Birdland is Everywhere

I have posted the first image not just as a prompt to people to go and see our new mini show at the Ruskin Exhibition Space at PX Learning Zone but also as a statement of intent. This display containing an antique birdbook and feather shuttlecocks comes after the Business of Life Press in Force of Nature [second image] and builds on or feeds the growth of a line of thinking around the idea of Re-imagined Landscapes. I suppose i wanted to declare it here and perhaps begin a conversation or exploration of an idea as we have started to think more about what this is or might mean or could be. What we took from the press was an idea that landscape is everything outside of us. There some Heidegger quote about "far from my body being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space for me at all if I had no body".  Re-iterated by you in your inscription in blood of the word inside on page 5 or near there [Bachelards "and with the stroke of the pen i name myself master of the world" - seems to fit here both literally and metaphorically!].. and reinforced by what we took from the book in the first image is the chapter heading - Birdland is everywhere - ie .. its everywhere.

This of course compliments my thinking around past ideas of writing and representing landscape. But leads us forward to think about what we as artists are doing and encourages me to ask my self/us the question 'Are we contemporary landscape artists?' Does the idea that we work still with space, place, people. site, memory, the senses, history, embedded knowledge, environment, aesthetics count? I am used to thinking and reading about work created in social spaces with all its different intentions as Relational Aesthetics or Socially Engaged, and perhaps it would be more useful or interesting or perhaps not to think differently or at least critique that. Perhaps instead what we do is the equivalent to landscape painting - we continue the line on from cave art, to Turner, to APG to now.. [Yes i know big jumps, but you see what i mean]. And instead of always looking for new ways to describe the act, instead we should look at the content of the act or perhaps the subject of the act...
If Cave art is a celebration, an act of remembrance, a showing of respect for those we share our space with, a describing with awe the living world. And Turners work asks us to look beyond the physical space, to see all around, to look anew to look deeper  - too feel. And if APG are working in the field, alongside workers/producers of the field, for the betterment of the field it strikes me we are the bastard children or, put nicer, the torchbearers of them all...