So are we landscape artists? I first asked this when we were talking about our work and if you read the Birdland is Everywhere post from Feb you'll see i was thinking in relation to the fact we work with space, place, people, site, memory, the senses, history, embedded knowledge, environment, aesthetics etc.. Now it seems timely to interrogate the idea more and i suppose it throws up another question immediately - Whats the difference between landscape artists and artists who make site specifically? The answer cant just be work made 'for' a specific place, rather than 'of' a specific place - or can it? Here is the wikepedia entry under landscape art - do we meet the criteria? Probably not, but i suspect that's not my point. Instead i came to the idea off the back of an interest in landscape as a subject, my drawings and work of the farm and an interest in how we talk about what we do as Kate and Steve. And there in lies the point...its about representation. So if we are landscape artists then i suppose we have to ask or wonder at whether we are representing space, place, people, memory etc or are we doing something different?
My first thoughts are:
ReplyDelete1. I personally don't want to label myself as a landscape artist, despite doing one painting and a number of photo's very recently that really do engage with landscape stuff.
2. So, I wondered why you may want to label yourselves as such. Could it be restricting? I haven't seen that much of Steve's work but what I've seen of Kate's looks a bit like landscape. But what I am really interested in is: Why do you want a label? Or do you?
Paul
i suppose we are talking of the larger practice that is kate and steve's work not what we do as individuals. Its what got us thinking about Birdland is Everywhere as a coming together thing and why you were asked to join - not because you paint pictures of landscapes, but because of your interest in the political landscape and history - we were laterally thinking. So yes the birdland group does have in it people who look a bit like the traditional notion of landscape artists but it also contains the curator of Site gallery [clues in the title] and an academic who works with words. In terms of labels - no, i suspect in the greater scheme of things I'm not interested, but it is an interesting thing to think with as Steve and I get better a working out what we do etc..
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