Earthbound - Landlocked
This series combined paintings with editioned intaglio prints. The images portrayed large standing figures, labouring to move beyond a mass of earth.
Like all the works with the theme Earthbound, these paintings depict a ‘lower’ form of consciousness as either a sleeping figure or a head, from which emanates a landmass containing another human form.
In Landlocked, the human figure within the upper dimensions of the paintings is an active, integrated element within the landscape it inhabits. It is an animalistic entity that struggles to distinguish itself from the dry loam it is immersed within. This body is just a muddy spirit of the earth, only slightly detached from the surrounding environment through which it labours to escape. The path it treads is an earthbound scar that points to the sky.
I tried to depict the ravine as a self-contained capsule of dense light, the edges of which are like the ribcage in the body of the earth. This form may have been inspired by having seen an archaeological photograph of an ancient burial boat set into the ground in Turkey.
The starting point for the pictures came after I produced a field of paint that seemed like a mass of earth, from which I was able to carve out the negative spaces of the ravine. The notion of a primal figure, imbued with spirit that enables it to transform its environment, has been explored in numerous ways in my past work. In these paintings, that entity has been reduced to its most fundamental form, like an earth spirit or homunculus from alchemical literature. The act of shaping the contours of the figurative form from base earth pigments seemed like giving life to dead earth, which forged this connection for me.
As in most of my work, I allowed the pictures to evolve of their own accord, until certain aspects of the imagery became more prominent and seemed to reveal underlying meaning. In this series, the dry gorge eventually came to resemble elongated wings that branch out from the head of the sleeping figure below. The following two paintings measure roughly 1.7x1.1m.
The three prints displayed below combine colours from multiple photopolymer printing plates. They are intaglio prints, measuring approximately 40x30cm.
I also made smaller paintings, where the nature of the imagery was more amorphous. These paintings measure approximately 80x40cm.
Explore this theme
1. Introduction
2. Inland
3. Landlocked (You Are Here)
4. Grotto
