Forests and trees (2015-2020) [multi-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3365
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Hayward Gallery, London, UK; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK; Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland; and other locations.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2015
- URL
-
https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.c.4938369
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Forests and Trees is a substantial body of work built on over 20 years of experimentation to
develop the methodology applied to the works between 2014 and 2020, with further works in
development. The output includes five major interdisciplinary works stemming from
extensive, multi-layered research into the legacy and contemporary environmental relevance
of the Romantic Sublime in 19th-century painting. Neudecker's permanent audio-visual installation
entailed 3 years of research and planning: working with the BBC Natural History Unit to film
vertical tracking shots ascending the 42m Ecuadorian Rainforest canopy, and co-designing
the lifts at Guy’s Hospital that houses the commission.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Widely represented historically in the Arts, Forests and Trees now have renewed symbolic significance in relation to pollution, sustainability and human survival. Drawing from the Romantic Sublime in 19th Century painting, and her childhood experiences in Germany Neudecker adapts ideas that impact our conscious and subconsciousness exploring notions of the Contemporary Sublime to ask:
1. How have our perceptions of Forests and Trees changed and what is their metaphorical significance today?
2. How can the legacy of the Romantic Sublime and urgent environmental concerns
interconnect ?
3. How does the viewer experience the collision of the real and imaginary, and the political and historical in these works?
Neudecker’s research is brought together in 3 vitrine works and 2 audio-visual installations. Commissioned by the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2018, Breathing Yellow is the most significant of the vitrines, featuring a dense section of Romantic forest submerged in a toxic yellow solution. Playing with both psychic and physical scale, the real and imaginary collide, questioning our perceptions of landscape and nature.
Working in the Ecuadorian rainforest, slowly deteriorating from human impact, Neudecker took vertical tracking shots and sound recordings to create 2 immersive installations. Firstly, Figure of 8 2015, a soundscape recreating a nocturnal experience in the rainforest, shown at Art Basel, Miami in 2015. Secondly,
commissioned for the New Cancer Centre at Guys Hospital, London, Parallel Lives 2016, is an installation in 3 lifts, screening Neudecker’s rainforest footage, alongside the real time city views from the lift windows, connecting and synchronising the growth height of a rainforest with the building within the urban jungle.
Neudecker’s methodology of layering coexisting opposites aims to provoke a new awareness of space, an exploration of the semiotic realm and our perceptions of both, moving us toward a new understanding of what constitutes the Contemporary Sublime.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
