Duality: the Human Landscape

As so many artists before me, I have been fascinated by the desire to understand how we, as humans, fit into our natural world. These two groups of work make some attempts to visualize some ideas around this. The first group – Human/Nature – are oil paintings. The second group – Estrangement – are all photographs.

Human/Nature

I work from a place of historical and individual reference points and try to arrive at a visual representation of what I’m reacting to and/or perceiving at any given moment, first nature, then human. Over the years my art has slid back and forth and in between landscape and people. In recent years, the focus on people has taken precedence as I have become increasingly preoccupied with issues of identity and impermanence. We presume to ‘know’ what we see, who we are, yet there is nothing consistent or continuous about any aspect of identity, whether identity of the self, the other or objects. I have pushed myself to try and understand through visual means how technology interacts with human behavior and what results are being drawn from that combination.
Read more about Human/Nature here.

Estrangement

The continuing and accelerating estrangement of people from a connection to nature or even the artificial environment within which they live is the very definition of modern human society today. Disconnection from our natural world is being pushed to all extremes by the use of isolating devices and applications – including mobile phones and tablets. In general, though seemingly increasing our access to the world, these devices also decrease our awareness of the natural environment we are in at any given moment. It is this loss of integration with our very nature that is seen here.