Selections from: Seeking the Sublime

Statement: For Judy Bales, moving through the natural landscape creates a sense of rapture, triggering memories and dreams, both real and imagined. Grabbing photographic notes as she walks, she then freely manipulates the photographs to create images that are truer to her emotional response and experience than the original capture. By blurring, slurring, and overlaying the photos, an image immerges that is both dreamlike and real for her. This image in turn creates its own emotional response in the artist, leading her to see the landscape differently when viewed again, and again to create a new image in a never-ending cycle. The artist views this process as akin to the observer effect in physics, the observer and observed continually influencing and changing one another.