The therapeutic nature of landscape

The work looks at how walking can be used as a form of creative engagement with landscape and place, to create a response to movement through place. One might call it ‘deep mapping’, as it seeks to accurately capture the texture and multifaceted view of a place to the viewer. It provides a reading of the Icelandic landscape from the point of how the artists body moved through it, closer and further away from different areas of the places visited. The geographer Edward Relph made a specific claim about place in his Place and Placelessness (1976), where he describes place as ‘centres of our immediate experiences of the world’ (Relph, 1976, p.141). If one is to view art geographical, then it might be suitable to do so through this framework, as art itself often aims to capture, re-present or create such experiences. The landscape and places grasping of our senses, where we become highly aware and responsive to us dwelling within the world, are the points in which the work is aiming to create.