Interconnectedness: Changing Landscapes
Date
2011-05-19
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Abstract
I visually explore landscape as inspired by looking through the lens of sustainability. This exploration considers a landscape in terms of systems and substances. Through papermaking, printmaking, mixed media assemblage and collage, drawing, and burning, layered images draw on multiple places and perspectives. The pieces represent “landscape” as the spatial entity of area that integrates the environment, living systems, and the human-made.
A place is not limited to a visual interpretation in terms of form, light, and relationships. I create maps, but unlike a cartographer I am free to disobey rules in order to build maps of collective knowledge that do not lead or point to a specific location. These maps become objects that challenge reality, orientation, time, and identity.
Space is a web of interconnectedness; matter, energy, and patterns combine into networks of infrastructure in the form of roads, electrical currents, sewage pipes, pathways, internet, and ecosystems. Climatic changes are altering the world, and the identity of places is shifting. Artistic actions are captured through regenerative combinations, movements, lines, and planes. I carve away at surfaces, reshaping and determining form and distance. Drawn and sewn ectors articulate the way mass moves through an area, forming linear and non-linear pathways and connections.
Uncertainty and unpredictability are part of my decision-making process, as I work through scenarios rather than executing a piece with a foreseen concrete outcome. Materials—such as found objects, landscaping materials, fire, and natural dyes—are challenged to play a large role in the work by becoming engaged with time, pressure, and heat.
My work explores a question: How do we form a relationship to the changing landscape? Rebecca Solnit writes, “How we inhabit the landscape is determined by our metaphors for how we live on earth.” Through both indoor artwork for gallery settings and outdoor environmental pieces this question is explored. I learn by experimenting, thereby becoming part of the conversation of urban and ecological landscapes.
Description
Images of art work available on CD ROM.
Keywords
Art, Environment, Sustainability, Landscape, Map, change, collage