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Statement:
“Outside and inside are both intimate -- they are always ready to be reversed … If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides”
-Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space”
Our lives consist of internal and external landscapes. My work examines the ways in which these landscapes intersect and are altered by such intersections. Paper becomes Bachelard’s “border-line surface,” the membrane that both divides and connects what is inside us and what is outside.
Landscape consists not only of the physical realities of our surroundings, but of our relationship to those realities. As J. Douglas Porteous states in “Landscapes of the Mind,” landscape is “a visual construct [that] does not exist without an observer.” In observing, we project ourselves onto the landscape. Individual landscapes, however, also dictate our observations of them. The landscape is inside us as much as we are inside it. It is this interplay of outer and inner space that I attempt to represent in my work.
The resulting prints are representations and embodiments of this communication between inside and outside. Often, ink transfers from the block to the paper, as in a traditional woodcut, but the residue of previous impressions also transfers from the paper back to the block and then onto subsequent prints. Through this exchange, the prints document a conversation, the way we are changed by contact with new environments and ideas. When the prints become books and installations, this conversation expands to form its own environment.
In these pieces, I represent relationships and the spaces that contain and create them abstractly to allow the viewer to use the space of the landscape as a site for meditation on the relationships and spaces in their own lives.
