Experience

“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish." - Hermann Hesse

I heard this quote the other night in my Religions class as we were being lectured on Taoism. I think it goes along with what we talked about that night in class. It's one of the main points of Taoism. The Tao cannot be grasped using our normal vocabulary to convey it; trying to grasp it in words only spoils it. You have to be able to see it or experience it some other way, to feel it. That is what I would like to be able to present in the end. I want my final work to be installed in a way so that it is more than just the images, I want it to be an experience. I'm hoping to be able to fulfill that by using sound as well as projecting moving images on the wall. I didn't realize it until now but I am actually working a lot like the early Taoist artists. In his book, The Illustrated World Religions, Huston Smith states Taoists "teach that human beings are at their best when they are in harmony with their surroundings. It is no accident that the greatest periods of Chinese art have coincided with upsurges of Taoist influence. Before reaching for their brushes, painters would go to nature and lose themselves in it, to become, say, the bamboo that they would paint" (138). Again, this is what I've been practicing as I go out and photograph. I try to become part of nature in order to document my own experiences within it.

Smith, Huston. The Illustrated World's Religions: a Guide to Our Wisdom Traditions. [San Francisco]: HarperOne, 1994. Print.

"Clearing Autumn Skies" 

Kuo Hsi