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The landscape has long been the focus of my artistic research. Yet no matter how often I return to it, I continue to wrestle with how to engage, respond to, and conceptualize landscape and my place in it. I recognize "that which is real (the actuality of one's experience) butting up against the forms of cultural representation that encode it." There are two primary ways that I encounter landscape: 1) through my body and a phenomenological orientation; 2) through layers of discourse, stories, and representations. While the landscape and its features may be neutral space and objects, it is a site fraught with highly charged stories and competing systems of representation, narration, and perception surrounding the same events, time, and place.
To this end, my thesis is guided by the following questions: what stories shape my interaction with and understanding of landscape and nature? How have I been disciplined by cultural and historical scripts, media, and technology? How does a lineage of art history influence a particular way of picturing and framing the natural world? And finally, what stories do I perpetuate or contribute in my work as an artist to this discourse about landscape?