FOLK

ARTIST STATEMENT

Folk.  What is it that happens when I’m urged to introduce a new word to my neighbourhood of words and to have it meet with a community settled in the suburbia of my meanings. Will it find friends or will it forever remain an alien? Will it shake things up and cause a fanciful stir or be given the cold shoulder.  What happens is this,  I wonder how it too can contribute,  maybe how it can alter, be altered, explain, subvert, enlarge or enrich.  I wonder a little more and it causes me to interpret, perhaps guided by its influence, what it is I do, what it is that draws me to engage with it, what it is that lies beneath what I see, and what it is that I look for in the first place? 

The folk word, while is settling kindly within the community, is boldly indicating what it is I do and what it is that I seek through my work. The folkscape. Until the urgency to examine the word folk, I thought it was landscape that I ‘did’. Here and now, in the word folk, I find myself not with a tourist but with a new resident in the neighbourhood.

The folkscape, is the place I find myself lost in a thicket of significant meaning, where the traces of the activity of people in their endeavours remains, where the friction of lives leave their marks on the landscape, where the furrows drawn deep remain in the tilt of the soil, where the hollow in a horizon holds a story, where the scale expressed in the husbandry of the land reveals another scale of means, where the proportions chosen express an aesthetic personal communal or indeed global, where the strata reveals the architecture of social and cultural evolution, where we’re mistaken by our assumptions and caught in the wire of nostalgia, where the landscape simply has the indelible, although at times, the faintest, footprint impressed onto its surface. 

The traces of the folkscape that I seek are current or historic are seasonal or daily or simply once in time… they can at times be something magic lying within the mundane. 

This is how the folk word will reside in the community of my meaning.

Johanna Connor 2023