A Wind From Noplace: Using visual art as a lens for understanding humanity, emotion, and the changing earth through ecological intimacy

Abstract

Presented at the Stamps Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan in March 2022, A Wind From Noplace is an interdisciplinary body of visual artworks and creative research surrounding my attempts to understand human ecology through a personal lens. In the making of these works, I attempt to uncover and transcribe the psychophysiological roots of my intimacy with land, flora, and fauna.

The installation includes two large kinetic landscape sculptures with corresponding videos and a third, smaller sculpture. Beside the largest of the sculptures, the wall text reads:

What does it mean to hold memories of a changing landscape? Like lost loved ones, can we keep mountains and meadows with us after they are gone, or after we have gone from them? A Wind From Noplace uses physiological data to understand the land as an object of affection, a surrogate for emotional relationships with humans absent from our lives. With a collection of heartbeats and brainwaves, I attempt to reanimate the landscapes of my memory, blurring lines of species, geography, and self.

In each kinetic sculpture, I capture several moments of my body’s responses to natural landscapes, translating the fluctuations in physiological activity into a visual language for interpreting emotion and sensation.

These brief moments of bodily response to stimuli were captured over the summer in remote or isolated locations, after I completed a six-week trek through mountainous backcountry. I’ve spent the nine months since I came out of the backcountry trying to remember it, to hold onto what that immersion did for me, both in body and mind. In A Wind From Noplace, the viewer is both witness to those moments and participant in my attempts to reconfigure them. In this document, I will present the research and methodologies that produced this body of work, and which also provided the framework for many works of experimental creative nonfiction and a budding philosophy regarding human ecological engagements.