landspace interiors – Dana Neilson
The on going performance/installation/sculpture piece WinterWonder takes on yet another form at Galleria 3h+k. The piece inspired by the sometimes forgotten magic of our northern environment transforms the everyday into a fantastical, enchanted space to celebrate.
My work on personal landscapes has been influenced by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. In his book Bachelard presents a psychic interpretation of “home,” and one’s prototypical experiences of personal space; he discusses the way our perceptions of shelter begin to delineate the very essence of how we think and imagine proposing the house as a representation of both our body and mind. My work, using this text as a starting point, explores the symbolic meaning of home as tied to ideas of memory, intimacy, experience and landscape.
This installation takes Bachelard’s ideas and applies them to our landscape home instead of architecture. It speaks to the way the northern environment shapes our inner being and how the physical world can give a better understanding of our inner dimensions. Extremes, isolation, introspection and nostalgia are starting points.
For Bachelard a cabinet opened is a world revealed, drawers are places of secrets and the cellar or cave is an underground realm of darkness and mystery. The basement and attic are places of the unformed image. They are where we store the relics of our past, the now-unused items to which we remain attached, warehouses of memory and neglect. Sigmund Freud, too, saw the cellar as the receptacle of the subconscious. But what if we live in the attic or the cellar? Northern countries are comparable to the attic, being at the top of the earth with low population density and lots of room for dreaming. Many lines can be drawn connecting ideas of the winter and the cellar or cave; dark, damp, isolated and mysterious.
This installation asks you to take a moment to ponder the symmetry of our interior and exterior landspaces/landscapes.
Bio:
Canadian Dana Neilson currently resides in Helsinki where she is completing her Master’s of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art at Aalto University. Originally a photographer (BFA Concordia University, 2010) her practice often includes ceramics and multimedia sculpture. Her work circumnavigates personal histories; nostalgia, cultural and landscape heritage, sentimental value and wonder.