Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Ulster
‘A Contemporary Sublime’
This body of work develops investigations into ‘contemporising’ the subject of landscape. By incorporating motifs of urbanisation of the rural, the imagery actively avoids sentimentalising that juxtaposition: concrete bridges and roadways cut and enclose the vista. In this research McIntyre defined a contemporary practice capable of addressing landscape as its subject.
Another strand of this project draws upon notions of the sublime. These works fixed the most transient conditions of the landscape, the ‘elements’ themselves, in representation. By photographing in mist and fog, she produced documents of that which is intangible; the landscape itself, the supposed ‘site’ of the work, was rendered unknowable, an absent subject. Contemplation of the impenetrability of the object of representation and of the traditional illusionistic space of the picture plane allowed for consideration, through a supposedly ‘representational’ medium, of the most abstract aspect of the sublime. In its most literal appearance, the work investigated the ‘weakest’ sense of the sublime, explored by Burke. However, the erasure of the landscape, or the isolation of elements within it by wreaths of fog, produces a more generalised Kantian ‘dread and melancholy’. By interweaving a broad historical range of stylistic, aesthetic and theoretical approaches to landscape, the project laid out the basis for a new, critical landscape photography within the context of her work.
As a strategy for further exploring the context of this research, McIntyre’s photographs were exhibited alongside key 18th - 20th Century landscape paintings. She secured loans of major works by Corot, Van Ruisdael and Lowry from the National Gallery and Lowry Museum. This body of work was a further investigation of work explored in an AHRC research project: ‘Reconsidering Landscape in Contemporary Photography’ (2008/09) which together with earlier works are included in the catalogue. AHRC research project: ‘Reconsidering Landscape in Contemporary Photography’.
