Martina Shenal

Borrowed Views (2009-2014) 

The title of the series is a translation from Japanese shakkei, referencing the stylized perspective
strategies found in traditional eastern landscape painting and seventeenth century Japanese garden design. The work explores aspects of human intervention within the landscape– intersections of public and private, nature and the built environment, literal and metaphorical boundaries that protect as well as isolate, on a series of remote islands in the Japanese archipelago.

The perspectival structuring of our vision of the natural world, and our assumed control over it, is historically exemplified in the microcosm of the garden. Early research focused on idealized landscapes that were reflective of the garden– highly manipulated and cultivated, alluding to a mediated interaction with the natural world while contextualizing the work within a broader topographical and conceptual framework.