Sky's Limits / Unseen Landscape (2006)

Sky's Limits began with a walk through Cambridgeshire, England, where the vast sky above the flat agricultural landscape is framed by tall hedges and alleys. While walking, I filmed the landscape behind my back - with the camera pointing backwards and without a chance of looking through the viewfinder. From the video Unseen Landscape a series of still images was chosen. The outlines of the sky, framed by the landscape and the viewfinder, were traced from the stills as line drawings, and transformed into ten silhouette graphite drawings. They could be imagined as slices through the spatial and temporal continuity of the walk, slices of view and of presence. The drawings became the basis for a series of five plaster casts, which elevated the virtual planes into threedimensionality, solidifying the arrested moment of presence into an (impossible) object. Finally, one of them was cast in lead, the densest and heaviest material accessible for the purpose. At the end of this chain of experiments the lead cast stood as the maximum solidification of an arbitrary cut-out image of a moment of presence in an unseen landscape that had been passed through - both the representation and the material antithesis of a highly specific but entirely fictitious slice of air.