Fictive Landscapes

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When I was a little boy there was a picture on the wall of my bedroom. Now long since lost its exact details are somewhat hazy but its effect on me still lingers. There were mountains, snow capped and edged with cloud. An unassailable wilderness stretched across the foreground and high above the mountains soared a small plane. I have no idea whose work it was but the visceral sense of escape and wonder it filled me with is not something I have forgotten. Not everything else has been lost though.

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My grandmother gave me a scrapbook gathered through years of travel, it held pictures from magazines, postcards and a diverse collection of family snapshots. As a child my first introduction to art was through this book. Paintings by Turner, Martin, Caspar David Freidrich and Bierstadt were dispersed amongst the pages, their beauty and power as inspirational to me today as they were then.

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In producing these Fictive Landscapes, I have digitally brought together the landscapes that fascinated me as a child and combined with them my own photographic landscape images in an attempt to relocate that place of wonder. The gap between memory and experience, between then and now or between imagination and realisation, is, of course unbridgeable but that doesn’t stop us from trying.

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Mark Kimber 2004