Landscape of Belief

Up to this point I have only been sharing images of my photography from this semester. I've completed a good number of lithos again this semester and over the next few days I will try to get a few of them up as I am pushing to finish up a paper on landscape art and theory (which will hopefully make its way on here as well).

The series below was an idea I stumbled upon midway through the semester. I was reading how in the development of landscape art, landscape and cartography played off each other even merging at times. I began to think about mapping and what kinds of maps we use to get around today. At the same time I was listening to Krista Tippet's Speaking of Faith interview with the late religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan. It struck me that our creedal statements can function like maps to orient our participation in the world. My hope is to continue this series though in a modified format to be increasingly more inclusive extending well beyond typical religious creeds. A step in that direction is the Pledge of Allegiance. Conceptually I like them, but after a recent critique, I need to work on the visual aspects of the relationship between the text and landscape.

Below each text I've also added a blind embossing of a "devotional object" for the text. The first, the Shema, is the word Zakhor or remember in Hebrew. The second, is a couch suggestive of the therapist couch (in what I am making a judgment upon as a therapeutic kind of religious creed), the third of course is the US flag, and the 4th a pair of folded hands in prayer.