Landscape Inscribed

Work In Progress

The desert means one thing to those who have experienced it and another thing to those who haven’t and only up close will one notice the subtleties that distinguish one from the other. The Arabian Desert is vast, up close it reveals its rich diversity, but further still, its subtle and redefining quality is its human history. Landscape Inscribed centres around the representation of this unique region while examining this surprisingly consistent link to a human past. Accounting for contemporary ways in which urbanity is continually encroaching on its edges with fast expanding developments, and ways in which nomadic communities still make the desert their home as they adapt to changing times, the exploration delves deeper, into what is essentially invisible—to lost cultural landscapes still tenuously tethered to the present.

Seeing “beyond space” could be another way of describing the approach as it is about depicting physical space, but from a different vantage point: aside from the obvious visual/tactile qualities of surroundings is something less tangible and related to time and history. It is not a history in the traditional sense as there are no clear events or timelines, but more of a deduced history derived from an observation of traces left behind, “inscribed” on the land. The Work is a visual survey of how things appear at present and how people and other beings interact with a particular environment, but the passage of time and the “memory” of the landscape continually appear as reminders, extending the vision to the past and revealing what is hidden, yet found in plain sight.