Borrowing from Liz Wells, I am identifying space as an indeterminate expanse of the unknown and place being that which is named, imaged, and thereby owned. “A basic useful definition of landscape, thus, would be vistas encompassing both nature and the changes humans have effected on the natural world.”^[2] My landscape images operate in an opposite manner than standard landscapes. Through the repetition, the notion of a unique moment is thwarted, the notion of transcendence is obscured, but yet the images retain a romantic nature. This romanticism stays due to the compositional structure and the gradual variations in light, colour and moisture. The process I deploy relates to the human process of intervention and effect. The apparatus is inserted into the land, and through a systematic approach renders change visible compared to the intervention that often results in visible and invisible change. The transformations from man’s influence and the resultant negative feedback loop become manifest through the series of images. Each landscape is treated as a species, a typographical representation, used in a photographic process that interrogates the condition of the place – an ontological quest to question the condition and stability of the site.

This work draws from the historical lineage of landscape photography, particularly in the relationship between image-making and ownership, inherent from the onset of landscape imagery, derived from European merchants in the late fifteenth century following the introduction of mathematical perspective and oil paints. This use of perspective introduced an ego-centrality to viewing that enhanced the transformation of space into place through picture-making. According to Philip Descola, “Such an ‘objectification of the subjective’ produces a two-fold effect: it creates a distance between man and the world by making the autonomy of things depend upon man; and it systematises and stabilises the external universe even as it confers upon the subject absolute mastery over the organisation of this newly conquered exteriority.”^[3] Although it might at first seem that the only locations that retain the realm of space lie beyond the known cosmos or in the sub-atomic structures of life, the primary concern of this project is the transformation of place back towards space. The allowance of ownership and knowing that underlie the determination being place allow for the use and abuse of resources, such as land. Conversely, rejecting that ontological condition and moving land towards space allows for the agency of the land to be recognised, as through the recognition of agency the relationship of “object” is not fixed and allows for a fluidity amongst these things. This shift cannot breach the condition space, but could potentially relocate this condition into a liminal position, allowing a location to bridge the threshold between space and place, acting within both models of thought. To name and to image is to own, to objectify that which is being designated; here the serialised and gridded imagery can escape this fate through its own resistance to the condition of being known.

By creating a vertical topology of atmospheric forces through the collection of data, the serialised images abstract place, although the landscape is not returned to the position of space. The importance of the data is nearly equal to that of the images. The data operates as the theoretical construct for the creation of the images as well as the immediate antecedent for the capture of the images. In operating as the theoretical construct, the data is the connection between the image, the land and the atmosphere. It is an imperative measurement of indeterminate forces of small change that reflect environmental cycles and human interventions. The data is not functioning as science, but is working towards the positive unconsciousness through manifesting data through visual means reaching for an understanding that can tie experience into scientific understanding. The data is working towards an unfixed consciousness by escaping a fixed know-ability, and forcing a new attempt at understanding or perceiving a place with each new encounter given the visual changes indicative of the atmospheric actants reified. Although a tension may seem inherent between chance and scientific data in the capture of the images, to call the system chance is to deny the causality, or to not recognise the relationships within. The proliferation of data through a single day of image capture results in the discarding of hundreds of readings, yet the system of logic retains its accountability through the construction of the grid and the transparency to the mode of construction. It is thus required to embed the data with the corresponding image, retaining the original causal relationship.