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'.
Fine Art print on Hahnemühle bamboo matt paper. 500mmx700mm
Artist: Myvanwy Gibson 2017
This work is from the artist's "Animism" series. 2015-2020
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 series was inspired by the topic of Animism. Animism attributes sentience to a wide range of 'beings' and can blend and blur with other ontologies - opening it up to contradictions, humour, imagination, inspiration, and reflexive awareness.
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.