Field Ground

Patricia Satterlee has been exploring ideas about representation and observation since the 2001. The result is the formulation of "field ground" as an analytical framework.

Observation

• The core is observation and the question is the scope of observation.
• Observation tied to perception
• How do we define perception
• Normal perception defined
• Scientific definitions of perception
• Sight / wavelengths
• Hearing / frequencies
• Touch / ??
• Taste / a form of chemoreception.
• Smell / a form of chemoreception.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoreception
• What we call normal perception
• Different measurement, different perceptions
• Other modalities of perception
• Ranges of other mammals — other perceptions are available
• Sinethesia (sp?) — mixing of perceptions
• Single measurement range of "normal perception" — is this possible?
• Idiosyncratic ranges of perception
• Idea that everyone has different ranges of perception
• This affects what they are able to observe of the external reality
• Satterlee — opening to a wider range of observation

Personal Geometry — a tool to aid in representing the wider range of observation

• Not a rejection of classical geometry
• Tools not sufficient
• Forms, shapes, and relationships discovered which can been seen throughout her work

Field Ground

• Not figure ground
• materialistic
• hierarchical
• privileges people, particularly men
• Not negative positive space
• non-materialistic
• optical illusion

Essential features

• Interaction between material and non-material
• material becoming non-material
• non-material becoming material
• the zeitgeist of energy and matter
• nothing and something
• Non-hierarchical
• Perception is neutral
• One color is not "better" than another
• Identifying distinctions without judgement
• Recognition of the equivalence of nothing and something

Utility

• More direct connection between observation and representation
• Hierarchy supplied by viewer
• Switching between field and ground
• Within a painting
• The painting within the environment

I was intrigued by a recent story about the ALMA observatory in Peru specifically when the project director mentioned that the Incas charted star-to-star constellations but they also charted "dark cloud" constellations. The anthropologist Gary Urton characterizes the dark constellations as symbolically representing a transitional, intermediate category of celestial phenomena. "That is they are androgynous or asexual, and even though they are located in the sky, they are classified as pachatierra (or pachatira), a word which combines the Quechua and the Spanish terms for earth." (Urton, At the Crossroads... 109). This kind of intermingling of experiences, contexts, and meanings, of earth on heaven and existence in nothingness resonates with the way I approach my work.

http://www.astronomy.pomona.edu/archeo/andes/inca.nightsky.html