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Ground and Figure Landscape defined in direct relation to settlement, is an idea embedded in the original meaning of the word country, derived from contra – against or opposite. Language reveals a reflexivity of terms, country and settlement, that can be compared to the figure-ground relationship – a visual sense of an object, or settlement, being supported by a stable ground, or campo. Often this seemingly balanced arrangement functions as a threat- relationship, in which figure or settlement maintains visual authority over the landscape. In The Experience of Landscape 2 , Jay Appleton interprets this relationship in landscape painting in terms of the danger one perceives from one’s surroundings. The figure can present itself as either maintaining a view or prospect over the surroundings or as a refuge in which the viewer may find shelter. In both instances, the aesthetic response to landscape is based upon a survival response to potential dangers. ‘[T]he symbolic impact of these
Fig. 3 Paul Nash, We are Making a New World , 1918. Imperial War Museum, London Possibly Nash’s most successful depiction of human absence is symbolic of the de-humanising effects of the War. The trees are observers of a human tragedy, which is revealed in stark effect by the rays of the sun. The land has assumed the changeable, threatening and uninhabitable, wave- like forms from Pyramids in the Sea . In a scene made so uninhabitable, there can be no imaginable resting place for human life. This is probably something which struck Nash, living in the trenches, walled-in by the earth and surrounded by death and the dying. Through the threat of annihilation and the gas poisoning of the atmosphere, all figures are now dissolved into the landscape. 2 Appleton, Jay. The Experience of Landscape . Wiley, 1996 3 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an analysis of the concept of pollution and taboo . London: Routledge, 1966. Douglas equates domestic acts to an ordering of the environment. The home, therefore, contains the seed of violent juxtapositions between nature and dwelling.
or of unease and disturbance, and it is on these emotional responses rather than on the real potency of the danger, the refuge or the prospect that our aesthetic reactions will depend.’ In emotional responses to the landscape based on the perception of threat, we see the figure, or settlement, as an attempt to establish a defendable location. We may also see the inversion of this – that the creation of the figure is a violent act which disrupts the landscape. 3 The English landscape can be read as a container for memory and rural imagery, but it can also be seen, in relation to the figure, as a plane onto which a new human order (the modern city) is to be imposed. This flattening-out threatens the landscape’s existing relationship to memory, but composes new acts associated with human settlement.
environmental phenomena can induce in us a sense either of ease and satisfaction
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