Where it all came from.
Fair warning, this next bit might get a bit nerdy and wordy - my college tutor used to call my writing ‘too flowery’ (so I guess I’m nothing if not consistent ey Sarah?). But, I felt it was important to explain where this all came from and document the truly wonderful things I’ve read that have shaped my understanding.
It all started with 3 modules I took in my last 2 years at uni. The first, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the more classical study of Literature of the Romantic Period (what can I say, I’m a sucker for wandering lonely as a cloud). The second was ‘Quiet Rebels and Unquiet Minds: Writing to Contemporary Anxiety’, which examined depictions of prevalent mental health issues such as anxiety, addiction, and depression in contemporary literature. And the third, ‘Literature, Landscape and the Environment’, which encouraged us to examine the cultural, artistic and philosophical issues that underpin the complex relationships human beings have with the living things around us. The texts I found myself reading were so moving, so urgent, so determined that their messages were heard.
It all swirled around in my head like a thick brain-soup and I’ve been hooked on this train of thought ever since.
Wordsworth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads describes the process of choosing ‘incidents and situations from common life’ and ‘throw[ing] over them a certain colouring of imagination’ whereby things seem both familiar, yet strange, and ripe with hidden meaning should we look deeper. We just have to listen, our ears to the ground, ready to transmute the message through creativity.
The natural world is at once tangible yet untouchable, enduring yet fleeting. It’s elements are harsh and uncompromising at times, yet nourishing and life-giving at others. It’s this ability to exist wholly in a state of constant contradiction that has me endlessly inspired. It’s life, all life. The rainstorms and the sunsets, the flowers and the thorns. Our lives as human beings are a lot the same if you really think about it.
It’s a thread that Owen Sheers picks up in a lot of his work but, specifically, in his poetry collection Skirrid Hill (an absolute fave of mine, big up Owen). The collection takes motifs of grief, separation, divorce, the movement from childhood to adulthood, growth, change, and hardship, and lets them play out against the backdrop of the Welsh natural spaces he knows so well. Nature is a companion, an adversary, a comfort, a teacher. Or something unchanging, uncaring and distinctly inhuman. It watches on unmoved as the poet grapples with the futility of it all, unstoppable as the breeze. The poet and the landscape illuminate one another through their interactions to reveal fresh understandings about what it is to simply exist. This way the outside world speaks to our inner world.
Rebecca Solnit further builds on this concept in her text The Faraway Nearby. Another absolute GEM of a text. Have I read it and re-read it so many times the pages are started to wrinkle at my enthusiasm? Yes. Is it something I’ve found myself ugly-crying while reading in the bath after long day? Mind your business. But if there’s one text I will endlessly recommend, it’s this one. The way she inter-weaves memoir, contemporary journalism, cultural criticism and fiction seamlessly into one text is incredible. In doing so, she emphasizes the key role art and literature plays in facilitating connection and empathy between people. The hybrid nature of the text replicates this idea of interconnectedness, and by using tangents, metaphors and allegory to examine a number of different texts in the book itself, she’s able to construct an imaginative community, and highlight the various ways humanity can connect by ‘putting ourselves in [each other’s] story’.
It’s raw, honest, and just all the adjectives. But not only is her work about connecting with others and our shared humanity, it’s also about the importance of exploring your own inner world. She depicts the self geographically, with the external landscape and world around us providing a means to examine ‘physical and psychic geography together’. Weather, seasons, light and dark all can’t be fixed; and neither can time, space, or emotion. She asserts ‘Emotion has geography’, and since ‘we are all free to imagine what the world is like, and since we all imagine it differently, there is no reason to believe in the fixed reality of things’.
It’s capturing this notion of transience, movement, change, duplicity, and allusiveness in the fixed medium of paint that I wish to explore in my work. To offer up depictions of our exterior ways and allow us to explore the ways these might intersect with our own inner worlds.