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Jenny Arran

Landscape as Language -

a sensory, emotional topography and landscape as language.


I had to write something about my work for an exhibition, my 'statement' gets updated everytime I think about it. It is always changing and always the same. It is always the natural world I come back to, inner/outer, a sensory, emotional topography, landscape as language, one that happens almost unconsciously, so deeply embedded does that territory feel.


I found something today that I wrote in my sketch book in 1998 way before any of these drawings. Way back when I was doing drawings of landscape - seeing micro / macro patterns - drawing cracks in the pavements as huge landscapes and replicating the lines left by the sea on the sand in huge mountainous drawings on the wall in silicon sealant.


'the landscape as a language more fluid and subtle than words. A pattern, an expression. Black on white like words on page, visually simple, beautiful with the meaning there to be read.'


It gave me a an amazing sense of how we can know things deeply so early on and yet for me they take a long time to filter through, to come to form or come into a different kind of consciousness - knowing has to be absorbed so very deeply, like water flowing, filtering through rock. All this time later I am still exploring the same themes and ideas in my work, from my changing evolving perspectives. I was reminded of how patient we need to be and of what Rilke said;


"And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them...'

Rainer Maria Rilke



#topography #landscape #language #rilke

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