KATHERINE BLACKBURNE

72" x 96" oil on canvas

Further to my point about shared biological history of aggression. Freud locates this history in the human unconscious or what he called primary processes. Most thinkers situate primary processes as an earlier form of thinking in our development as individual subjects. Meaning that primary processes pertain to all of nature, not just the human psyche. Nature evolves and contains human life, and human life, in the mirroring of the creative and destructive forces of nature, can grasp something of the dynamics of the psyche of nature.

Current neuroscientific understanding of the evolution of the human consciousness insists that biological hardware is the genesis of consciousness and not an ‘ephemeral’ entelechy-type entity. And that while we humans experience selfhood as an internal, chimeric domain introspection is actually a fully explicable result of the differences in the supplementary functioning between the superior surfaces of the two hemispheres that register pre-action potentials

oil on canvas 56” x 56”

2018

66" x 80" oil on canvas

Whatever “the other” represents -stories, myths, events is situated between humans and material reality. In this way humans are positioned as separate from nature and landscape. I’m interested in how that occurs. I’m interested in questioning that dynamic.

68" x 76" oil on linen

Much of our darkest collective stuff seems to happen in forests. I find this immensely fascinating.  No less so because I grew up in Australia where colonial history intersects with the long indigenous history in ways that all Australian people are obviously still grappling with. How the landscape figures in that story affects me deeply.

Unstretched Scroll oil on canvas 66" x 94"

Can a landscape painting that contains nothing of human making or design speak to our history, our present our future? Of course a painting is never devoid of human design since our eyes create the frame in which we view or comprehend something beyond our immediate body.

A picture, whether photograph or painting always already separates us and defines us away from the thing we see. We capture and release it back into the wild. Therein lies a vestige of the human’s ‘design within nature’.

60" x 72" oil on linen

I wanted to get at this idea of a forest as a place for psychic projection of the social imaginary.

I reference a fragment of a Roman wreath from a bust sculpture juxtaposed with fragments of several indigenous masks suggesting the ways the artifacts of a culture speak to the history and issues of domination by colonial culture.

60" x 72" oil on canvas

60" x 72" oil on linen

72" x 96" oil on canvas

Even though Post Impressionism, Symbolism and Expressionism seem like outmoded terms in this post human, pervasively digitized realm, manyfigurative painters (myself included) still labor under the same formal conceptual rigors of the late 19th early 20th centuries while attempting to depict contemporary states of being and the socio-contextual identity of the artist.

The 'masks' I reference here are an Islamic warrior mask, Roman warrior bust and a Mesopotamian clay mask of Huwawa guardian of the Sumerian cedar forest. In order for the masks to blend with the forest I rendered the landscape more loosely. In the breaking up of the planes the spaces in the painting seemed to flatten and resemble camouflage pattern. I wondered what this ‘accidental’ camouflage might signify in relation to my ideas surrounding collective social imaginary?

72" x 96" oil on canvas

…I’m thinking about disembodied voices in the present, past and future loops. Evoking perhaps in the most literal sense a voice that calls out in the dark forest, or the voice that comes from inside a technological device or the voice that issues from history. Not forgetting of course our own internal voice. Who is speaking?

Of all my  recent forest paintings I find this piece to be the most personally exciting since it poses questions that I don’t yet have answers for, presents challenges in terms of content and formal construct that I haven’t quite figured out. It represents just one possible point of departure for subsequent works.

oil on canvas

52” x 45”

2019