Windeye: Viewer with composter from my garden transparency 2023

The title "Windeyes"refers to the origin of the word 'window' which is derived from old Norse language describing the skin of a building where wind and light can permeate.

My window installation is the culmination of an elaborate process of constructing a layered viewing device. Photographic transparencies with a 'Claude glass' style oval opening, capture plants in my garden, a wooden composter bin, plants from botanical gardens and insect nests from a natural history archive. They are superimposed to make up a membrane of combined imagery. When adhered to the window of a moving train a rushing landscape can be seen through these still-life images of plants and insects. The abstract composition of observed plant forms is combined with a blurred, mesmeric moving image.

Aesthetic elements of picturesque taste evident in this imagery: side-screens, middle-ground, meandering distance are complicated by the blur of rapid movement of mass culture and framed by a 'mixed-up' distribution of plants. Form is coupled with formlessness as an irregularity of composition that verges on the lurid.

The problem of representing landscape/cityscape as a sense of lived-in place rather than as a picturesque prospect, commodity, naturalisation of political relations or utopia is central to my work. The process involves tangible encounters with the natural world mediated by critical reflection on the codes and conventions of its depiction. This window installation is an attempt to comprehend the current disquiet and turbulent complexity of the act of viewing and give a sense of resolve and gravity in the form of illuminated architectural space.