Plains series
This body of work developed from my interest in ecology, and is, in part, a response to traditional Western landscape painting. I am interested in how landscape as an image is read and understood. Landscape art in the Western tradition relies on the illusion of receding space and positions the viewer outside the picture plane as surveyor, suggesting division and governance. I recognize a more encompassing understanding of place that does not favour imitation of the world by fixed a vantage point and illusionist devices such as planimetric perspective. And rather than producing the picturesque, I am interested in addressing the sensory properties and experience of the natural environment - how we understand place through sensory properties and the mind. In this, I am interested in what the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty described as “the lived perspective”. This understanding of place favours comprehension through consciousness and bodily experience. This work is not concerned with depicting the physical specifics of a locality, rather it looks to address the experience or sense of place through the process and language of painting.
This project was inspired by travels through the prairie ecozone in the southern area of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, from 2003-2005.
