Landscape, colour and dislocation

'I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.' (Strayed, 2013)

The idea of walking as a cathartic, healing, redemptive process is the storyline of the film wild, 2014. The film is based on the 2012 memoirs by the same name of Cheryl Strayed and is an account of an epic hike she undertook along a 1,100 mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in 1995. Strayed describes the three month trip as a spiritual journey, a way of finding her way back to the person that she used to be. Following the death of her mother from cancer aged 45, combined with an abusive father during her childhood Strayed's life had slipped into a freefall of heroin abuse and a series of destructive affairs.

Although ill equipped and with very little experience of hiking on such an epic walk Strayed undertook the jouney as a way of helping her to come to terms with losing her mother. Strayed realised that surviving the adversity and setbacks along the way way was due to the difficult childhood that she had once blamed for her troubles. The film captures perfectly the experience of the cyclical repetitive nature of enduring an experience as well as the redemptive and spiritually uplifting nature of successfully completing an arduous journey and coming to terms with a troubled past.
 

As my Master's Project has progressed I realise that this project has operated on quite a personal level. The places that I have chosen in order to inform my work have been taken from the landscape in and around the area in which I have grown up. A once familiar landscape that I have returned to after a ten year exodus having moved away to university before moving to London. Having recently been forced to return to this landscape due to illness, I have experienced a sense of dislocation and separation from it. By immersing myself in it once again I feel that I have come face to face with the memories of a former self embedded within this landscape. 

Expanding Landscape, 2015, Oil on Paper, 40 x 60cm

Slippage I, 2015, Silkscreen and Gloss on MDF, 26 x 40cm

Is it possible that my use of strong non-naturalistic colour as well as experimentation with distortion has been some attempt at manifesting this sense of dislocation? It seems that my default setting is to use bright colours, regardless of the colours inherent within the places depicted. Within my Master's Project I have oscillated between using strong colours and abandoning it completely in favour of using just black ink and paint, as depicted in the pieces above and those shown below. Place has been a consistent and ongoing concern within my work however it is the colour that has been a changeable element.

Irregular Fluctuation, 2015, Silkscreen on MDF, 25 x 36cm

Simulcrum, 2015, Pen and Ink on Paper, 70 x 100cm

In going forward I think it would be beneficial for me to attempt to re-introduce colour back into the work but to moderate its use so that it relates back to the places that are being depicted as well as toning it down so as not to be overly non-naturalistic or bright. Not only do I feel that this would be beneficial in terms of the work being produced but also as a way forcing myself to curb my natural instincts with regard to my use of colour.

Framing:

As part of the Bishop's Art Prize 'Streams of Living Water,' I had one of my silkscreens, slippage chosen to be exhibited as part of the competition. 

Richard Wade, 2015, Slippage I, Silkscreen and Gloss on MDF.

I contemplated several ways in which I was going to display this piece and decided in the end that it would be most effective to have it float mounted and framed within a box frame.

Richard Wade, 2015, Slippage I with box frame, 39 x 48.5cm.

 In choosing to frame my work using a float mount and box frame, I felt that this was in keeping with my research and related to the idea of a blending and blurring between the past and the present.  

Suspending the work within the window I felt helped to create the appearance that the work was hovering or floating above the rear backing board, which I felt gave it an added sense of ambiguity as well as adding to the sense that it was unanchored within the physical world of place and the landscape. 

Using this method of framing enabled the edges of the image to be visible within the frame allowing a shadow to be cast onto the background. I felt that this helped to create the impression that this was an object or a fragment that belonged as a part of something 
else.


Strayed, Cheryl, (2013) 'Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found.' London: Atlantic Books.