Paper short abstract:

This paper and short video presentation articulates my artistic research and approach to the interpretation of landscapes and embodied geographies alongside resonant intersections with Victorian science and ideology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper and short video presentation articulates my artistic research and approach to the interpretation of landscapes and embodied geographies alongside resonant intersections with Victorian science and ideology. My work is anchored by my relationship with the essence of a specific place. This paper focuses on my work in the Cheltenham Badlands of Caledon, Ontario, originally the land of the Mississauga First Nations. I have been working with this site across seasons since May 2014. I ask: How is essence discoverable? How do geographies take effect in our bodies? What permeates the fibre of things? What surfaces from a deeper source? What kind of value do we ascribe? I attempt to answer these questions through the framework of The Observatory. The Observatory is a curated collection of found and created curios which I draw from the sites I work with. The curios range from discovered artifacts, to physical responses to the emotions, themes and memories that surface on site. These responses may take the form of performance, dance, painting, photography, film, timed lighting design; and are influenced by archiving, cartography, framing, museum studies, and by emerging technologies. I aim to archive all that it is to be within my chosen environment through these disciplines and mediums, and to transfer essential data to the observer. What is important to me is that the curated data creates an experience that is restorative in the sense that traces are reflected everywhere. What is restorative is found through recognition.