Landscapes- a reading.

Challenging our reading of an objectivise, idealised, pastoral landscape, a series of photographs taken from one vantage point. By deflecting the viewers’ eye, subverting a more contemporary, traditional understanding of a mountain landscape, challenging us to see beyond the obvious, to the far distance, the land, sky, the landscape therein. By introducing the dynamics of mother nature, her birds, confuses the more Arcadian relationship between the viewer, the animals and the land. John Constable's comment on his paintings, “..it will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the keynote, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment..” helps partly articulate what might be experienced in such mountain imagery. In the same way that traditional Japanese landscape imagery would oft’ have a tree branch, or similar intruding into, even partly obscuring the landscape, I am challenging the viewer to apply a more intellectual rigour by asking them to see beyond the mere object, glimpse traditional allegorical motifs of beauty, sublime totems in the land & the sky. Underpinning this series are Paul Cezanne’s hallowed observations, "seeing as not believing, it is to question”, and that “One must see nature as no one has seen before you”.