Horizons
The landscape has become integral to Shirley’s recent practice. Encountered on daily walks, she recognises the land as an active place that nurtures reflection, with the motion of walking mirroring her longstanding interest in repetition as a carrier of meaning. In a return to the process led explorations of painting, screenprint and needlepoint tapestry in her early career, she now contextualises these material investigations and responses to place within the wider context of her academic research.
Amongst others, she is interested in the reflective accounts of John Muir, who beautifully articulates the contemplative nature of walking in his comment ‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in’.1
In addition, the theory underpinning her research led practice and the work of new materialist writers such as Donna Haraway2, Rosi Braidotti3, Katve-Kaisa Konturri4 Mary Modeen and Iain Biggs5 and find an outlet for capturing a sense of place through the process of engaging and negotiating with materials.
In these works, horizons act as a point of reflection and the slow accumulation of layered mark making accentuates the physicality of each work. For Shirley, the process of making becomes a point of osmosis between herself and the landscape, reflecting Karen Barad’s observation that ‘We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are part of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming’.6
1 Wolfe, L.M. (1979). John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir. WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.
2 Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. (2008) When Species Meet. London: University of Minnesota Press.
3 Braidotti, R. (2022) Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge, Polity.
4 Konturri, K. (2018) Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration. London: Open Humanities Press.
5 Modeen, M. and Biggs, I. (2021) Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place. Abingdon: Routledge
6 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Duke University Press