Giving my practice some thought.
My work appears to be revolving around the theme of creating a personal space, a landscape within a space. My personal space where inspiration is discovered and ideas flourish. This happens when I am next to/experiencing nature or within a natural landscape, I escape into the natural wilderness, away from the urban life that is increasingly taking over.
I constantly feel like I am trying to escape the depths of society, the negative obstacles I face because of gender/appearances. The elements of control society feeds us to keep an order in the world that we live in. Whether that is through diet (the food we are provided through supermarkets, sugar loaded and chemical loaded), the advertisements we consume on how we should dress, behave, live! The forces that are bestowed upon us to keep us all in line (police, armed forces). Money, which controls our career choices, life choices. We lose what we truly love, who we truly are.
This world is increasingly taking over as population grows, and the wilderness is slowly diminishing. These two worlds are combining into one, with urbanisation/society being the stronger of the two. This scares me, will we become an existence uninspired and losing ourselves into this corporate world of working and consuming? Whatever happened to “living”?
Where will I find my inspiration once the natural world disappears?
In my work I will demonstrate how the two worlds are increasingly integrating into one.
Here I used two projectors to project images of my installation work with projections of images of people, busy society. I created this with the thoughts on how the world is getting smaller, with population increasing the world is losing more wilderness spaces. This makes me question what will happen to creativity as this problem increases, will people become less creative as nature slowly diminishes? In my case, this is what scares me.
Below are some quotes from well known people of our world, who describe the significance of the wilderness to our existence.
“There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as It does protection.” – Theodore Roosevelt. President of the United States.
“And this, our life exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” – William Shakespeare.
“Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.” – Sir John Lubbock. Vice chancellor, University of London.
All Quotes From: http://wilderness.org/article/famous-quotes
In this set of works I have been incorporating the use of lens based media. I wanted to capture the thought process of dealing with everyday life in an urbanised environment, in search of solitude. I recorded a video whilst cycling through Ipswich town centre on my bike, a journey which always agitates me. I am constantly met with barriers of society, whether it is people, glances, traffic.
The other video I recorded was cycling through the forest at Rendlesham, a place where I always escape to when it all becomes too much. The deserted, peaceful location contrasts with the busy town centre video. I changed the speed of both videos so the forest video was slowed down, and the town video was fast forwarded. I projected these videos on top of each other, I thought this effect showed the inner battle I feel I am fighting between the two world, with the urbanised world slowly taking over.
I’ve been experimenting in my studio at university, using dead plants, newspapers and wool, I have been creating sculptures. I have found that whilst creating these sculptures I have found that I enter that creative flow that I normally do when I am in an open landscape. I found this really interesting as I previously felt I could only create whilst in the landscape. This caused me to question why I feel this, the process of creating my own landscape is where my creativity flourishes. In my mind I am picturing a place with no influences or constraints of society, my creativity is a process of enjoying this moment, with no judgements. Everywhere I turn I am faced with barriers, glances and judgements, my landscape is my escape.
Following the previous installation, I walked further down the beach to the edge of the land where I could look out to both sides of the river.
I found an interesting spot with large pieces of driftwood. Materials that had been discarded by nature, I felt inspired to make use of this material. I began with using wool to create a spider web pattern around the pieces of wood. I used bright coloured wool to do this. During this time, I wasn’t thinking about much, I was immersed in the flow of creativity and pattern making, I feel his way of working is reminiscent of Kusama’s work, the repetitive cycle of pattern making.
During the process the weather turned and became exermely windy, this didn’t put me off. I found this influenced my work positively, the wind caused the wool to flow away however due to the wool being intertwined it created and amazingly bright flowing effect. I stood amongst the flowing movement of the wool, at this moment I felt at ease, surrounded by nature, solitude and creativity. This is what I had been searching for.
The unexpected influence of the wind on my work added an interesting twist, I would like to create more work where I won’t know the outcome due to the unpredictable elements of nature.
