Constance ARI

Gaze is an investigation into the relationship between processes of drawing and the expression of emotive, experiential and metaphysical dimensions of landscape. The intent is to move beyond the pictorial conventions of landscape imagery to evoke a deeper understanding and expression of place.

The subject for the work is Tasman Island and a strong personal relationship with the site. Central to the work is trial and experimentation into forms of mark-making and performative elements of drawing using gesture, accidental and found marks and erasure juxtaposed with highly composed and structured techniques.

It’s an attempt to make sense emotively of what this landscape is, to try to reach a physical presence beyond ideas that reflects back to us our emotive and subconscious states rather than a static environment. It explores a sense of connectedness to a place, initially conceived through my appropriation of its physical surroundings, to which a process of emotive and metaphysical evaluation, and re-evaluation, occurs transforming into a deeper relationship between context and method, surface and texture, and manipulation and deconstruction.

For this work to be realised, the viewer is encouraged to enter the space and onto the work, which is drawn on the ground as well as the walls. The viewer becomes an integral part of the re-making/marking of the work, re-defining the drawing and landscape with their own presence in it.

David Edgar works with metaphysical ideas of emotion in landscape and is intrigued by the process of representing an emotive state in reference to place in the visual depiction of landscape. Previous works have involved large-scale lithographs and woodcuts but more recently he has been exploring subtle interactions of mark making within performative aspects of drawing. David is currently undertaking a MFA at the University of Tasmania in Hobart where, through historic imagery, contemporary stories and his own experiences, he is exploring a deeper investigation into ideas of presence within various aspects of landscape through new processes of drawing.