Landscapes

Landscapes

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“Every landscape is a condition of the spirit”. Henri Frederic Amiel

 

Living in the Karoo landscape, I often feel like the dry bushes myself, spreading across the landscape, living in the olive trees, spreading over the mountains with the clouds, flirting with the hues of light in the cheeks of the clouds.  I feel like the nocturnal aardvark, porcupines, kudus, and leopards that come and go, in the procession of the seasonal curtains of rain, wind, and snow.

 

We are “made of the earth”. No heart, whether human or of the earth, goes unplundered by loss – all love presupposes it. With “love” I mean the innumerable confidences between humans and the human-earth relationship.…woven through the senses, sometimes trembling, because of droughts, famine, fire, and death. When this happens, we grieve, whether it is a loss of feelings or atoms. We learn to walk out of the embers when we bear and forebear whatever unfolds, inhaling deeply from the magnetic centre of the planet that is our being.

 

It is in this context that I create and photograph landscapes – the textures of dead leaves, the bark in nooks and crevasses of trees, the centre of small wildflowers – and create textures on rice paper with salt, water, and fire – because textures evoke feeling, the fleeting intricacies of strands of life intertwining and disentangling in wondrous and miraculous ways – weaving and unravelling patterns , disorderly around “a secret order”. (Carl Jung)

 

Humans and nature are bound in boundless landscapes.

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“Still round the corner, there may wait a new road or a secret gate”. Tolkien