Above the grid : multidimensional perspectives in landscape

Landscape and maps are a rich source for metaphor on which to build a symbolic and empirical language when coding and decoding the world. The perception of maps, in a Eurocentric context, as Cartesian representations of the grid include all the implications associated with power, ownership and colonisation. However, maps also contain coded information in relation to topography, movement and the inscription of spatial history. It is in this meeting of ephemeral action and the material of land where I explore philosophical questions about nature and our place within it.Research for this thesis led to analogous connections between the material universe and the spiritual domain and research into the techniques of painters such as Sean Scully and Brice Marden led to the significance of material in art as a transformative medium. A search for analogous connections in the modern abstract art movement and indigenous art, in particular Australian desert painters, led to the discovery of philosophical similarities underpinning contemporary Aboriginal art and early modernist abstract painters, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. This research has shifted my painting practice to a position where I can open out to more diverse possibilities in the depiction of rhythm and movement in landscape