Read About This Work

Our awareness of a world environment may have increased through mass media and global travel but at the end of the twentieth century our actual experience of nature is often increasingly restricted.’[1]

Inspired by the fundamental concepts of artists such as Henrik Håkansson, Sergio Vega and Heather and Ivan Morison I have assessed my own relationship to my urban environment and the contact that I personally have with nature. Within the city I see architectures promoting economic power and romantic visions, grand façades hiding neglected ideals and carefully cultivated remnants of a natural world. Based on these experiences I have created an installation which exploits themes of construction and fabrication. 

The romantic notion, suggested in Ibsen’s play The Master Builder, of building ‘castles in the air’[2] as a refuge from reality reinforces the parallel of construction in both physical architectures and cerebral imaginings. What landscapes do our fantasies construct and where do the images that fill these fantasies originate? Vega believes that even from our present sophisticated perspective we feel that at some long lost time we did share a true connection with nature and the continuing pursuit of paradise fulfils a fantasy that we could return to a state of bliss.[3]

Through this subliminal desire we partake in a process of ideological naturalisation and so I find that the tantalizing glimpses of a natural world that I encounter within the urban environment turn out to be an appropriation of nature, stylised and marketed to conform to a uniform and saccharin idyll. Beguiled by artifice, I am drawn to these fragments as if to gaudy jewels. I want to recreate this feeling of seduction in the viewer and so have reversed the façade, delaying the moment of impact when the vision is revealed. The shabby side exposed, confronts the viewer and initially hides the spectacle of the panorama. The vast expanse of the city is depicted with muted tones and sketchy appearance to convey a sense of monotony through scale that prevents detailed recollection. It is the familiar yet indistinct backdrop to my life within which the promise of the natural world appears literally reduced to a sliver, removed and unattainable. At first glance the imagery through the opening may suggest the natural world but this is not a real nature for this no longer exists, as Ulrich Beck explains; 

The process of interaction with nature has consumed it, abolished it, and transformed it […] one is dealing with variants of an artificial nature: projections of nature, wish-fulfilment natures, nature utopias, all roughly as natural as a big-screen advertisement replete with roaring, turbulent rivers in the urban bustle.[4]  

On closer inspection through the aperture the view is exposed as synthetic, and although it hints of the sumptuous, lush and harmonious it is drawn from the collective vision that manufactures the ornaments, pots the plants and blasts the rockery rocks. My own experiences, reflected in the imagery I have chosen, corroborate Beck’s theory that nature has become indecipherably entwined with society. My use of insubstantial materials flimsily assembled as support structures signifies that the tenets maintaining the illusion of nature as safe and malleable are only held in place by nostalgia and desire.

The sky given a heightened reality in contrast to the graphic illustration of the cityscape is a reminder of the enduring and irresistible power of something beyond the manmade.