CONCEPTUAL OVERVIEW
Artist Lynne Roberts-Goodwin in the 2014 M O R E T H A N E V E R photographic series which comprises three conceptually linked yet paradoxically, at times different series perceptually ; ‘THINK THE MOUNTAIN’ + ‘as the sky FALLS’ + ‘a CHANGE OF PLAN’ which translates the nature and concept of movement/migration and stillness within contemporary Central and Asian Pacific Culture regarding global transitions and the critical trace within landscape and within culture.
M O R E T H A N E V E R challenges the concept of imaging the psychologically imagined and experienced global/geopolitical space aerially, intending to engage conceptually & innovatively with refiguring cultural topographies of landscape and the body that are paradoxically both imbued with migration/movement and stillness. It is within contested landscapes and bodies in transition, that these works reveal invisible borders through which layers of geographic and geomorphic tableaus play out, of personal narratives of migration, and through which the seeds of the diaspora are revealed at large.
The work comprises avian – Raven imagery, swarming and flocking in conjunction with high-altitude mountain landscape, which conceptually addresses issues of states of observable collective motion and stillness within aesthetic codes of representation where the utopian states of future utopias are revealed.
M O R E T H A N E V E R attempts to reveal, through photographic imagery and wall installation (avian/bird shadow trace) the representation of the Raven (corvidae) and its position within cinematic history and Central Asian and Pacific cultural history, as a transforming of the species subjectively, given the role and potency of its appearance and mythologized status. Further, the work questions comparable mechanisms through which they can be apprehended and transformed or repositioned within the aesthetics of cinematography and codes of archetypal representation. It is here that the ‘uncanny’ (making strange) utopian aesthetic style has be activated through the spatial configuration likened to an interior cinematic space within the Gallery, rendering the avian body and bodies as a slowed gesture of the perceived uncanny.
The topographical landscape mountain/aerial perspective imagery within the photographic images takes the agency of weightlessness and disorientation as a key factor in rendering the imagery and the wall works paradoxically anchored for the spectator, giving false, yet desirable positioning. Both the ‘lowest’ (282 feet below sea level) geographical point on Earth, Badwater Basin, Death Valley, Arizona and geographically most politically inaccessible and contested highest (3,360 feet) Mountain Ranges sites (Northern Cyprus/Turkey), the Kyrenia Mountains, are played-out visually through the artist’s imaging and subsequent voice. The two disparate sites, both at low and high elevations topographically are intended to link as sites of great impact both geopolitically and as zones of contested territory.
M O R E T H A N E V E R series connects key issues of visually & textually confounding place & presence within landscape, evoking utopian dreams, transitory and transitionary spaces for the spectator/viewer, fading thoughts, reclamation, failure, impossibility and the poignant stillness, strangeness and wonder of the unwritten bodies and sites invisibly circulating through each aerial view.
