AwA - Feature -Woman & Wild

Woman & Wild

by Chloe Wilwerding

START WITH A bowl of fruit on a table. The bowl tilts at a slightly unrealistic angle so the light hits the apples in dramatic highlights of Titanium White and shadows of Lamp Black and Payne’s Grey. A silky cloth, strategically arranged to highlight the artist’s skill with each curvaceous fold, drapes over the table. In the background, a wine bottle glistens. This arrangement of objects is designed to be looked at. Now, imagine the same scene, but add in a model. A female model. She drapes herself over some sort of chaise. Maybe she reads or stares off into space. She does not return your gaze. She has also been strategically arranged to have her image captured.

We accept that the bowls and bottles are objects with a function or for looking at. The woman complicates the image though. We might say that depicting her shows appreciation for the beauty of her form or that this kind of canonical image is worth studying as a product of its time. Yet, when we look at the woman in this setting, we have power as the viewer. We observe her. Without any additional context, our gaze strips her of the liveliness that separates her from the vessels around her and objectifies her.

The woman is animate, changing and unique in a way that distinguishes her from the other elements in the scene. Depicting another living being places responsibility on the artist to accurately

An Essay on Depictions of Women and Nature represent the complexity and inner life of the subject. It requires a shift from the question “What is the subject of the image?” to “Who is the subject of the image?”

The obligation of the artist to the animate subject raises questions for me about another genre of image-making—the landscape. The rings under the bark of a tree reveal an individual story of response to fires, droughts, insect infestations, and years of abundance. A river teems with microorganisms that we do not see as well as ebbs and flows. A landscape is like a picture of a crowd; it is a collection of individual bodies that live, change and bear physical marks of their adaptations to their surroundings. A landscape is a living subject.

I hesitate to tie women and nature together too closely. I understand the risk of essentializing women by playing into ideas of “Mother Nature” that connect women’s and earth’s function to fertility or nurturance. I also recognize the risk of exoticizing women. The wild woman who does not ascribe to social norms and connects herself with nature can be hypersexualized through animality—an image of Britney Spears with a python around her neck comes to mind. By connecting women and nature, I also risk furthering ideas of purity that attach themselves to women and nature. Think of the “virgin” forest. We dedicate more focus to the untouched and therefore more valuable virgin forest than the small swath of polluted urban landscape that badly needs our attention.

Society values purity in both women and nature.

Yet, I connect women and nature for the purpose of this article because objectification in art connects them. Female voices in the art world help shape representation of women throughout visual culture. The slow shifts in women’s depiction in art provide a model for shifts in nature’s depiction.

After visiting Steamboat Springs with my family for the last 15 years, I moved here in March. I anticipated the Steamboat art scene primarily would focus on nature and the landscape as subjects. The specificity and lovingness of the representations of nature not just 74

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for the artists, but also for many of the viewers of the art, surprised me. For people who know the Steamboat area well, a breathtaking photograph of an alpine lake is not just an alpine lake. It is Dumont Lake, Gilpin Lake, Pearl Lake. The number of artists in Steamboat making art about the landscape creates potential for a rich, ongoing dialogue about how to depict the natural environment in ways that do justice to place as an animate subject. The more elevated presence of female artists in the art world contributes to the gradual shift in how artists portray women. Obviously, although nature creates beauty, nature cannot participate in capturing their own image. An awareness of the male gaze helps both artists and art viewers critically evaluate the perspective informing an image of a female figure. In the same way, artists can practice self-awareness of their own perspective when portraying nature as a subject. An acknowledgement of the challenge of moving outside of an anthropocentric viewpoint can help artists critically evaluate their depictions of the natural world.

Not every image of a woman or nature is objectifying. As an artist, it can be a struggle to know if your art accurately represents your animate subject matter, whether human or natural. Yet, how we depict nature as artists, and how we engage with depictions of nature as art viewers, are challenges worth tackling because the images of the landscape that we surround ourselves with shape our ideas about nature, which in turn shape how we interact with the environment. The power in telling the story of a landscape is not in capturing nature through image-making, but in bridging the natural and human perspective to shape humankind’s relationship with and treatment of a specific and local environment.

GUIDELINES TO CREATE LANDSCAPE IMAGES AS AN ANIMATE SUBJECT AVOID THE SYMBOLIC IN FAVOR OF THE SPECIFIC. Rather than depicting a tree that looks something like this , depict a Peachleaf Willow or a Rocky Mountain Maple. A specific representation of Art with Altitude

nature creates a relationship between the viewer and the natural environment that cannot form to the same extent through symbols of nature removed from their original context. Women appear allegorically in art to represent ideals such as justice. In this type of depiction, woman becomes a symbol that is removed from any real experiences of womanhood. In the same way, idealized portrayals of nature camouflage the real, localized condition of the environment.

AVOID THE IDYLLIC IN FAVOR OF THE REAL—including the real presence of people in the natural environment. The presentation of pristine nature, untouched by humans, masks the artist’s presence in nature. By acknowledging their own perspective as a human depicting nature, the artist brings attention to humans’ relationships with nature more broadly and encourages the viewer to consider their own relationship to the environment. In the same

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way that art has moved toward a consciousness of the male gaze, an artist can acknowledge the human gaze.

LET NATURE PARTICIPATE IN ITS OWN DEPICTION THROUGH NATUREINCLUSIVE ART PRACTICES. For example, artists can use responsiblysourced local plants to make natural inks that allow the environment to participate in representing itself. Just as the art world has started to present female experiences more accurately and completely by including women, representations of nature will be more accurate and complete when nature is included in the art-making process.

ELEVATE THE ARTS: Chloe Wilwerding is a Steamboat-based visual artist. You can learn more about her art practice at chloewilwerding. com or @chloe_wilwerding_art. CW Photos courtesy of Dagny McKinley.

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