Everything Happens There
The culmination of Masters Degree research, 'Everything Happens There' was an installation examining my relationship with the pond near my house in rural Aberdeenshire. Exhibited in August 2009, Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen.
Dramatis Personae |
Multiplicity In UnityGoethe’s way of seeing draws us into a deeper understanding of the wholeness of nature and thereby recognizing our own place within it. We cannot separate ourselves from our environment: by doing so we can no longer truly see the interdependencies that exist to sustain a balanced ecology. By envisaging nature and all forms of life on Earth as One not Many Goethe rejected the empiricism of science in favour of a more holistic approach to the understanding of phenomena, indeed, a phenomenological way of seeing. Goethean seeing involves the rejection of scientific terminology applied to the phenomena perceived, as these terms do not relate to direct sensorial experience or phenomenology. It is more about a feeling, or of noticing what arises as we look closer and truly try to understand what it is we are seeing.
Goethe was very much concerned with the primal in the experience of perception, a deep, atavistic and holistic approach to the Earth and her flora and fauna. His idea of the ‘Urphänomen’[1] is that of looking for the part that contains the whole: believing that one cannot exist without the other, that we cannot recognize the part without the whole. Therefore, plants, animals, indeed everything that this world is composed of, cannot be viewed independently of the entire ecosystem. A plant is imbued with the primal essence of what it is to be a plant and grow as a plant, therefore plants are One not Many, as it is their very plantness that defines them. This can be expressed as holistic consciousness understands multiplicity in unity, but analytical consciousness understands unity in multiplicity: the essential difference between empirical science and Goethe’s phenomenology of science. Although both empiricism and phenomenology deal directly with the perception of phenomena of a known quality, Goethe’s ‘way’ is not based on existing evidence or theory, a posteriori, but one of a more notional a priori sense perception. That is, an intuitive encounter with nature leading to the recognition of interdependencies that relate to a more primal understanding of phenomena that corresponds more to truth through an atavistic sense of belonging, than the supposed truth of the Cartesian empirical methodology that exists within a scientific vacuum. This leads us to see nature as a whole, an interconnectedness of species that allows us to understand the self-supporting and self-regulating systems that maintain balance. And so this brings us back to active observation and participation, that of truly seeing and perceiving data and, maybe, simply noticing the beauty of something pure and unblemished, and the action of trying to preserve it. It is possible that through adopting a Goethean way of seeing that we will begin to understand our Earth and the wholeness of her. [1] Bortoft H. The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science. New York: Lindisfarne Press; 1996. p. 22. This is the German spelling of ‘urphenomenon’, and is right when referencing Goethe’s idea. |