Vol25　「On Foreign Ground」

Date　2013.10.24　　16：00～17：30

Exhibition Title（dates）："On Foreign Ground"(2013.10.16-27)
Artist：Suzanne Mooney

Participants：Artists,Armaud Gallizia (Youkobo residence artist from France,Residence 1)Kunio Motoe(pfofessor,Tma university of Arts), Hiroko Murata＆Tatsuhiko Murata, (Youkobo direcors),Mika harigai＆Jaime Humphreys (staff),etc.

Moderator：Jaime Humphreys
Documentation：Mika Harigai＆Jaime Humphreys

 

Suzanne: The work shown here is related to previous work I made. I will say a few words here about the process of making the work itself. I am trying out a new idea here for the first time. I started out last year with the intention of exhibiting drawings, but moved away from my original plans to show this series of photographs and digital images.  The landscape you see in the photos is a place I first visited when I was 14/15 years old. I'm interested in our relationship with the landscape, how humans separate nature from what is man-made. After living here in Tokyo for more than four years, I started to think about the Irish landscape again, but with a new perspective, and I re-visited this location in the North of Ireland again in February of this year. The natural formations seen here and their geometric appearance reminded me strongly of cityscape such as Tokyo. It is this connection that I wanted to make here.
Arnaud: Can you talk about this work (digital photo)? It is the only one in the series I don't quite understand.

Suzanne: With the other photos, I was interested in how viewers perceive this landscape. Historically, these natural formations have caused people to associate them with something man-made, when they are not. With this digital image, I was interested in seeing how a photo created by my own hand would be seen in relation to these landscape images. All the stone shapes and surfaces originate from the photo studies on the wall opposite. As you can see, the stone in the center has a slightly more regular shape while the other stones were manipulated to fit around it. Due to the selection of paper, the image appears to be natural like the other photos in the series. 

Arnaud: I'm interested to see what direction this work will take from now.

Suzanne: This is certainly a work I will be exploring in the future. In my next work, I intend to make a comparative study of the view seen from the top of Sky Tree with that seen from the top of Mt. Fuji, exploring the motivations people have for climbing both and our sense of connection with the landscape.
Tatsuhiko: Have you ever considered showing just close-ups of the rocks themselves rather than more panoramic shots?
Suzanne: Yes, I did give that consideration but I felt it important to give a context to the place shown here, and explore the human connection with it, hence this photo in which I appear in the distance.

Hiroko: The landscape you have chosen for these works has a very strong impact in and of itself. How did you overcome the difficulty of showing it as your own work in the context of the Youkobo gallery?

Suzanne: This is a very difficult problem, something I am still trying to resolve. This is part of the reason that I decided to include the individual basalt column studies in this exhibition, and why I started to explore ways of creating a new landscape through the digital image. 

participant: This digital photo is particularly interesting. There seem to be many avenues for exploration.