Monday, 8 May 2017

Raymond Williams - Ideas of Nature

I was encouraged to look at Raymond Williams's essay, "Ideas of Nature."

The core of my project has been nature, through and through. There is no doubt about that and it is present in each piece of my work.

An important development of my work included Mother Nature, and Gaia. Nature personified into a benevolent woman.

In Williams' essay, he speaks of the personification of nature within religion.

"From many early cultures we have records of what we would now call nature spirits or nature gods: beings believed to embody or direct the wind or the sea or the forest or the moon. Under the weight of Christian interpretation we are accustomed to calling these gods or spirits pagan: diverse and variable manifestations before the revelation of the one true God. But just as in religion the moment of monotheism is a critical development, so, in human responses to the physical world, is the moment of a singular Nature"

I briefly looked at Paganism, and how they have personified nature into the Mother Goddess. I found this to be a very interesting concept, which fuelled my art to some extent. I would like to imagine that my sculptures are personifications of the 'nature gods' as one single, whole being. He speaks further on this subject in the next passage. 

"Singular, Abstracted and Personified
When Nature herself, as people learnt to say, became a goddess, a divine Mother, we had something very different from the spirits of wind and sea and forest and moon. And it is all the more striking that this singular I abstracted and often personified principle, based on responses to the physical world, had of course (if the expression may be allowed) a competitor, in the singular, abstracted and personified religious being: the monotheistic God."

He goes as far as to say that our personification of Mother Nature could be seen as a competitor to God. I can see that this would be a very gripping concept. Supposedly, God is a man that brought humanity to the Earth (and is biased towards humanity). The Earth is mother Gaia's homeland, and had been for billions of years before humans had even set foot here (this is, assuming that we throw creationism out of the window). I envision a subtle, celestial rivalry between the pair of deities, for each of their creations is forever destroying one another.
I can envision a love-hate relationship between Mother Earth, and our Father. Or perhaps a strange relationship between them.
This would be a very interesting concept to explore through art. Perhaps painting.


Although I found this very interesting, this was not the part of the essay that gripped me most. Williams goes on to explain our relationship with nature, and how it has evolved, or devolved, into a separation. I have included a passage from the essay below, which I have highlighted as to pinpoint the quotations that I found the most interesting.

"The point that has really to be made about the separation between man and nature which is characteristic of so many modern ideas is that however hard this may be to express-the separation is a function of an increasing real interaction. It is easy to feel a limited unity on the basis of limited relationships, whether in animism, in monotheism, or in modern forms of pantheism. It is only when the real relations are extremely active, diverse, self-conscious, and in effect continuous-as our relations with the physical world can be seen to be in our own day- that. the separation of human nature from nature becomes really problematic."

"In our complex dealings with the physical world, we find it very difficult to recognize all the products of our own activities. We recognize some of the products, and call others by-products; but the slagheap is as real a product as the coal, just as the river stinking with sewage and detergent is as much our product as the reservoir. The enclosed and fertile land is our product, but so are the waste moors from which the poor cultavators were cleared, to leave what can be seen as an empty nature. Furthermore, we ourselves are in a sense products: the pollution of industrial society is to be found not only in the water and in the air but in the slums, the traffic jams, and not these only as physical objects but as ourselves in them and in relation to them. In this actual world there is then not much point in counterposing or restating the great abstraction of Man and Nature. We have mixed our labour with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out"

I feel that this part of the essay relates strongly to my sculpture, "Gaia 3017".

In summary, here, Williams is discussing the separation between humanity and nature. He hints towards nature being more of a function than an interaction, and that we lack a proper relationship with it. Instead, we use it to our advantage, and leave products of pollution in our wake.

Gaia 3017 is the personification of this idea, that humanity is too far gone, and too hooked on using nature for their own selfish desires, to ever draw back and redeem it. Raymond Williams published this essay in 1980, so this view has already been present for almost 40 years, with no signs of improvement, or even acknowledgement. This begs the question of just how the state of the Earth will decline, if we continue to selfishly convert nature to waste products. 


https://wcerion.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/williams-ideas-of-nature.pdf




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