Patricia Townsend |
Artists Statement
Much of my work is concerned with our relationship with landscape – the ways in which landscape can affect us emotionally and the stories we construct by projecting our own beliefs, expectations and desires onto what we see. I use photography, video and installation to explore this borderline area between ‘reality’ and fantasy, the outer world and the inner.
Recent work includes a series of non-narrative video pieces concentrating on minimal changes and transformations that might otherwise go unnoticed. The resulting works have a mesmeric effect and are intended to induce a meditative state of mind in the viewer. They have been shown nationally and internationally both in gallery exhibitions and film and video screenings.
My work draws on my experience as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and, in particular, on the ideas of the psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott concerning transitional phenomena (phenomena related to an intermediate position between fantasy and reality). I am a member of an interdisciplinary research project, Transitional Phenomena and Cultural Experience (T-PACE). The aim of the project is to develop cultural theory, methodology and research through exploring the potential for object-relations theory in psychoanalysis (and in particular the concept of transitional phenomena) to extend and deepen understanding of various aspects of cultural experience. I am exploring these ideas both theoretically in relation to the experience of the artist and in practice-based research. One area of exploration is to use the “wet desert” landscape of Morecambe Bay in North-West England, a treacherous area of quicksands and rapid tidal flow, as a metaphor for the transitional space Winnicott describes. Many lives (including those of the Chinese cockle pickers) have been lost either to the quicksand or to fast incoming tides. Personal responses to the landscape of the Bay are likely to be coloured by history, memory and associations to the concepts of both desert and sea. The work will use video and installation to explore the shifting relationship between land and water, above and below, life and death. This area lends itself to an exploration of the “intermediate area of experiencing” described by Winnicott in that it is itself an intermediate space – neither wholly land nor sea but constantly shifting from one to the other.
For further information, to view videos and to see images from other exhibitions, please visit my website at www.patriciatownsend.co.uk or www.land2.uwe.ac.uk/townsend.htm