Lines of Flight Visual Presentation

For centuries linear perspective has functioned as a dominant technology of capture, producing an aesthetic and cartographic gaze that distances the observer and renders Earth a passive, extractable surface.

My work proposes a departure from this problematic framing, looking backwards to move forwards. Drawing from the pre-perspectival landscapes of late medieval painting, specifically the penitential wildernesses of the Italian early Renaissance, I am developing a visual language that rejects the horizontality of the singular perspectival subject and plots a new trajectory from the spiritual function of these historical wildernesses to the ecological and material complexities of the present. These early works suggest a blueprint for a visuality shaped by world-building; one that is haptic rather than scenic.

The works presented here are part of this process of loosening the normative visual structures of landscape, so that, rather than the static background to human action, it is shown instead as dynamic complexity.

• https://henriettasimson.com/