The Shape of Landscape: Reimagining Space for the Anthropocene

As an artist my research is focussed on landscape’s characterisation as ‘image’ and I consider the problematic implications of this at this juncture in history. I am especially interested in critiquing the assumptions of realism generated by visual technologies that have grown out of a Western perspectival history, whose hegemonic forms have established a regime of unproductive distance, characterising landscape as three-dimensional ‘space,’ the generalised background in front of which human action is played out.

For this workshop, I will discuss an ongoing exploration of landscape that draws from bodily and material sensibilities, which I find in the landscape backgrounds of late medieval paintings. These works present the landscape as something other than Cartesian extension and as such can help to alter its increasingly unproductive positioning within Western subject/object ontologies. Rather than being the straightforward settings in which human narratives are enacted, I will argue that their unique forms in fact work in a way that triggers a physical empathy and can therefore become a ‘tool’ for mitigating the feelings of loss created by ecological collapse.

By moving beyond landscape as the ‘de facto’ representational image to a sense of landscape as embodied form – understanding landscape as ‘body’, and defining it as non-human subjectivity – requires a reappraisal of ontological definitions, and especially of space and our relation to it. This pre-historical framework to the imbrication of image and space is re-visited, and is found to offer up creative possibilities for re-thinking landscape under the conditions of the Anthropocene.