LANDSCAPE AS AN INVENTION OF THE MIND
(The makebelieve and fairytale as temporary salvation from the claws of death)

 

Pan’s People and the possibility of a school of Arcadian genius.
This is what holds us.

Work should challenge pretty Pastoral, never the Merchant Ivory, always a streak of debauched fertility and the wildness of the outlawed woodland.
Non-urban and definitely not happy-clappy.

So
Rather it’s where the bestial occupies the folkloric and bloodletting abounds.
An animistic presence within the Great Out-of-doors.
Awed.

 

Artifice as an index of certain truths.
The makebelieve.

It might start with the body’s business and work out.
From early super 8 films onwards. Reels soaked in Live Art and multi-media japery, the staging of self and others, perhaps as an acknowledgement of certain confessional tics in the social order and Politics.

But
It does not have to be placard so the vision must be inherently committed to degrees of dispossession and the reverse - reclamation.
Less the megaphone, more the hope of ‘politics’ and ever the Prank.

Swandown and the need to engineer meaning from the haphazard and the happenstance.
This is what makes up the landscape.
The terra firma.

 

Or is it?
The work is process.
In constant flux, images and sounds migrate, are curious about the elsewhere, are remixed, lose titles and gain new labels; fixity is not the purpose here; things arrive into being, are held like water in the hand, then pass on. Are flawed, unfinished.
Contingent.
Thus it is like the life.
It holds like mercury then pools and spreads.

 

And
People are the bedrock of the landscape, from which grow flowers and the trees of ideas. Family, friends, strangers all bring wind to the sails.
Worlds.
Delved in.

Mostly
Eden and The Gardenof.
This is where it now comes from.
Illbegotten perhaps.
Intact nevertheless.
Her world, my world, this, our world.
The inscape versus the vista.
The mindscape versus the exterior.
I try to navigate her, to steer her into a more complicated water.
My froth on her daydream.
The words speak of different places.

Here, all is not well. It is the madness begotten of settledown.
Melancholia and the This Our Still Life.
I want to climb inside her to rearrange the furniture.
It is my fault.
I spawned her.

In the Earthouse Manifesto, it is suggested that there be an obligation to spend time with arms or feet inside another sentient being, alive or dead.
This is what must be done with the Landscape. 

And
The stories and histories are inhabited by, and live within, people.
The world breathes through people.
Through what they do and fail to do; what they reach and fail to reach.

I’m going to take you to a place that you have not been before.
I remember his words most distinctly, most clearly, most enjoyably.

 

Boundaries, tracks, traces and songs.
That dark light that falls upon the throng.

They all move us along.
Mediated unmediated.

The work as cipher to the stream of think.

Watching as it makes its way from the mountain location (head) to sea level and off into the eversoBigbeyond (aura).

The bundle of approximations and inconsistencies that sits down for breakfast is later reborn as the work intended.

Or is it?
From home-movie to Imax spectacular.
They are one and the same.
Temporary salvation from the make believe and fairytale.

‘In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world….’
A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY – E.M.Cioran

 

Ps ‘Inscape’ is a concept inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins from the ideas of the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus.

 

Reflections upon a landscape - remixed and regurgitated
Andrew Kotting - Hastings Old Town - January 2013