According to the writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger, the Forest is a place of existential freedom.
He developed this idea as a metaphor for being able to be part of a system, but also to concurrently be able to maintain one's individuality.
'Dimensions of irrationality and myth are at home in the forest, as the irrational nourishes the capacity for independence'.
Archival Fine art print on Hahnemühle bamboo matt paper mounted on dibond. 750x1000
Artist: Myvanwy Gibson 2016
This work is from the artist's 'Emergents' series. 2015-2021
The works are mixed-media compositions that combine the handmade with the digital - crossing over from digital to material and back again many times. They develop through layering, removing, reworking and revealing - photographs are digitally painted, material paintings are photographed and reworked, and at times natural elements are layered between the image on the screen and the camera.
The idea of 'Emergents' was inspired by Posthuman critical theory. It is theorised that the Posthuman has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one - in other words it is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can 'become' or embody different identities, and can understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives. This liberated person is an eternal shapeshifter, possessing no shape that is truly his or her own.
Myvanwy Gibson reflects on the relationship between technology and painting, the virtual and the real, and the natural and artificial.
Her practice with technology, an interest that was born at the beginning of her career as a video artist, developed through intense experimentation with the relationship between sound and technology to create video images.
She conceives the digital as a language that introduces different fruition parameters from traditional languages. For the artist, nature is evocation not imitation, a non-anthropocentric art where human experience, technology and the natural world intertwine, becoming the themes on which the aesthetics of the artist concentrate.
She has exhibited in numerous private and public areas such as The Australian Centre of the Moving Image, Melbourne; The International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, New York; and The Autonomous Biennale, in Venice. Her research papers have been published in Academia Letters magazine and in the IAEA New York and Vienna proceedings.