The Legacy of the Burkean Sublime: Representations of British Spaces and Landscapes in a Contemporary Art Practice

Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757-59) attempts to establish a theory of the passions. The ambitious central idea of this treatise is that emotional reactions to objects, landscapes, and ideas, which can be categorised as either sublime or beautiful, can be explained by a rational examination of passion, ethics, and morality.

My research reconsiders the Enquiry from the perspective of an artist using an autoethnographic approach to ask the question, to what extent can Burke’s aesthetic philosophy be used as an applied methodology in the production of paintings, and drawings, which reflect on contemporary spaces, places, and landscapes?

The thesis explores Burke’s contributions to the discourse of the sublime in the eighteenth-century and how contemporary authors have reflected on the Enquiry’s meaning. It shows how the Enquiry can be said to reflect a utilitarian aesthetic philosophy which is open-ended enough to offer multiple ways of seeing and thinking.

Central to my practice-based research is the argument that various, and differing, aspects of Burke’s conception of the sublime and beautiful are potentially useful in the process of understanding, and presenting, artistic visions of British spaces. This argument is explored in three chapters which consider very different territories defined as the horizontal, vertical, and transcendental sublime using Burke’s thoughts about extensions of space. In this research the horizontal sublime is reimagined as the British coastline or border, the vertical sublime is reinterpreted as a mineshaft, and the transcendental sublime becomes an ancient British chapel. In these spaces differing relationships to nature are explored through the prism of the Burkean Sublime, as are contemporary events which give these spaces context in the twenty-first century.

The thesis argues that Burke’s flawed attempt to impose strict laws and very narrow limits on the recalcitrant material of the passions is more than a confusion of eighteenth-century speculations. My research demonstrates how the Enquiry can be used to stimulate the imagination, and how Burke’s aesthetic speculations can turn painting, and drawing, into an exciting conceptual adventure with links to an eighteenth-century principled code of ethics and aesthetics.