Edward Bateman

Mt. Olympus No. 3

2021

For those of us who live in the West, mountains are more than just landmarks; they dene a sense of home. We have memories associated with our mountains; those we grew up surrounded by; remembering the rst time we saw one, and the people we visited them with. This gave us all a larger sense of where we locate home. During our recent pandemic, home shrunk to the walls that surrounded us. Real experiences became mediated through computers and the Internet – but something felt lost: a living connection with things bigger than ourselves. But we kept our memories – waiting to be triggered by a photograph or reminder of the mountains that could bring back that sense of the sublime. Mountains and nature have long been places of peace and refuge. There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the word sublime arose to describe the feelings that the natural world can evoke in us. At home, on my kitchen table, I have been trying to capture something of that sublime in bits of plastic. Using geographical data from the Internet, I used my 3D printer to make the memories of those mountains tangible. With a small fog machine, I create atmospheres and clouds. Sunlight through a window illuminates some, while others were lit with a variety of sources including ber optic lights used for microscopy. For me, these images evoke the place I call home; and remind me that it is our memories that make a place special. At Home in the West was created as a companion to Yosemite: Seeking Sublime, which premiered at photo-eye Gallery in November 2020. In December of that year, work from that series was invited to the Art of Staying at Home; Artists in the Time of Corona exhibition at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, where I was the only U.S. artist from eight countries included. Additional works from that series will soon be exhibited at the Krakow Triennial in Poland and at the Earth Photo...

For those of us who live in the West, mountains are more than just landmarks; they dene a sense of home. We have memories associated with our mountains; those we grew up surrounded b...

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