Elliot Collins Surveyor

ANN POULSEN

Tacita Dean writes of travelling to Delphi, the navel of the ancient world, where she crouches in fear, transfixed by the landscape because she believes in it, believes it is the place where the umbilicus between Mount Olympus and the human realm has been severed. Are we born in myth and echoes continue to rustle the foliage like minor gods sneaking by on their way to meddle with the natural order?

The stories Dean believes in affect how she sees, how she experiences the landscape. Her landscape is a cultural construction of the sublime, and she responds accordingly―but how is it that a contemporary artist can be so deeply affected by a supernatural story from another culture, another millennium? Could it be something about the place itself which gave rise to the myth?

E.H. Gombrich suggested art modifies our perceptions and so we are trained how to see landscapes through the conventions of landscape paintingan idea Francis Pound elaborated on in 1982 in . Like Dean, Elliot Collins reframes this idea, using his exhibition, as part of his doctoral submission, to consider the history of art and art theorising in New Zealand through his experience of place.