Sabine Kussmaul
outdoors.here.within.there
Watch this short film to see how Sabine has responded to the theme Seeing Differently.
In my current practice I use drawing to explore how we are related to natural outdoor environments.
I understand drawing not only as a process by which marks are scribed onto a surface, following visual observation, but also as notation that captures feelings, as a visualisation of relationships between objects, environments, thoughts and events and as a score for planned action.
I explore environments by immersing myself ‘within’ rather than ‘looking at them’ from the outside – a ‘seeing by feeling from within’
When I walk, run, draw, or install elements of my mobile working kit on and over land, I change my perception of the place and I bring change to the place.
Moving my own body over land is similar to moving a pencil over paper, both actions create their own experiential space, scribing a new journey with lines as a drawing emerges on paper, or as a walk unfolds over land.
I document my art making events with photographs and videos, building an archive of art making (and art making experience) as the practice moves along. I also understand recording a video or taking photographs as ‘drawing’ – as an event or an action that inscribes into a digital medium.
The art making event also marks into my own sentient memory and changes previous assumptions about how to feel and how to know ‘the out-side’. I hope that my art works might do a similar thing to my audiences.
I assemble videos, photographs and drawings to form compound artworks. The video on show here is one such example.
With this video I have been interested to explore how a felt sense of space might come about for the viewer of the video, created from combinations of photographs, video clips and drawings, all made at different art making events and sites.
It seems that ‘touch’ visually communicated in the video like moving grass or my hands touching materials, can create an embodied presence between images that are originally unrelated and offering engagement to the viewer.
In my project, I aim to show to audiences how art making in outdoor environments happens to me as the human investigator, and, in doing so, I hope to point to the themes that arise from our from our connections to environments – about who we are and how environments matter to us.
outdoors.here.within.there.