Natural process; Wildness; ‘Wild land’

Summary

Spawn: Light sensitive paper immersed beneath the surface of an icy pond of frogspawn and willow leaves in late January, exposed to a full moon.

Recycling Lucifer's Fall: The turbulent flow of a river cascading beneath the stars at night, illuminated by a microsecond of flashlight onto paper unrolled into the water.

The below mirrors the above in terms of points of singularity unfolding over time into forms of increasing complexity, giving rise to consciousness and the possibility of the world knowing itself through us. But that consciousness also seems to separate: ourselves from nature, from other, from self even, to the point of destruction.

Are we able to evolve, or more urgently, make the quantum leap into a new state of awareness, that recognises our complete interdependence with the self-regulating processes of the natural world? Or will we continue with the delusion of being somehow special, separate entities, entitled to use nature for our own purposes?

These questions lie behind the making of the work, which is a ritual enactment of a desired state of belonging in the world.

‘The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again.’ Cormac McCarthy.

The Crossing – Volume 2 of The Border Trilogy.

I am a long-term practising artist, whose primary interests revolve around issues of the landscape, historical and cultural geography, cartography, and the problems of picture-making. Making photographic work is important and central to both my work and my research. During the last 30 years, I have been making and assembling a large, thematic body of work developed out of the physical act of pictorially mapping the cardinal extremities of the immense region described as the Atlantic Basin.