Simon Dent - The Journey
My interest lies in the creation of a continuous narrative through landscape, that jumps through time and space, that allows digression and return. The scenes that interest me are of arrival, portals, paths, obstacles, steps, doorways, bridges, reflections, hiding places and departures. Different sequences of images can create a narrative following paths along coasts, down roads and through forests. I am interested in Shan-Shui traditional paintings that depict landscapes where the elements take on a symbolic relevance in a visual story that describes a journey from beginning to end.
Traditional hand-held painted scrolls of journeys through landscapes are a format that resonates with my way of working. The earliest images are from 1984 - from before my art school training. In 2010 I picked up this thread again because I realized that it was a way of perceiving the world that was meaningful to me. The place and date of each image is only important as it is the spatial and temporal location during my time. The chronology is not important, but I like discovering connectors between images that were taken decades apart. There is always an autobiographical element in every choice, from choosing the scene to cropping, editing and processing. However, there is no autobiographical intention. I am interested in the lyrical aspects of individual landscape scenes, but more than that, how these scenes can interact together to make narratives. This sequence is of natural landscapes.