10min preview

Being Somewhere, 2009, video, 41min; produced during residency at Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, Germany. Based around the activity of repeatedly visiting a landscape, the video is structured into eight sections, each representing a separate day.

Initially developed as documentation in blog-form of a series of daily visits to the open countryside near Worpswede in North-West Germany, the resulting video charts the progress (or lack of it) in my attempts to visualise the landscape, to find ways of acting within it, and to form coherent thoughts about my experiences.

The task of image-making is problematised: the seductive beauty of the landscape remains a constant inspiration, and yet that same landscape is often experienced as nothing more than an absurdly banal diversion. The inconsistency and contingency inherent in any response to nature is laid bare, and yet an irresistible sublimity never quite goes away.

Video has been shown at exhibition Artsway Open 09 at Artsway, Sway, Hampshire, UK in 2009/2010; read review of the show in a-n magazine. Also shown at Die Kunst der Natur ist die Natur der Kunst ("The Art of Nature is the Nature of Art") at Künstlerverein Walkmühle, Wiesbaden, Germany in 2010; and also at The Box at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, UK in 2010.

See the related online work Being Somewhere.