Disrupting Beauty

Landscape Studies made 2016-18

Inside looking out, Crete, 3.55 with sound

Experiments with seascapes, in the UK and Crete. exploring the impossibility of really seeing and remembering a place of beauty.

Poorton inside looking out 4.16 with sound

Big Dots on Eggardon 1.45 (no Sound)

After a month-long residency at the Mothership Dorset, June 2016, I re engaged with the landscape and area that I grew up in. It took about a year to get the technology right, to learn how to program random opacity changes, and get a smooth motorised pan for my camera. The problem of the landscape of west Dorset, is that not only is it incredibly beautiful, and I have such a personal relationship with it, that it seems impossible to film. It’s too easy to make landscape appear romantic, to make it seperate and apart from us. It wasn’t enough. It almost seemed more honest to obliterate it from view, so a tiny bit could be looked at a time. We have such strange cultural relationship to the landscape, and I feel so strongly attached to this one that I’m almost jealously protecting it from a viewer’s gaze, whilst being unable to stop looking at it myself. The various strategies of occlusion are intended to focus the eye on tiny parts, as I don’t believe we can really look at anything bigger than a thumbnail at any one time. 

I made many many of these different tests. None have been exhibited so far. 

White stripes on Eggardon 1.02 no sound

Stripes on Eggardon 1.02 with sound

Big Dots on Poorton (Snow) 1.58 no sound