Artist Review

SERIES NOTES:

TRANS-FIGURATION

 

A number of ideas and subjects shift through this body of work. ‘Trans-figuration’ highlights the inter-connections between humanity, the man-made, and the natural environment.

As a starting point for this show I have revisited the figure to study the landscape of the human form. I have found this a hugely challenging task: to understand the human anatomy, to weight the body and breathe life, hopes, fears, dreams and memories, to translate the complexity of the form onto the flatness of paper, to sand, and reshape to make them transient yet solid, anonymous yet individual so that we make a connection with our own brief encounter here.

I have endeavoured to express something about human nature, something about our needs and desires and how this affects our relationship to the landscape. Consumerism, Industrialisation, landscapes manipulated, our very existence, pressing on the land. I have explored the contrast between civilization and the landscape, the division resulting in a kind of isolation, as we create for ourselves an illusion of being protected from the forces of nature. Many of our activities here are based on multi-national industries and pure materialism and nature regresses into the life of the population.

There is a sense, in these works, of an imaginary environment, created by our own hands, of mammoth constructions, erected stone by stone, and of humanity left powerless by the thing they have built, which is seductive in its splendour, yet perilous. Not a day goes by that we are not reminded of our own fragility and the damage that industrialisation is having on our prospects of survival in a world as we know it. We bear witness on a daily basis worldwide ‘nature-bashing’ to an extent never been seen before. How long we ask ourselves will the natural ecology be able to withstand such development and use of natural resources.

I have looked at the dramatic works of Canadian Photographer Edward Burtynsky’s Quarry Series as a reference to comment on global Industrialisation. His series traces large-scale quarries around the world exploring landscape transformed by industry. ‘These detailed, sumptuous photographs urge us to consider how we as viewers are simultaneously attracted yet repulsed by these landscapes. Somewhere, while a building is created, a landscape is being destroyed’

I have also referenced examples of ancient architecture, the sublime perfection of the great pyramids, master builders and urban planners creating structures that are monumental yet intimate. In contrast modern cities in places like China are crammed with looming tower blocks, vast concrete structures, overwhelming Skyscrapers, factories and dense urban dwellings. These kinds of buildings are a part of our lives now but we rarely stop to consider the natural landscape from whence they come.

 

 

‘I remember looking at the buildings made of stone, and thinking, there has to be an interesting landscape somewhere out there because these stones had to be taken out of the quarry one block at a time. I had never seen a dimensional quarry, but I envisioned an inverted cubed architecture on the side of a hill. I went in search of it, and when I had it on my ground glass, I knew I had arrived. I had found an organic architecture created by our own pursuit of raw materials. Open-pit mines, funnelling down, were to me like inverted pyramids...We are surrounded by all kinds of consumer goods, and yet we are profoundly detached from the sources of those things. Our life-styles are made possible by industries all around the world, but we take them for granted, as background to our existence....Because people are always trying to put a human scale on things, we need to put our human perspective into these images, and our presence is dwarfed by the spaces we’ve created. It is an in interesting metaphor for how technology seems larger than life, larger than our own lives.’ (Edward Burtynsky)

To the viewers I want to draw you emotionally into the work through the subtleties of rich colours that bleed into each other, of delicate surfaces that represent the fragility of nature. The complex layers, and built up textured surfaces create a sense of a stage setting, a kind of sublime fictional landscape, rich and seductive, yet a landscape in the balance, engulfed by the urban reality in which we live.

 

Jane Mitchell - 2008

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