Internal landscape
artists, general :: posted on July 5th, 2008
There seems to be quite a lot of artwork that is titled ‘internal landscape’, but what does that really mean? This has been a bit of a research question for me and it is proving illusive. To express the internal landscape externally, to create an artwork that reflects inner… what?
Polywog has approached the description with grace and beautiful descriptive writing, but soon starts to question it. Most descriptions I find seem to refer back to language as the signifier, but I tend to think of language as the construct for the external understanding of the world around us, rather than the subliminal emotive triggers that dwell beyond the reasoning of language.
Sungmi Lee has called one of her works ‘Internal Landscape’ from her Evanescence series. Using plexiglas, sandpaper and a very smokey incense, the landscape has appeared and is a construct of her understanding of what a landscape looks like, but is also a creation of controlling the smoke. So is it an internal landscape? Or an image that looks like an external landscape, but being representative of what an internal landscape may look like – smokey swirls that may appear to be something, but are really something else. Our language tells us that it has elements that are recognisable in the literal landscape, but it is perhaps an illusion.
Is that an internal landscape – an illusion?
Approaches to understanding what it is we are describing as an internal landscape swing between psychology, with a scientific approach to the cognitive abilities and cultural understanding developed through our lives, and the philosophical which approaches discussion of the mind – body by distinguishing the mind as apart from the bodily functions described by psychology. In my limited and no doubt naive reading and understanding I tend to sit between these disciplines – combining, as I so often do, things that people tend to separate. I see the cells of the body as stores of memories past – even carrying the histories of previous generations genetically – and as responders to the present.
The internal landscape then becomes a complex matrix of subliminal emotive responses that can’t be qualified through specifics, but can be understood as belonging to the living body. I have just read ‘breasts, bodies, canvas – Central desert Art as Experience’ by Jennifer Loureide Biddle which was a breath of fresh air for these eyes. Her beautifully researched and written book talks about the Aboriginal women’s art as being an expression of their whole relationship to their landscape. The canvas is the ground – the skin of the earth – the painting the landscape that has been inscribed upon it. The women’s bodies are the same – the skin, the skin of the earth, the body art, the inscription, the written language. Could this deep understanding of a relationship between the external landscape be an expression of the internal landscape? There is no distinction between the physical body and the land – they are one.
The Book Show review on the ABC Radio National website by Rex Butler says in part “These women’s works are not depictions of a pre-existing landscape. Rather, the landscape comes into being with the painting, exists only in its ‘transmission’ or ‘enunciation’. It is a performance and not a description that is at stake here: the works do, not are.”
And so I think I’ll leave it there!
