Originally written about the park epithet, I found the above phrase interesting when thinking about art that explores the natural world. Collide seems a fitting word. Nature sometimes appears a polar opposite of culture: culture being a product of self-aware beings.

 

The very first human depictions of animals we’re iconoclastic, two-dimensional or viewed from unviewable perspectives. Quite a collision. Botanist and ornithological painting were scientifically precise and reductionist – shadowless. Photo-realistic art, photography or video may present recognisable elements of natural space but remain single vantage points: products understandable in the context of their cultural histories.

 

Whether scientific, romantic or realist – image, text or object – cultural representations of the natural rarely exceed more than vignettes of nature’s incalculable scale. But perhaps that represents their strength. In simply drawing an aura of an animal or making public a single interaction with the natural, the collision is recognised as worthy of investigation. Nature’s value to culture is focussed by its distance.