Environment and scale
How much of our experience of the environment is connected to visual perception, and how have artists surfaced an awareness that is not necessarily visual? These are questions raised in the course of researching the nature of surface as expressive idiom. The moment a surface becomes horizontally aligned, moved from wall to table or ground, it becomes a place, not only where, but on account of which things can happen. Paul Carter (1996) refers to the "motivated" land of difficult country, where the ground itself is the cause of movement. He places this in direct contrast to the staging of the western poetic act, an enclosure that separates the stage of expression from the contingency of the earth's surface. Carter's analysis suggests that the creative act happens in movement, just as James Gibson insists that perception happens only in movement. Indeed, for Gibson, our perception of the environment is most certainly visual, but vision for Gibson goes beyond the retinal image, to include the sensory awareness of the moving subject, picking up on aspects of the environment in relation to the body by which perception happens.
For Gibson, a perceptive act is never complete. Being in the world constitutes a continuous perception. "I perceived a waterfall" would make no sense in this account, for at what point did I perceive it and when did this stop? Where did the waterfall start and stop? Was it the water, the rocks, the elevated terrain, the weather? Furthermore, what made it a waterfall and not a shower, was merely my own relative size. I am not a giant. He makes an interesting point, because when we arrest a moment, in a photograph, a drawing or in a memory, we effectively invent it as meaning. Imagine, though, how hard it would be to expect all the details of a situation before agreeing to understand it. Impossible, because the greater the number of details, the more it becomes evident that the real situation is not a logical equation made from these parts, but precisely the infinite details themselves. What I have is my body, that has a particular scale and symmetry, so that the world is one thing to me and something else entirely to the giant for whom the waterfall affords no dangers..
Works created in 2011, 2012 and 2013 for Lines in the Sand, Minjerribah, Moreton Bay, Queensland. Lines in the Sand is on again this year, from June 27 - 28. See www.linesinthesand.com.au
Virginia Jones, 2013 
