Bio
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Visual Artist Nicholas Monks explores a deep personal connection with the environments he inhabits. He is interested in exploring the ways in which different lens-based media can facilitate a reciprocal exchange between the self and the land, a relationship. His overarching intention is to explore what might constitute an ecological-self emerging out of embodied lived experience. As such, his photography is underpinned by an ecological phenomenology that promotes embodied and affective sensitivity for the rhythms of the more-than-human world. Monks' aim is to recognise the environment as a participatory agent in his practice, liberated from the colonising processes of rigid meaning that he might inadvertently be imposing upon the land. In this endevour, he employs a multi perspective approach that explores the continuities and divisions between subject and object, and between people and the environment. Different attitudes towards landscape perception evident in Monks' practice are framed as constructionist on the one hand – relating to the projection onto the landscape of culturally determined ideas and attitudes – and phenomenological on the other – perception arising from a sensory and embodied relationship between the subjective self and the land. Monks recognises these different perceptual modes as being mutually entangled within his practice, necessitating joint consideration. The environmental philosopher Val Plumwood has outlined a corresponding conceptual framework for ecological ethics Interactive Landscape [1], that informs Monks' multi-perspective approach. Interactive landscape embraces gradations between self and other, and between humanity and nature, arguing for an ecological ethic that considers the variations and interweavings of human and non-human narratives. 1 Plumwood, V. (2006). The concept of a cultural landscape. Ethics & the Environment, 11(2), 115–150. |
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