Experiencing ‘Place’

27/08/2009 by James.

I went to see Kurt Jackson’s exhibition at The Victoria Art Gallery yesterday. I love the immediacy and energy of his work, the mixture of quick pencil text, paint and the odd found piece of rubbish mixed in. The exhibition documents the flow of the River Avon from Bath to Avonmouth, with Jackson’s paintings capturing snapshots of his time at each place. Its definitely worth a look if you are near.

 www.kurtjackson.co.uk

It made me think again about whether I want to use my work to document specific places in a more direct way too. I used to focus a lot more directly on particular places, for example by creating a book documenting a particular walk. Some pieces still draw directly from my relationship with areas such as Savernake Forest, Salisbury Plain etc, but generally I like to allow my experiences of those different places to mix and merge in my work as they do in life.

After all, when you go home to your garden, watch tv or walk the dog in the evening, you don’t build a wall between those experiences ones at work, you make connections between one experience and the next.

I want that sense of interconnection to pervade my artwork as it does my research within learning, creativity and ecology. ‘Nature’ is everywhere, and is everything, and as a part of that, I want to keep blurring boundaries and fusing materials and imagery, reaching through to an interconnected reality rather than representing some kind of distant ‘other’.

I suppose I feel torn between a need for my work to go beyond the specifics of place in communicating a sense of the bigger picture, and wanting to express the wonder of feeling a part of a place and setting up a dialogue with it through making. Maybe I don’t need to choose, maybe the way I think will always determine how I relate to the world around me, and will come out in my work anyway, whatever form that takes.

Posted in other art, me & my work | Print | No Comments »