landscape and body/lens (making & contextual study)

eye lens: one of the areas that was discussed as part of my recent tutorial with P.G. and C.S. was my use of lens based processes in relation to landscape. of course the lens is an eye, only once removed from the direct experience of the body. i can’t help but think that they eye is also a lens and already once removed, not from the body but from direct experience of the landscape or otherwise, turned upside down onto the retina and then reverted upright by the brain. so is the experience of the landscape always a representational image of one kind anyway, one that we are constantly negotiating even before we make any external image of it. something to consider in my making and in my remaking.

digital and analogue lens: digital lens based work can so easily minimise the sense of separation from experience to imagery and trick an unreal as real, a past as present or an image as experience (lens and the hyper-real is for another day). analogue lens-based processes perhaps announce their presence more obviously; their relation to the direct experience being separated by the materiality of the process and often giving hints of the body’s presence in the process. the artist charlotte prodger discusses her use of analogue processes having obvious material limits where the body is always somehow present in the making. even in her use of digital lens based work, prodger emphasises the body as part of the process – using shaky hand-held methods and including the sound of her breathing as part of the work etc. she says

‘the systems of the body are enmeshed with the camera’

‘a symbiosis but also a kind of grappling’

maybe a body/lens, as i like to think of it.

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