2016 – 2018
Climate change, the economy and the natural world. These are the themes I have chosen to guide me through this project.
I set out with the intention of developing responses in sound and vision to humanity’s part in pushing the rate of climate warming to the alarming situation we find ourselves in. Be under no mis understanding about the place we find ourselves. We have gone beyond the tipping point and with climate change largely off the political table I would say, hold on to your hats!
Economies in the developed world seem to behave as though nature is but an ornament our existence. It will be easy enough to destroy the inhabitable environment, but all too much to get it back. My work is determined to be neither an alarm call nor a protest, but simply to dwell in fascination with nature. The work aims, as Robert Macfarlane so aptly scribes, to ‘stand not as a competitor to scientific knowledge and ecological analysis, but as their supplement and ally.’ To paint a pictures of the natural elements as not only a resource to be plundered but a living force to be respected and admired.
The language of science struggles to truly affect emotions with facts and figures, charts and diagrams yet desperately desires to. For humans to fully become attached to information they need room for their imagination to breath. It needs to be felt emotionally as well as intellectually. It needs to be owned on a personal level, without which human behaviour will carry on destructively as ever it was thus.
Nan Shepherd describes a shift in perception between her sleeping and waking mind on the Cairngorm plateau; ‘The senses must be trained and disciplined, the eye to look, the ear to listen, the body must be trained to move with the right harmonies. No one knows the mountain who has not slept on it. As one slips into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. One neither thinks, nor desires, nor remembers, but dwells in pure intimacy with the tangible world.’
Through ‘abstract’ images, which are in fact photographic documents of organic phenomena, I am attempting to portray some of the innocence of seeing without knowing. To emote reactions felt deep within. To employ the words of Barry Lopez, ‘something emotive lies in the land and…it can be recognised and evoked even if it cannot be fully plumbed.’
The work lies somewhere along the thin line between the figurative and the abstract and attempts to absorb the viewer’s very being, to emerge somehow affected. With these slideshows I’m seeking only to portray how much fascination can be enjoyed if one were to merely look and listen close enough.
brian swaddling 