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Forgotten Place


Collection: Gray's School of Art Collection
Object Type: Painting
Artist/Maker: Watson, Katie
Place Made: Gray's School of Art
Date: 2016
Media/Materials: oil on canvas
Dimensions: overall: 120 cm x 180 cm
Awards: RGU Drawing and Painting Purchase Award

Artist's statement:
"At different times man has considered itself separate from nature and a part of nature. This can be evidenced by the extent that nature is controlled in landscape architecture and its representations in art. In my painting, I analyse attitudes concerning the place of humans in nature – and, in a way, also the characters who hold these attitudes – through subjects of human intervention within landscapes and landscape’s gradual domestication (farmland, gardens, deforestation, Land art, etc.).
Born into a family of farmers and architects, I have grown up to be sensitive to ‘recomposed’ landscapes and their surrounding politics. Traditionally, the cultivation of land has been considered a good thing – a means of constructing a better world and emphasising human superiority over nature – but the recent consensus recognises mankind to be just one small part of nature and the rate at which land and other natural resources are exploited as perilous to ourselves and other species. While I feel guilt for the suffering of other species, my egotistical, but ‘natural’, inclination as a painter – as an architect, a composer of spaces – is to view the exploitation of nature, with the collision of ‘abstract’ human architecture and natural architecture, as fantastically sculptural."
Object Number: ABDRG2016.5