Landscape and art

In stillness and in movement, in the studio and in remote landscapes I am aware of a Self that seeks to express itself in shapes and forms that are beyond ego’s perception of what my artistic practice is or might become. Who will I be today? Where am I? How do I do this? Some factors are given – time, body and space. My video, photographic and performance work emerges from a dialetic relationship between inner ‘felt’ and outer ‘seen’ landscape. In this intersubjective space I engage with the ‘felt sense’, ‘numinous’, ‘the vague’, ‘the stillpoint’, the dreamworld, the underworld in the hopes that the artistic form will speak of both the outer physical and inner psychical landscape. In this ‘witnessing’ place I try to re-imagine my habits of perception and give undivided attention to what comes towards me without moving to impose sense or meaning. It is as though I begin to notice the particularity of the glasses I am wearing, the lens through which I look. Working to suspend what Husserl calls the rule of the vertical, ordering in hierarchies, for the rule of the horizontal where things are allowed equal weight. To witness, to view, is be a natural phenomenologist. I surrender to complexity. These three fragments of work (2 video and one still image) emerge from this process of generating creative articulations from experience. My hope is that they begin to articulate something about the inter-action between Psyche, Soma and Spirit. 1) Stillframewalk 1 (video) – 737 photographs taken on a contemplative walk in the west of Ireland made into video to create a jarring and dislocating sense of place and no place. 2) Stillframewalk 2 (photograph) – 400 photographs taken on a contemplative walk in the west of Ireland laid side by side in order to encourage the viewer to experience the walk in the landscape whilst also questioning the idea of panoram