A response to space in the natural environment : painting as a phenomenological study of the Blue Mountains, NSW

Abstract

My Masters research engages with the ways as a painter, I increasingly struggle to give form to my relationship with the Blue Mountains. Although it is a familiar natural environment, this struggle has articulated my research question: Can problems associated with representing vast natural environments like the Blue Mountains be overcome through an analysis of personal embodied experience? This thesis examines the complexities of translating the perceptual and corporeal experience of the Blue Mountains. This site is rich in social history, from Indigenous occupation through to the listing of its status as a World Heritage Area in 2000. It is also a place of early childhood memories and has been my home for the last 20 years. My research has investigated these histories and the physical landscape in an organically responsive practice of both charcoal drawing and watercolour on paper. The written exegesis of 20,000 words, describes the outcome of the research in four bodies of work on paper: Nests, Vertigo, Absence and Presence and Keepsake. The Nests works explore the symbolism of the nature of nests, while also providing the opportunity to more ambiguously trace the labyrinthine form of the mountains. Vertigo considers the implications of edges, and of distance and intimacy. In Absence and Presence, I advocate for what is hidden in the landscape, including the competing and forgotten stories about place. The final works identify how I have brought the horizon and vastness into intimate images that can also become objects to be held in the palm of the hand. I have argued in the exegesis from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory and phenomenology, how the development of a personal symbolism originating in an embryonic nest has enabled me to approach some of the more problematic concepts of vastness that this natural environment holds. This trope evolved through my studio research, and was developed through a series of constructed and productive binaries, such as intimacy and distance, past and present, and loss and attachment. I argue through the studio practice and writing that the development of these approaches have contributed to the renewed accessibility, for my audience, and myself, of a distinctly over-represented and culturally determined site. Show more