Smoke and Mirrors 5

This work explores the idea that notions of beauty and our understanding of landscape are constructed, and in doing so they subvert the notion of beauty as truth, and reference wider issues of authenticity within photography.

The intention is to request a more personal response to the landscape, an experience embedded in memory, history, storytelling and folk law to engage the viewer in a dialogue with the image and in a sense of the familiar, drawing on an awareness of how our perception of the natural world is shaped.

Ongoing debates surrounding landscape examine the consequences of conceiving of landscape as beautiful. This construction obscures the reality of the land, veiling it, reducing the natural world to an idealization. The golden tree, sparkling with a seductive opulent sheen alludes to this construction, whilst also evoking a sense of the fairytale. These magical, fantasy trees reference the fictions which persist in spite of any conscious knowledge about the material, social or political status of landscapes, to create ‘rural myth’ and romanticism, obscuring an understanding of the land as threatened and exploited, dangerous and unknown.