Engaging Feeling: The Subject of Landscape in the Twenty-First Century

As an artist my research involves reappraising the visual-spatial structures that define the conventional landscape idea, to move landscape from ‘de facto’ representational image towards an idea of mutuality and embodied form. This includes the study of pre-genre landscape backgrounds, exploring how to access difference from within the western landscape tradition. Through a discussion of recent works derived from these early Italian paintings, this chapter examines how empathy becomes a key tool in reshaping landscape’s image. Drawing from recent feminist theories that address the binaries of western thought through materiality and affect, the chapter explores ways that the painted landscape form—rather than existing as the visual ‘object’ to the viewing ‘subject’—carries agential properties in itself that facilitate empathic connections. Developing Bernard Berenson’s notion of ‘tactile values’ and Vernon Lee’s associated concept of ‘empathy’, the relationship between materiality and signification within these artworks is examined, gaining an understanding of landscape that is shaped through empathy and affect and that situates the visual within embodied experience. This presents an opportunity to align human and landscape in ways that befit twenty-first century concerns and addresses the dissonance between landscape as aesthetic image and landscape as material source.