Humans are constantly renegotiating our relationship towards nature, however, nature is not always the supportive partner. Our designed environments often strive to be those reconciliatory landscapes where human and ecological interests co-exist and prosper. But within an impermanent and entropic landscape, these relationships are not always possible, nor desirable. Conflict is ever-present.
Nature will always win. When we create our built environment, it is with a knowledge that we are designing and ecologically engineering to delay the processes of nature. The landscape, thus, can now, be recalibrated with intent to further enhance both ecological integrity and human wellbeing by understanding these integrated anthro-eco processes.
The Designed Environment serves as a means to establish a relationship between the human landscape and the real landscape. These places often evoke an intellectual, cultural, emotional, and physical connection to its users.
Yet the designed landscape is not a static object. The myriad of environmental factors that affect the places we occupy offer opportunities for emotive connections and dramatic imagery - the Moods of our Environment.
EXPRESSION AND MEANING IN THE LANDSCAPE
BY CREATING SPACE ...
WE BECOME AWARE
How do we define space to make us aware of the landscape ?
To make us aware of our place in this world – of our place within nature ?
Our landscapes emerge as blurred spaces of diluted nature. Landscapes are present and disappearing at the same - consumed. These landscapes offer a glorious banality. The Jeffersonian grid turned the American landscape into nothing – yet it is in this nothing we find our selves if we look. Art an Design shows our relationships – helps us understand our place. If you think about it, our built environment is often a milky nothingness – it is not a true transparency into ourselves.
Yet space helps us ask questions, it tells us about our world. It provides a reflection. This leads us into a new reality – a new kind of space; a reality where we try to figure out where we are – how we are in this environment. It helps us map the human construct onto nature.
In seeking the visual essence of a composition, it is very important to look at the space - the space between things. I seek compositions which present the beauty and struggle in the designed form and ecological processes.
Whether contextual relationships or subtle details, I seek to distill and intensify these elements. These photographs illustrate the powerful relationship and the emotive quality of our designed environment and those truths present.
RECALIBRATING the LANDSCAPE
THE NATURE OF OUR RELATIONSHIP