Description

We live in a world of man-made ‘worlds’ for example the art, natural, political and historical worlds, these ‘worlds’ are of our making and we could not function without them. Without them we would be lost, reduced to the ‘world view of an oyster’ for example, perceiving a mass of undifferentiated, unidentified information, which means little.

This work is an investigation into how we understand our ‘world’, associations and contexts in relation to nature are complicated and mixed up. Here I am interested in looking at our relationship with nature as a manifestation of the romantic landscape tradition and how this has created a distancing through the idea of the view.

Here the context is the historical idea of landscape as dominated by the image of a single human figure surveying 'his' domain, separated from 'his' surroundings, as can be seen in the work of 19th Century German artist Caspar David Friedrich. This situation reflects an idea of landscape as an object to be surveyed, used and dominated.

In this work this idea is subverted here landscape exerts its right for identification as an entity, containing its own view of itself with rights, a voice and an awareness of its right to exist and be recognised.