JAN PARKER
NO MATTER HOW CLEAN AND QUIET
I went out into the forest early in the morning before dawn, at dusk and late at night during a cold autumn/winter in rural France. I breathed in the cold clean air, the space, the early bird sounds and the silence. One time I stopped and was absorbed in taking a picture, I paused, feeling the silence change around me. The forest seemed to move, my heart beat faster and I experienced a visceral fear. I knew I was unseen and alone but the feelings were unexplainable but real.
Was I experiencing an Arcadian moment?
We do not have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious impression of “going deeper and deeper” into a limitless world. Soon, if we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are…. (Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space”)
BIOGRAPHY
Jan Parker was born in Melbourne and currently lives and works in Tasmania. She received a BFA from RMIT in 1992 and a BBSc from Latrobe University in 1979. Whilst her work is primarily photographic based her oeuvre also encompasses sculptural elements. Her concern is with the constructed gaze and the conventions of representing landscape with an emphasis upon sustained looking, connecting corporeal processes with thought and feeling through the utilisation of landscape as allegory for structures and functions of being. Her background in the biological and behavioural sciences gives her a sense of perspective towards our interior life, which she seeks to connect to external constructs.
This suite of work called No matter how clean and quiet is the result of an international residency at CAMAC in France in 2010-11. Jan has self- published a book of photographs related to this series. Her work is held in a number of private collections in Australia, France, Vietnam and Italy.
To view more of Jan’s work please visit her website.