Imagination is Nature

I am working within the continuum of artists from cave painters onwards, whose subject matter is nature.     As our relationship with and ideas about nature change so there is an acceleration of different ways of working with it.

Perhaps the greatest shift in our thinking in the shadow of climate change is to do with how our attempts to utilise and colonise nature have backfired.    There is a loss of contact and disassociation from it that is having tangible destructive consequences on the environment.

Artists and writers are thinking of ways to work ‘with’ nature, rather than to define, conceptualise or utilise it. The French essayist Helen Cixous’ writing, for example, is described as being:” a path into nature . . . Things are felt more by being caressed with discourse than being classified and named.  They are felt in their essence.”

 “To the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself”   William Blake