Open Collections

Art about life form encounters : making sense of place in the Okanagan region

University of British Columbia

My research explores how creating art can be a method of connecting to an unfamiliar environment. Positioning myself as a newcomer to the Okanagan, I observe, document, and work with the various life forms I encounter in Kelowna over a two-year time period to demonstrate how through creating art, a sense of place and an appreciation for a place can arise over time in an individual’s mind. In the creative research, I ask the following questions: How can creating visual art about a local natural environment develop a newcomer’s sense of place? And how might creating art about the experience of a place enhance or facilitate the development of one’s connection to a place and sense of belonging? Informed by hermeneutic phenomenology and working in various mediums, I use observation and interaction as forms of lived experience and art making as a method of generating meaning and knowledge. My artwork isolates and seeks to identify the individual life forms I encounter in Kelowna in order to deconstructing the environment – a complex interconnected system – to acquaint myself with the land, resulting in a body of work presenting a construction of my perspectival experience. Giving significance to the commonplace and easily overlooked aspects of nature as important place-defining elements within the urban environment (my everyday-surroundings), I hope to encourage viewers to reflect on their own perceptions of place and to consider the significance that life forms have in shaping the way in which a place is perceived. My work engages with the ideas put forward by Jakob von Uexküll, Elen-Maarja Trell and Bettina van Hoven, Rachel D. Kroencke, Nina Katchadourian, Lynette Shultz, Megan K. Halpern and Hannah Star Rogers, Joseph Cornell, Walter Benjamin, and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Text

2018-07-18

Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/66531

Visual Arts

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/