In View of the Mountain
Acknowledgements
I respectfully acknowledge the Turrbal people, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which this work was created and the Wakka Wakka people on whose land this work is shown.
This new series of work was produced with support from the Regional Arts Development Fund, a partnership between the Queensland Government and Moreton Bay Regional Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.
I would like to thank Fran Van Vegchel and the Kingaroy Art Team for the invitation to exhibit at the Kingaroy Regional Art Gallery and Max Walters for his expertise in the installation of works.
I would also like to thank Ant McKenna and Elliot Bledsoe for mentoring and guidance under the Regional Arts Services Network in 2021.
Special thanks to Matt, Elvie, Samuel and Sandy for their love and support.
In View of the Mountain
In View of the Mountain is my foray into engagement with place through the mediums of painting and drawing. The move from figurative to landscape reflects a shift in understanding of my place in the world, necessitated in part in response to the pandemic and recent climate related events.
Val Plumwood
Putting mind back into matter: restoring intelligence to body, and agency to nature[i]
The series was developed with reference to the late Australian philosopher, Val Plumwood (1939 – 2008) whose work revealed and ultimately unravelled the inherent anthropocentrism of Western rationalism and sought alternative ways of engaging with ‘nature’ based on ideas of kinship and philosophical animism.
I was introduced to the work of Val Plumwood through Dr Janice Reilly, while a student of Philosophy in the mid-nineties and the effect was transformative. A quarter of a century later and it was more than ever apparent that the human/nature divide was defunct. Bushfires, floods and zoonotic viruses recognised no such distinction and Plumwood’s philosophical stance had become increasingly relevant.
Succinctly summarised by Deborah Bird Rose, Plumwood's philosophical animism:
…’opens the door to a world in which we can begin to negotiate life membership of an ecological community of kindred beings.’ Her use of the term ‘kindred’ means beings with whom we are kin; she was claiming an earth kindred, or kinship amongst those she called earth others. We tend to think of kinfolk as organic beings, but Val was open even to thinking about kinship with stones and other inorganic ‘beings.”[ii] (Indeed, Val Plumwood adopted the name of the mountain in which she lived in view of, Plumwood Mountain, near Braidwood, NSW.)
Rather than making claims about the way the world is, or who or what is deserving of ethical consideration, Plumwood asks, “what kind of stance a human can take that will open her to a responsive engagement in relation to nonhuman others.”[iii]
Influence on the Work
It was immediately apparent that adopting Plumwood’s stance in relation to this body of work required that I concern myself foremost with places familiar and relevant to me:
The immediate environment of my home and studio in the Pine Rivers area of the Moreton Bay Region;
Places visited when staying with family in the Gold Coast and Scenic Rim Regions; and
While not as familiar, my visit to Kingaroy in May 2021 when I was struck by the beauty of the land (and exhilarated to be able to travel!).
The works range from more conventional representations of landscape (‘Studio View of the Mountain’, ‘Munbilla Road’, ‘Bunya Mountains from Bethany’) to abstract landscapes (‘Rain Over the Mountain’), highly subjective mappings of place (‘Relational Mapping’) to experiential inner landscapes (‘Kinaesthetic’) and attempts to map experience to place (‘Tallebudgera Creek’.)
The range of approaches reflects the various methods employed to see the world. In advocating for an extension of Plumwood’s critique of Rationalism through imagery and metaphor, Ronnie Hawkins writes:
… my position now is that we undertake seeing as an active, intelligent process, an effort to visualize our interactions with the real world as accurately as we can, a process that may reflect a special capacity of the "silent" right cerebral hemisphere.[iv]
There is no limit on the forms in which “visualising our interactions with the real world as accurately as we can” might take, even within the confines of painting and drawing:
Careful observation of clouds through the studio window, from morning to evening, day after day, (‘Studio View of the Mountain’, ‘The Mountain Looking West’, ‘The Mountain Looking South’, ‘Rain Over the Mountain’) leads to a heightened appreciation of place, changes in the weather and light, the movement of birds and air currents.
By contrast, works such as ‘Relational Mapping’ and ‘Kinaesthetic’ employ an introspective mode of seeing, honed through many years of insight meditation practices.
Works such as ‘Taco Bell Mountain’ and ‘Something I Didn’t’ Say about the Mountain’ see the now familiar mountain in the context of rapidly encroaching suburbanisation and the ongoing impact of colonisation.
The larger scale drawings, ‘Dragonfly’ and ‘Honey Ant’ recognise our more-than-human kindred beings, their agency, communities and cultures.
Originally envisioned as a series of figure in the landscape paintings and drawings, ‘In View of the Mountain’ includes very few overtly figurative elements and, unlike earlier series, avoids placing the human subject in positions of centrality. While perhaps no single work successfully transcends the human/nature binary, the multiplicity of perspectives and techniques goes some way to avoiding reductive modes of representation as the series shifts between the outer world and the inner world, from the mundane to the meditative, unified by my growing regard for, and consciousness of being, ever in view of the Mountain.
Leonie Chinn, April 2022
[i] Plumwood, & Shannon, L. (2012). The eye of the crocodile. Australian National University E Press.
[ii] Deborah Bird Rose; Val Plumwood's Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World. Environmental Humanities 1 May 2013; 3 (1): 93–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3611248
[iii] ibid.
[iv] Hawkins. (2009). Extending Plumwood's Critique of Rationalism Through Imagery and Metaphor. Ethics and the Environment, 14(2), 99–113. https://doi.org/10.2979/ETE.2009.14.2.99
