Barbara Harman
My artist books, monotypes, drawings and writing explore the intersections of physical place and personal experience. My visual work is landscape driven, where landscape represents the world, and subjective and enhanced color, abstraction of forms and compositional tensions are manifestations of the personal. Landscape is the classic, receptive "other," serving art, literature and history as passive repository for romanticized notions of mystery, danger, conquest, alienation, belonging (the sense of place), and innocence and its loss. In a period of increasing estrangement from one another, our physical selves and the natural environment, our desires are contradictory and, often, self-defeating. We want intimacy and fear it. We want to preserve the heritage of our natural world but resist the personal sacrifices that requires. Seeking community, spiritual connection and healing, we avoid commitment and refuse responsibility for others.
For the past six years, I have been involved in exploring this contradictory and ever-changing idea of Self in the world, with landscape serving, as it has historically done, as the available canvas for my own projections.
Some mountains.
Washington, D.C. : Pyramid Atlantic, c1988.
Bound in Canterbury cover, a vintage hand-made paper, designed to form a pyramid when closed. 14 x 14 x 14 cm.
Limited edition of 418 signed copies.