The Sublime

 

The vistas in this Sublime series are only truly evident in the tableau itself. Their slow drift in detail and definition from the foreground onwards, gradually dissipating as it stretches out to the horizon, replaces certainty with uncertainty, drawing on Burke’s notion of unknowingness and inviting Longinus’ scope for elevation, creating a space and sense of vagueness for the viewer to fill. The shift from the specific, from the visceral presence of seaweed, worm holes and trickling tides, to the evaporating void where the mud meets the sky, is a trajectory from terra firma to speculation. It is in this respect that the Hoo Flats series engages with Kant’s freedom from form and expression of the unnamable.