through a glass, darkly, installed view
An alchemical crucible, containing a landscape in microcosm, through a glass, darkly explores sublime readings of landscape, in particular Gordale Scar in Yorkshie, a famous staging post on the Romantics' quest for wild and savage landscape.
Exploring various observational devices, from the Claude glass to the Camera Obscura, this piece inverts the landscape, and encapsulates it within a specular bowl, whereby its power becomes a tangible experience for the viewer.
Exploring various observational devices, from the Claude glass to the Camera Obscura, this piece inverts the landscape, and encapsulates it within a specular bowl, whereby its power becomes a tangible experience for the viewer.
A Claude glass is a slightly convex tinted mirror, which was supposed to help artists produce works of art similar to those of Claude Lorrain. The Reverend William Gilpin, an amateur artist, advocated the use of a Claude glass saying, 'they give the object of nature a soft, mellow tinge like the colouring of that Master'. Many 18th-century artists and landscape theorists were interested in the effects of Claude glasses and they were widely used by tourists (who viewed scenery via the mirror to give the real live view the required 'mellow tinge').
My research has lead me towards a philosophical, psychological and historical appreciation of ‘landscape’. My readings on the sublime, the picturesque, the phenomenology of landscape and psychogeography have contextualized and directed this work.
There is a very personal locus within the work, a subjective exploration of what the sublime has meant historically and socially, and why threads of it influence my position.
The contemporary sublime is a preoccupation within my work whereby I explore the liminal physical and emotional edges of my experience; moments which give a sublime ‘thrill’. In my explorations, I question the traditional reading of the sublime as a solitary, heroic, overwhelmingly male narrative. At the same time as reclaiming the definition, my intent, using the symbol of the glass, is to skewer the absurdity of a vivid experience mediated by turning one’s back on it, or inverting its projection.