Luke King-Salter

The four smaller ‘inscapes’ draw their name from abstract-surrealist artists like Roberto Matta and Roy Turner Durrant. The idea that thoughts and feelings can be expressed in the form of a visionary landscape seems to be a natural one; it is certainly natural to me and runs through most of my work. Sometimes it might be related to the commonplace literary device of describing the natural world in a way that complements the characters or plot, as if the environment was simply a mirror that reflected the mental states of its human inhabitants. As a rule, however, that is not an approach to which I am sympathetic. I prefer to see nature as fundamentally independent and transcendent of human concerns, and dislike thinking of it as a convenient stock of psychological tropes for artists and writers to play with. My ‘inscapes’—and really this applies to Theraps Avagthee in general—are intended to induce that otherworldly sense of detached reflection characteristic of surrealism, but without indulging in the deliberately ‘Freudian’ adventures that give some surrealist landscapes their highly anthropocentric focus (and, to my mind, spoil the effect of otherworldliness that makes visionary art a means of expanding, rather than narrowing, our perspectives). They are ‘inscapes’ in the sense that they visionary manifestations of the interior world in quasi-landscape form; but they are abstract, like music, not psychopathological distortions of nature, but ideal realms of natural form and colour that serve the usual purpose of artistic expression.