artist statement

I understand the landscape to be a dominant aspect in the reconnection of lost memory; a place where if one pays close enough attention, may be able to regain the memories the land has graciously stored. I believe that the landscape inherently swallows the experiences which are first enacted within it. Due to the innate breakdown of human memory, I search for ways to recapture the memories that the land has perhaps recorded. The land takes priority in my practice, and bears primacy in all of my investigations. In order to examine the ways in which the land may reflect identity and embody mnemonic significance I utilize performance, photo-based media, and video to implement my research. My thesis is unified by a continual attempt to extract the mnemonic significance from the land through a series of engagements and interventions.

This engagement with the land takes the form of a performance where I go to a specific location that symbolizes memory and present a proposition through a bodily engagement to pull out the entrenched memories from within it. By revisiting aspects of the memory that are still present in my mind and re-immersing myself in a sensory remembrance, I experience a merging and reconnection of the empty areas. The performance takes the form of a dance, where as I perform the memory, the land becomes my relational partner. The land dually takes on the position of spectator and participant, as I attempt to lure my memories from it. The work will exist as photographic documentation of my performance in the landscape.

I intend to point to the notion that we take into ourselves our experiences by showing that our receiving senses swallow our experiences. I believe the body to be a human documenting machine; therefore to highlight and expand this idea further, I propose to utilize my body as a human camera. The body can be turned into a camera obscura by utilizing my mouth as the body of the camera, therefore photographically documenting my experience from within the human body. By turning my body into the camera I am documenting the passage of the internalization of experience. In following the same principles of the traditional camera obscura, I place a piece of photographic paper in the back of my mouth and cover the opening of my mouth with a black shield and microscopic pinhole. The resulted photographs, which were taken from my mouth, will be enlarged as to proclaim that the final stage of the internalization process is externalization, projected and expelled from the body.

Being apart from places that hold mnemonic importance result in a disarray of the memory and disintegration of remembered experience. As a result of my dislodgement of memory through dislocation, I began to perceive other landscapes as sources of mnemonic material, where I associated an unfamiliar type of tree or flower to a personal signifier of memory. The work consists of a video, where the subject is a landscape called Bradgate Park in the East Midlands of England. My desire to insert myself into a foreign landscape in order to represent a solely collective memory is the central prerogative, as I have no mnemonic attachment associated to this site. This work calls upon the idea that landscapes do in fact hold memory, whether personal or collective, and that if we listen carefully enough are able to extract this information. The video is the documentation of my conversation with this landscape.

work