I became interested in landscape and the human body, the human body as landscape when I first saw Bill Brandt’s wonderful nudes – several taken on Sussex beaches;
Others, including Eldor Gemst, have carried on the theme;
In an exhibition of work by Roni Horn at the CAC Madrid I discovered another dimension. One of her projects gave rise to a book ‘Weather Reports You’. In it she says;
Weather Reports You by Roni Horn Pub: Steidl & Partners
“Everyone has a story about the weather. This may be the single thing each of us holds in common. And though the weather varies greatly from here to there, it is, ultimately, one weather that we share. Small talk everywhere has occasioned the popular distribution of the weather. Some say talking about the weather is talking about oneself. And with each passing day, the weather increasingly becomes ours, if not us. Weather Reports You is one beginning of a collective self-portrait.” Roni Horn
Over the past two years Roni Horn has been working with a small team in the southwest of Iceland gathering personal testimonies from people talking about the weather. These “weather reports” include descriptions, reflections, memories and stories based on experiences of the weather that range from the matter-of-fact to the marvellous. The different nuances and usages of language suggest that the weather is not just a matter of meteorological conditions but is, in Roni Horn’s words, “a metaphor for the physical, metaphysical, political, social and moral energy of a person and a place”.
Another piece by Roni Horn extended the idea of landscape and the human form further for me – the idea that the human form, in this case various portraits of a young man, could be set up as a landscape through which we can walk.
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