Landscape as a Twist of Thought: A Line of Enquiry

How can an art practice based in lens imaging help us to question landscape as a pictorial category fixed in space and time? This essay proposes that we practice landscape as an ongoing process which always surpasses human spatial and temporal framing while enfolding the activity of the human within it. Starting with reference to a specific geographic, geological and environmental site, the essay tracks a process of situated making using the smartphone camera as the fulcrum of a performative activity. In making tangible, the practice has no one definitive object of completion but presents itself as an assemblage of parts, which become ‘relational objects for thinking- in -action’ (Manning 2009). It is through this process that I explore the work’s ‘expression’ (Massumi 2011: 57); landscape is not only performed as an event of ongoing change but is an activity of temporally situated sharing which can challenge privatised modes of the production and consumption of images.