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| returning |
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| Nature is always at the centre
of my work. Whether my concerns are social, personal,
or spiritual, nature is where I look to understand
my place in the world. The starting point for my
work is the acceptance that nature is not necessarily
as I know it to be. I allow myself to consider nature
out of context, to displace it into a relationship
that is unfamiliar. Questions evolve, one leading
to another, the process of learning always inspiring
new directions. |
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| Most recently I have been thinking
of nature as the context for human mortality. Last
year while traveling on a six-month sabbatical through
Tunisia, Greece, Turkey and Italy, I became particularly
interested in burial sites and the ceremonies, vessels
and images associated with them. Apart from obvious
and expected differences in the traditions surrounding
death and dying, it became clear to me that influences
also come directly from the landscape. |
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| The most immediate relationship
between death and the landscape is decay. If we
acknowledge that the process of decay is a physical
event of duration, can we not also think of death
as a physical, temporal process rather than an event
of the moment? Whether ultimately leading to an
abandonment of existence or a transformation elsewhere,
death also includes the experience of our bodies
being re-absorbed into the earth. Death is a time
of our existence where things are happening. |
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| The evolution of my work has brought
me to think of death as a time of our most intimate
relationship with nature. Without dismissing whatever
other spiritual significance death might have for
us, it also marks a coming together of whatever
we have decided is Human on the one hand and of
Nature on the other. What might nature’s cycles
reveal to us about our own sense of temporal and
physical existence? When do the layers of earth
stop reaching up to this moment in time? What makes
up the landscape and where does it end? How many
lives are contained in a stone? |
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| This body of work is an attempt
to explore these ideas and possibilities, to question
what, between us, might be absorbed or transformed,
or perhaps even reveal itself as having always been
the same. |
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