Being in the Land (Shenandoah)

Being in the Land is a series of artworks inspired by my desire to make contact with the memory and intelligence embodied by landscapes. By making aspects of the land’s more latent phenomena visible and material I hope to understand more about its biological capabilities, significance and meaning. I am always chasing ways to give shape to these potencies that haunt me—what seems to me to be the affective power of the land. I rely on my art practice to facilitate empathy and the imagining of others' worlds, lives, histories and experiences and, in so doing, hope for a kind of access to forces and entities otherwise lost or unknown.

The works submitted to the René Carcan prize are photopolymer gravure prints. I work with this process because it is unpredictable, giving and revelatory. Indeed, I feel the open, experimental nature of this process allows me to access what cannot be seen with a more conventional sense of sight. The inky sensuousness of photopolymer gravure allows me to explore the viscerally-felt, deeply-imbricated emotional and psychological potencies of what persists in the land: human histories, animal histories, the bodies of deep time and the limits of our own knowledge. By harmonizing the conceptual properties of photography with the material properties of intaglio printmaking I hope the images from Being in the Land might help materialize and amplify this feeling of presence inherent in all landscapes.

Size

30.5 x 40.5 cm

Prints

8

Technique

Etching