Illusory Landscapes of an Interior Territory

where in my body, do i let land live? where, in this land, does my body want to live?

she knows that as she dwells in land, the land swells in her;        shapes her interiority.      how easily terrains become territories        and that even her own imagined landscapes are subject to being claimed.       that the land that she’s felt held by,  has held her not alone.        and that when the land finds its way to her bones, she’s changed.        so she changes the land in her re-membering.        and her memories change her         and sometimes she longs to remember the land; longs to remember soft memories.         and sometimes she leaves the memories and land to find their distance within her.  

Illusory Landscapes of an Interior Territory is an effort to create an internal map of the lands in which I’ve felt both held and unnerved, through a collage of image transfers of various of photographs taken in situ. The work is largely prompted by the numerous works of Barry Lopez, whose writing touches on an expansive list of subjects, including: how human imagination is shaped by the landscapes we encounter, his experience of childhood sexual abuse, kinship to nature, and the need to let the lands you love mobilize you into action. Illusory Landscapes of an Interior Territory is a response to the deeper reflections Barry Lopez’s works prompted within me: around impermanence, relational ways of being with land, and the repression, erosion, and reconstruction of memory.

“To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one’s own interior landscape, and the familiar landscape of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.” - Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams