Since I can remember I have always been fascinated by natural landscapes and environments, nature’s intriguing colours, sizes, textured details, life cycles and varying forms along with everyday aesthetic qualities.
There is not a day that goes by where I do not admire, reflect or have some kind of emotional experience related to the natural landscape or environment around me. I mostly focus specifically on the small details, we usually overlook, these create feelings of interconnectedness for myself. It makes me feel so small but yet so big.
Personally, this experience creates a sense of freedom, freedom where my imagination can roam. Especially considering the worldwide pandemic we are in at the moment, where freedom is restricted daily.
This type of emotional experience is central to the sublime.
The sublime in its initial modern association with art consists of varying representations of natural phenomena, landscapes and the experience of natural surroundings, mostly overwhelming the viewer in some sense.
It can be a positive or negative experience, it can be comforting but then also alienating. It
It all depends on the viewers own perception and experience.
My work is greatly inspired and influenced by the Romantic sublime.
The Romantic arts have been known in presenting otherworldly or fearful elements associated with nature intending to a evoke the sublime effect through representation. By evoking the sublime, Romanticism attempted to maintain the importance of a built in metaphysical relationship between humanity and nature.
I use the natural environment around me as references. References of colour, texture and shape. With this I create my own abstract mini “environments” through ink and glue stains on glass and transparencies. I use these abstract stains on glass as a filter in a sense. A filter that I then place back into nature, back into the original environment that inspired me in the first place.
In my work I focus onthe small details in these types of landscapes that also leaves one in awe, disoriented or even frightened due to not being able to grasp the creation behind this microcosmic world.
A way of evoking the sublime effect is to explore the significance of the prosaic and how people react to a different approach/perspective that often requires the active participation of the viewer.
In this body of work I explore how human- nature relationships are perceived, experienced and challenged when their natural everyday landscape is projected in an unusual way along with an unusual scale and experienced ‘in’ an unnatural environment.
By doing this I aim to create some type of emotional experience. Emphasizing that everyday landscape experiences of the natural environment around us are crucial and healthy.
The idea of placing the natural indoors, outside of its original environment, allows viewers to experience sometimes overlooked mundane pieces of nature from a different perspective, gaining a greater sense of appreciation.
There are two things that are noteworthy, the obvious artificiality of the works but at the same time the natural aspect thereof, and the fact that the work is placed inside a building.
It mediates our experience, enhancing the interplay between the artificiality and the natural, the relationship between humans and nature.
I attempt in creating an environment for the viewer to step in and become self- reflective. An environment warped by nature through colour screens and reflections as thresholds.
These artworks are meant to create spaces challenging how we react to nature, colour, scale, and different personal aesthetic environments around us. These works are mainly centered around the emotional state of viewers.
The deep warm bodily fluid quality of the of the coloured stains are meant to be viewed as a symbol of human nature.
We as humans who are constantly invading nature to some extent whether we realize it or not. Generally, it can be seen as a negative approach or a positive one.
In the case of this body of work I personally see this warm bodily fluid quality not necessarily in a negative sense but more of a positive protective glow, shedding light on or bringing to the front the usual overlooked natural environment in a unusual way. In a sense highlighting and challenging the way we treat and view all natural environments, whether big or small in scale, it is important and crucial.
