Susan Patrice - Enveloping Landscape
No longer outside looking in, I found myself in the center of an enveloping landscape.
The Enveloping Landscape
Susan Patrice
This project began as a way to heal. Much like the Appalachian landscape, my body holds a map of multi-generational trauma. Too often expressed as violence against women, mirrored in our exploitation of the land, my family history carries with it a shame so deep that it inhabits our bodies like a curse. This shame passed from one generation of women to the next until it found its way to me. Under the weight of accumulated pain, my life imploded. Looking for a way back to embodiment and belonging, I took refuge in an Appalachian forest.
In search of help, I consulted ecologists, poets, indigenous elders, Celtic ancestors, and somatic mindfulness practitioners. But most importantly, I began speaking to the land itself, asking for guidance. What emerged was a set of practices that I used daily, much like gestural prayers enacted as rituals before photographing.
Within a few months, two remarkable things happened. First, I had a profound physiological change in vision. My eyesight expanded horizontally and vertically, leaving me with a wide circular view. I learned that our eyes are round, like all lenses, and the images they project onto our retinas are also spherical. Yet, trained in linearities, our minds almost immediately crop these images to fit into a rectangular and bounded view of the world. To see the forest's true form, I was being asked to see it naturally.
To honor this more expansive way of seeing, I began constructing cameras that photograph round. From the first moment, it felt as though this camera was made for the earth's body. Like a boundless sphere that stretched from stone to star, the camera offered itself as a container for the most ordinary of things: trees, rocks, dirt, grass.
More remarkably, this radical change in perspective altered the way I experienced myself within the natural world. No longer outside looking in, I found myself in the center of an enveloping landscape. Within these momentary experiences of belonging, which lasted anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours, I used my camera as a divining rod allowing it to guide me through the forest until something lit up, inviting me to photograph.
Was the forest actually lighting up to greet me? I can’t know for sure. I have, though, come to know that photography is more than the act of discovery; it is a way of remembering the vital beauty that connects us, one to the other, when the world is seen through the eyes of the heart. Maybe our habits of perspective make it difficult for us to see the sovereign beauty of the natural world and the intimate and entangled ground of being from which all life, love, and healing emerges.
As this work finds its way into the world, I hope that these images contribute to an essential conversation about environmental stewardship that shifts us ever further from the idea of the natural world as a collection of resources that we protect, or not, for our selfish use, pleasure, and survival. Instead, may many more of us come to know each plant and tree, and all biota, as essential parts of a living and articulate being and body worthy of our love, care, and protection.
- Susan Patrice
Susan Patrice is a documentary photographer and citizen artist. Her photography and public installations focus primarily on the southern landscape and its people and feature intimate images that touch deeply into questions of place and belonging. Since 2016, her work has primarily explored the nature of visual perception and its impact on our feelings of connection and kinship with the more-than-human world. She engages in intimate gestural conversations with the land through handbuilt cameras designed in response to place. Her most recent project, The Land of My Body combines her personal photography practice with place-based ritual and citizen engagement. She lives in Marshall, NC where she is the director of Makers Circle, a center for the practice of contemplative photography. She is the co-founder of the Kinship Photography Collective, a global community of photographers creating rich visual conversations that explore the intimate connections between nature, culture, and belonging.
