I have always found the social division between 'man made' and 'natural' quite simplistic and I often think about how this shapes human perception. I go to the beach most days with my work and also find myself in fields due to the rural location, I then drive home to the centre of the city, which is multicultural and urban, there is a clear difference between these two landscapes; however I still struggle to understand why we linguistically distinguish and separate 'man made' from 'nature'.
Within society there is an obsession with the care and state of the environment and rightly so, we are using and building things that are detrimental to this planet. Is this why there is a division between man made and nature? Furthermore, could this linguistic division have led us to our current environmental disaster of global warming?
If language and specifically binary language, leads us into viewing things as black and white, one or the other, is attributed to the environment, then surely this linguistic predisposition could transfer into how we manage ourselves as a species within it. Or rather we may not see ourselves as within it but outside of it, as other to it, in conflict with or removed from it.
As a species we have blindly allowed things to be created at such a rapid pace, mode of production is too fast, as well as the materials we are combining and using being poisonous or non biodegradable. Is this the reason or the aftermath of viewing ourselves as separate from nature? As an artist this also makes me question beauty, what is beautiful, has beauty been polluted? Do we adapt to the environments that have been created or do we change this? Or is this another binary and the answer is both? We adapt and we also do not allow the world to be poisoned. Are we already in a kind of post apocalyptic state?
Through the work I make, I bring together man made and nature and aim for some harmony, through representing landscape as both. Surely we are all an equilibrium of nature and social construction, the difference is that what is constructed can also be deconstructed and this is the nature of it!