I displayed a large scale version of the above work to a group of PhD arts students and asked them to note, without conferring, what the image brought to mind. There was a consensus amongst a number of them that the work reminded them of a graveyard, something that I, as the one with experience of the actual place, had not thought of.
The works, then, take on their own lives, reflecting on both the nature of perception and memory, and on the dynamism of the environment, allowing the viewer to act as a participant in this process of engagement and creating resonances and personal connections to the scenes depicted.
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