FOLK: WCC 2022 — Johanna Art

FOLK

West Cork Creates, Exhibition 2022. August 6th - September 25th.

Until the urgency to examine the word folk, I thought it was landscape that I ‘did’.

On examination however I was caused to interpret, perhaps guided by its influence, what it is I do, what it is that draws me to engage with it, what it is that lies beneath what I see, and what it is that I look for in the first place, which I now recognise as… the folkscape.

The traces of the folkscape that I seek are current or historic are seasonal or daily or simply once in time… they can at times be something magic lying within the mundane where the traces of the activity of people in their endeavours remains, where the friction of lives leave their marks on the landscape, where the furrows drawn deep remain in the tilt of the soil, where the hollow in a horizon holds a story, where the scale expressed in the husbandry of the land reveals another scale of means, where the proportions chosen express an aesthetic personal, communal or indeed global, where the strata reveals the architecture of social and cultural evolution, where we’re mistaken by our assumptions and caught in the wire of nostalgia, where the landscape simply has the indelible, although at times, the faintest, footprint impressed onto its surface.