Monash University Honours Graduate exhibition, 2009.

Nature and its Representation.

There is a moment when lived experience emerges from the psyche of the human subject into language as a mode of communication. I believe in the importance and possibility of unmediated experience and as an artist I believe in coming from a personally honest place.

But notions of truth and reality are soggy and shifting and it is not necessarily possible to communicate in a straight line from one human being to another. Instead meanings expressed in the form of language, signs or images meander suggestively with endless potentials for ulterior connotations.

Instead of searching earnestly for a pure means of expression, I am interested in exploring the potential for language and signs to convey contradiction and multiple truths.

This leads me to an interest in poetry which has the power of suggestion and the ability to express indeterminate concepts. Poetry can be more truthful than literal explanations of the world because it accepts metaphor as a necessary means of expression and is at the same time both ambiguous and precise.

In his essay ‘The Solar Anus’ Georges Bataille writes, “It is clear that the world is parodic, in other words that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form”. This quote from Bataille I feel connects with my interest in human representations and archives of the natural world, (in particular nature documentaries and museums) as deceptive forms.

What I feel to be the uncertain nature of reality makes me particularly intrigued by the clear and convinced visions of our world presented through nature documentaries and museums. In the nature documentary the narrator becomes the voice of god who speaks, slowly, carefully and passionately. Who has the capacity for wonder, delight and sadness. In the nature documentary the voice of god understands the circular nature of life and existence. He views the pain and struggling of life with equanimity, he accepts the necessity for animals to eat other animals. The nature documentary, like the museum represents the world in a shiny, contained form, which I sometimes see as an appealing and intriguing lie.

In Robert Smithson’s writings on museums and in his essay ‘The Domain of the Great Bear.’ He describes the Planetarium as a place where humans have recreated the concept of infinity inside a finite space. The Planetarium can be perceived as a human attempt for order. Both nature documentaries and museums interest me because they provide a frame for the ostensibly infinite universe, reinventing it as a small and digestible reality.

This concept of the frame can be related also to the human use of language and signs which themselves can be seen as a framing of globulous and nebulous thoughts and feelings.

I am inetersted in the tension between what is represented as ordered in our world and what we feel to be disordered and unreliable. The idea that the world makes sense or can be dissected and explained seems to me to be perfectly hilarious concept and searching for significance can often lead us into the realms of absurdity. This semester I would like to this absurdity embrace and what feels often like the ludicrous nature of our existence.

AL, Melbourne, 2009.