Engaging Feeling: The Subject of Landscape in the Twenty-First Century

As an artist my research involves reappraising the visual-spatial structures that define the conventional landscape idea, in order to move landscape from ‘de facto’ representational image towards an idea of mutuality and embodied form. This includes the study of pre-genre landscape backgrounds, exploring how to access difference from within the Western landscape tradition. Through a discussion of recent works derived from these early Italian paintings, this paper examines how empathy becomes a key tool in reshaping landscape’s image.

Drawing from recent feminist theories that address the binaries of Western thought through materiality and affect, the examination explores ways that the painted landscape form – rather than existing as the visual ‘object’ to the viewing ‘subject’ – carries agential properties in itself that facilitate empathic connections. Developing Bernard Berenson’s notion of ‘tactile values’ and Vernon Lee’s associated concept of ‘empathy’, the relationship between materiality and signification within these artworks is examined, in order to gain an understanding of landscape that is shaped through empathy and affect, and that situates the visual within embodied experience.

Focussing especially on the trope of the cave, the paper examines how these wilderness backgrounds collapse the intractable dualisms associated with landscape. Their craggy spaces connote embodied rather than exclusively visual experience and suggest physical affinity rather than a visually-orientated construction of space. This presents an opportunity to align human and landscape in ways that befit 21st Century concerns, addressing the dissonance between landscape as aesthetic image and landscape as material source.