Description

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Essays explore how the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes.

Catherine Elwes takes readers on a journey through the twin histories of landscape art and experimental moving image to reveal how they coalesce in the work of artists from the 1970s to the present day. Written in a clear, engaging style and drawing on a wide geographical sampling, Elwes considers issues that have preoccupied film and video artists over the years, ranging from ecology, gender, race, performativity, conflict, colonialism, and our relationship to the nonhuman creatures with whom we share our world. The book conveys Elwes’s belief that artists can provide an embodied, emotional response to landscape, which is an essential driver in the urgent task of combating the environmental crisis we now face. Enlivened by the author’s own experiences as a video artist, writer, and curator and informed by conversations with fellow practitioners, the book offers an informed, personal view of the subject.

About the Author

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Catherine Elwes is founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ).

Praise For…

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"This is a beautifully-written, well-researched, thoughtful, generous and passionate book. It is one that seeks to make a difference not only to our knowledge of representations of landscapes by moving image artists but also to inspire new generations of eco-critically-minded artists to discover fresh ways to communicate urgent messages about the ongoing breakdown of the natural world. The book offers innovative explorations of how the moving image continues to facilitate understandings of our relationships to ‘natural’ landscapes. [...] This is an original, often inspirational work which offers a comprehensive and up-to-date view of landscape and moving image from the perspective of a highly knowledgeable artist."
 
— Paul Newland

"Complex, yet highly readable. [...] The strength of Elwes’s writing is that she is not simply a film scholar discussing landscape and the moving image, but she is also an artist underpinning it with her experience of making videos, hence her interest in embodied and emotional responses to landscape. [...] Elwes takes great care to include a wide range of artists (using moving image or otherwise), sometimes returning to specific individuals, which creates a sense of continuity. Her stated focus is how artists might sensitively and ethically engage with the moving image in the landscape in the context of the environmental crisis."
 
— Edwina fitzPatrick