During the summer and my time in the Yorkshire dales I walked around the Ribblehead viaduct. This was a strange experience and I found it beautiful yet vulgar and it still perplexes me as to what my true opinion of these viaducts are. Having seen many of them across the country I always walk around them and take my photographs and inspect them with wonder.
One part of myself feels that they are vulgar, obtrusive and a intrusion of the landscape. Their sheer size and presence is impossible to ignore and whilst walking around them they are intimidating and, in a way, frightening.
Yet part of me finds them intriguing for the way the huge archways frame the landscape and illuminate the lush green landscape surrounding them. Furthermore as the stonework had aged it has become marked and claimed by nature. Yet in our industrial machine age we are used to these vast structures in landscapes which surround us such as telephone masts and wind turbines, do we begin to no longer notice them? (Unless of course a new one is being erected near our homes)
However when you consider this natural arch way which I saw on the Greek island Skiathos it is something which is immensely beautiful. Perhaps as humans we instinctively find nature beautiful as we can not control it, explain it or own it thus allowing it to be outside of our everyday experiences to consider the world around us rather than our own perspectives which are focused on our immediate situation.
This is idea which I would like to take further and experiment with through my artist process. From a contextual grounding of a personal love of nature, studying the romanticists, Ruskin and whitehead I feel that perhaps it would be interesting to explore what it is between the contrast between man made which, though we create it, we find unnerving and displeasing whilst we are overwhelmed and fascinated by sunsets, landscapes and natural phenomena.