'everything remains 5' from BEYOND THIS POINT series, extends this research with navigational satellite images, photographs, and traces of topographical... Read More
'everything remains 5' from BEYOND THIS POINT series, extends this research with navigational satellite images, photographs, and traces of topographical terrain as a way to reflect on spatial ambiguity, navigational complexity, and the vertical notion of aerial terrain. Embracing multiple levels of vertical space from the ground to the atmosphere the photographic series ‘everything remains’ reveals the tension between orientation and disorientation, between knowing one’s location and being lost to the spatial temporalities of flight. The diaphanous lungs of the air balloons engulf the surface of ‘everything remains 5’ as if in the act of inhaling and exhaling, their corpulent volume billowing in the effort to soar. Indeed, the red fabric of one balloon seems almost volatile in its capacious hold on space with its luminous surface and volume, bearing a striking contrast to the sensual folds and creases in the depth of the image. A disorienting sense of vertigo pervades the senses here as visual perception slips in and out of register.
Photographer Lynne Roberts-Goodwin is sensitive to the way the camera has conditioned and transformed the way we see the world. With a practice that is preoccupied with the language of landscape imagery, Roberts-Goodwin considers the impacts of human presence and intervention in the way geography is partitioned and traversed.
During the course of this project, and the ongoing wrestling with the balloon, Lynne became absorbed by the contraption itself, seeing the balloon not simply as means of transport but as a shape shifter. Turning her camera away from the ground below and up into the billowing sails, she made new landscapes. The photographs produced are dynamic motion studies that confound our understanding of scale and depth. These are topographies made of textiles. They tug at our desire to locate ourselves in an image and teeter towards abstraction. They serve as an approach to landscape photography that turns away from the site and rests its gaze on the means of movement; the human invention that has utterly transformed modes of occupation. Ever sensitive to the impacts of human intrusion. into the natural world, here Roberts-Goodwin focuses her lens on the device itself. On the instrument of intervention.
