“In nature nothing exists alone. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Rachel Carson

The Land is a Body builds upon the notion of passage and memory, from my previous exhibition at H&A, to embody regeneration through loss. Now, not only do the paintings refract figures and their relationship to place, but how the landscape might do that as well; encompassing not only human time, but earthly time.

This new body of work is not different from the previous portraits- it just expands upon it. How we pass through spaces (and time) and change them, and what we leave behind in the wake of this journey is still the center of my artistic project.

For this show, figures are no longer tethered to the land, but in motion- floating mirrors of the spaces surrounding their absence. And, in other paintings, what’s missing are the rocks of the land itself- the glacial erratics- boulders left by passing glaciers thousands of years ago.

Glacial Erratics are chunks of rock that have been carried and deposited by glaciers as they moved and shaped the land. Because of this, they are of a different type than the landforms surrounding them, and tell the story of how the glacier moved through the landscape. So quite literally, they are the residue of what is gone within the formation of the land itself.

As such, I have deliberately taken all the works from almost exactly the same location, Isle au Haut, Maine. Many of the paintings not only reflect alternate vantages of the same people or objects from painting to painting, but some of the “subjects” in one painting may be the boulders, rocks or surroundings in the background of another. Same with the figures, they repeat and multiply between the paintings.

A place, really any place, is the literal accumulation of everything that has ever been, lived or died in that place. As our understanding of the natural world evolves, more and more we are starting to realize that death is the engine within the landscape that begets renewed growth. Each is in concert to the process of decay and regeneration, we are not co-existing with nature, but are a part of the infinite reciprocal web that is nature.

I imagine this as future forward- that the very distant past, the remembered past, the present and the future are contained all at once in our experience of the world. As we carry the contents of our hearts through time, the universe becomes the reflection of the contents of our heart. For me, and within my painted world, they are one and the same.

Colin Hunt

Colin Hunt