The (Re-) Conquest of the Imaginary

In the pasture of the world,
I endlessly push aside the tall
grasses in search of the Ox.
Following unnamed rivers,
lost upon the interpenetrating
paths of distant mountains.

(From: Ten Bulls, 11th century poem, China)

We cannot get hold of reality. Whenever depicting a landscape, we make a statement about the difference between something existing and something perceived. The sign system of the image simultaneously shows both a scene and the view of the observer, from a unique vantage point, taken by the artist and his apparatus, be it camera or hand – an infinitely subjective world within a captured moment. 

Intentionally or accidentally, the traces, the wounds and fractures of the natural landscape are integrated into the emotional landscape of memory, by a semantic shift these elements are transformed into a suggestive and personal imaginary cartography – a gesture that undeniably represents a reinvention of nature.

A landscape is an order of interrelated places, a text to be interpreted, it is temporality, history, narrative. Nature is always overlaid with assigned meanings, consciousness is entangled within the self-spun fabric of these meanings. There is no « cliché » nature that prevents the „I“ from recognizing a „real nature“; landscapes are cognitive constructions, historical concepts with limited spatial and temporal validity. Landscape does not have to be experienced directly, it can be present as an epitome in the mind.

The landscape of the outside world has no need of explorers, the inside is the terra incognita, and where the outer and inner landscapes touch, where the tangible and intangible, the epitome and the image merge, there we see – resulting from close observation, intuitive experimentation and the liberation of the insubstantial – emerging images that correspond much more precisely with the reality in our minds than „real“ nature does.

Text and translation: Cem Angeli

german

© Ulrike Felder. All rights reserved