Well Equipped: Assembling the Outdoors

Abstract

My research seeks to find methods of art making that can approach the tangled layers of meaning, history, geology and intersecting experience which make up a contemporary relationship to the outdoors. This investigation is scaffolded by three key approaches: The use of assemblage as a material and philosophical practice, the development of an ontology for the outdoors, and a situated and subjective framing of the landscape.

The question I ask is: How can I use a personal narrative in art to make visible the complex layered systems that make up the outdoors?

There are two interlinked sites of exploration in this research: the shaping and defining of the outdoors as a potential field of study, and the development of a layered, single protagonist approach to developing sculpture in order to test the ways in which this field might function.

I locate these arguments with reference to artists Rosalie Gascoigne, Cornelia Parker, Ann Hamilton, Rebecca Horn, Julie Gough and Dorothy Cross. These artists have made assemblage a core focus of their practices over several decades. While assemblage is a broad field in both contemporary art and social sciences contexts, I have consciously chosen to situate my work in relation to artists engaging with materials for their linguistic, cultural and physical properties, and who are concerned with site-specificity, place and memory.

Theorists, philosophers and historians including Edward Casey, Simon Schama and Rebecca Solnit have informed my framing of the term outdoors through their research into landscape theory and in their arguments on memory and experience in the construction of place. The writings of Lorna Finlayson, Marsha Meskimmon, Donna Haraway, Brian Fay and Barbara Kingsolver have assisted in shaping my approach to the single protagonist narrative; and Anna Dezeuze and Sheri Klein were pivotal in the development of an assemblage approach utilising humour to create a partially shared experience.

The resultant artworks use clothing and items related to the body in combination with outdoors imagery and found materials as a way of connecting and integrating figure and landscape. In these artworks I have explored the outdoors not only as a place in which we enact our identity, as individuals and as a broader society, but as a collection of entangled systems of which we are a part.