As our experiences take meaning, I believe before even the simplest emotions arise, we are creating myths. This is to propose that mythologies the group of myths we create through which to assimilate and survive in our environment are a native disposition to most of us and as our discreet perceptual experiences are turned into cognition this semantic process has already begun. My work is researching and analysing these processes and in particular how we, as a society, create and maintain powerful concrete mythologies of the idea of “nature”. Is it possible to shift or analyse these mythologies through re-presentation?
Our environment is both subjective experience and objective fact. It is both idea and space. We survey it and map it, penetrate and sample it, we extract resources, we cultivate it, recreate and represent it and finally we inhabit it. The landscape is a personal sensory experience, at once the view and the viewpoint itself in our environment. We demand that landscape rather than space be a source of self-knowledge, where we discover our body, our organs, our speed, our limitations. Landscape is where we represent our material ideas and see them reflected and changed in other’s eyes. It is the membrane where perceptual experience and conceptual ideas are washed up together like a water line, moving continuously. It is a boundary between solid, liquid and gas, between reality, action and representation, but finally it is just an idea.
The spaces, images and actions of my recent works derive largely from explorations of the mythology of “nature”, a spatial and linguistic reservoir of experience and representations, of memories and myths, images and texts. The use of the mechanically reproduced image creates fictions and myths by vastly reducing, compressing and re-contextualising reality whilst still being read for its analogue. The photo is still a powerful carrier of meaning and ideologies both through, and despite its widespread and popular use; it dominates and erodes our ability to see the world around us – the way things are. Some of my most recent work are monochrome drawings which explore our relation to these fictions of nature, the story of landscape, and test the value of the indexical sign – the mechanical reproduction. They explore our relationship to the mechanically reproduced image, its reduction, framing, depth and focus within a complete and unbounded spatial environment. Working with deliberately constructed re-presentations or fictive spaces proposes an analysis of this delicate and often imperceptible shift between realities and fictions. This is analogous to the semantic shift from experience to primary meaning.
If we search for an ideal, a purity of “nature” we find it is unobtainable precisely because we are there. However even where man has not been, space and its meaning is created and codified through ideas. The existence of “nature” without civilisation is illusory. Likewise all images are not just views, but representations. The regard, and its representations are civilised, are social, are contextual. Our idea of nature is always affected in some way by our idea of civilisation. One always enters the other precisely because they don’t exist as separate realities, only separate ideas. The very possibility of the ideas of “nature” and “civilisation” are possible only through language, they are a function of language, and specifically languages we find in agricultural civilisations. They are ideas that are not necessarily possible to express in all languages.
I draw (in the broadest sense) spaces to enable myself to look harder, to begin to see. I draw to see my relationship to others and my environment – our shared spaces, our spatial relationships and our shared languages and meanings – to see how the use and representation of an object changes its meaning. These investigations begin at the simplest level, deconstructing and reproducing images, forms and spatial relationships.
I live a life full of activities that have evolved through a hedonistic relationship with space – activities such as mountaineering, cross country skiing, mountain biking, hiking and yachting – activities that have mostly evolved and become meaningful and pleasurable since the industrial revolution and the romantic era. Romantic ideology is still very much at the heart of many modern leisure activities and through my research this leads me to question in whose interest does it continue to function? It certainly appears to function for our benefit. It is arguable however that these ideological structures underpin the form of modern capitalism. It seems the social and spiritual freedom sought and first expressed by romantics now serves to feed hedonistic desires and insatiable wanting – the dynamic of modern consumerism.
I live and work in Geneva, Switzerland. The previous seven years I lived in Edinburgh, Scotland. I spend considerable time walking, cycling and climbing in mountains areas.