Chrystal Rimmer: Statement

Dedicated to a greater understanding of nature and the human condition, my practice uses the landscape as a vehicle to engage with the contemporary discourse of art and natural philosophy. Intrigued by future geology and concepts such as the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, my work is concerned with the inherent inclusion of trash and entropy as descriptors of the contemporary landscape in art.

Including the dismantling of unconstrained individualism heavily adopted within Modernism, I centre my practice in a disciplinary critique of the value placed on nature perpetuated by tropes of landscape painting. Aiming to dismantle problematic ideologies including nature's oversimplification as an entity in opposition to man, my practice aims to contend with this outdated dogma by exploring ‘the post post-natural’, nostalgia, ideology and misrepresented sentiments of ‘wilderness’ and the ‘pristine’.

It is the poetic use of junk as a painterly medium which arises as the defining thread in elaborating my hypothesis of nature; the inherent presence of trash in the landscape stands for a marker in dissolving nostalgic ideologies of object and subject. As plastic is found abundantly in all current landscapes, sourcing plastic is easy. Plastic becomes synonymous with nature, abundant and gathers wherever there is life. Trash, loaded with history and meaning, moves beyond ideology to stand for inclusion. Junk as a cultural commodity in art becomes an actant for cultural critique, with the power to reflect current philosophies of thought in art, science and politics. Born from this hypothesis is a personal fascination with waste, plastic in particular, as a painterly medium. By collecting plastic form the landscape and transforming it into landscape ‘paintings’, I am able to utilise a man-made material as a platform to challenge old ideas and circulate new visions of a truely contemporary landscape—the intermingled flux of synthetic and organic matter.