Drawing from the Edge - Statement
Drawing from the Edge
Drawing from the Edge explores the use of perception and memories of landscapes as a resource for imagination. I am interested in using strategies to dissolve and disrupt familiar narratives in order to capture the new and undefined at the edges of perception. While grounded in the material reality of the small mysterious Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, the photographs aren’t about Bhutan per se, but rather explore and draw from the edges of my Western mind and the exposure to Asian and Buddhist cultures. The constructed landscapes of this series call attention to the way in which landscapes come into being; but only in relationship to elements such as weather, gaze, mood, memory, history, culture, and the desire that frames them. My landscapes are composites created from a series of unrelated events rather than capturing one distinct location. They call our attention to seeing perception as a creative action in which sensation and memory combine to form subjective narratives, which, in turn, can be molded and transformed. In the high altitudes of Bhutan, the thinner atmosphere and the mist combine to produce a white haze – lifting and falling – and in the process create the visual appearance of soft edges
visually dissolving the materiality of a landscape. The boundary breaks the flow of the continuous nature of reality, temporarily drawing our attention to what is within. And at the boundary – the edge – is where “something new begins its presencing” (Heidegger 1971, p. 154).
I started making marks, emerging from the edges of my newly combined photographs. I drew from within the image inside the frame to sketch out a possible emergence of something new. A new image of thought arises from the juxtaposition, freed from history and offering a new reality.