Neil Armstrong
The Tunnel – Neil Armstrong
Acrylic on printed cotton
The work plays with ideas of the imagined landscape. An idyllic place, of often utopian properties set within the traditional escapist notions of the natural world, as demonstrated by artists like Caspar David Friedrich.
Here these notions are contrasted against the banalities of everyday domestic life by examining the physical use of the natural world by man, and it’s psychological impacts. Trees are the ultimate symbol of nature and when one thinks of nature ultimate freedom comes to mind.
The transformation of a naturally free force, like trees, into a socially acceptable enclosure as part of the home raises the question, at what point does the material cease to exist in its naturally symbolic form? When does it stop inspiring notions of freedom? And were those notions justified in the first instance?
This work attempts to draw attention to the fact that the material exists solely as its fundamental properties: Wood. It is the symbolic emphasis which we, as humans vulnerable to romantic notions, place upon materials that dictates our relationship with them.
