Landscape, natural beauty and the arts.

This book edited by Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell helped me to consider the relationship of the Field to me and my current practice.
Here are some extracts :
P10
..the visual arts of painting and film .. allow a particular access to nature that determines the object and the texture of its appreciation... the technology available for representing objects, determines the conception of nature and so of natural beauty.
Is textiles regarded as visual arts?
P14
The analyses of Barrell and Sitney suggest .. that an understanding of natural beauty and landscape that ignores their construction will end in nostalgia.
My research into the history of the field connected me with its history and its development from Breckland to cultivated agricultural land.
in the late 18c and 19c ..nostalgia took the form of including figures of rustics and their implements and their work on the land. ..including these figures was to suggest that no disjunction existed between the ideal image of the rural life and its actuality and offer reassurance about the state of the poor in England.
P16
Underlying this truck with nature was the fact that it had been cultivated, its harshness and jaggedness removed by the ...work of labourers. Nostalgia became more difficult; landscape bore again the imprint of God's grace and gift, but wrapped in some deadly threat that had to be overcome by taming and ordering nature.
Unburdening nature of the impact of history, of human engagement or of grace, landscape is simply another collection of sensations.
Would I have been drawn to this field before man had imposed his control? It was the shapes created by the lines of pine trees and the light between the shapes that first attracted me to stop. Then I learned that those trees were the key to open mans ability to control this land by reducing the impact of the wind on the soil.
P24/5
In Crawfords 'Comparing natural Beauty and Artistic Beauty .. he goes on to consider criticisms of the meaningfulness of comparisons between artistic and natural beauty. ..works of art are intentional .. requiring meanings and interpretation and criticism.. the aesthetic appreciation of nature .. is restricted to an appreciation of its sensuous surface. In nature no intention constructs these objects therefore they are qualitatively distinct from their artistic counterparts. two responses to this claim are possible : to argue that natural beauty possesses the expressive and semantic properties that art does or to understand art and nature on a continuum based on some general principle that makes comparisons meaningful.
An alternative mode of comparison may emphasize that interdependence of fine art and natural beauty. Some works relate to nature in that they depict it. Others directly make use of the natural environment in their artistic realization and are .... about their relationship with it.
This is where I can relate to Crawfords essay and feel that it has helped me consider my work a relationship and not a depiction. This has released me from strving to order and relate the parts of the design to reality but to see their relationship to each other as a pleasing sensuous experience.

So this is where I am at the moment.
Trying to combine and layer dyes to give the feel of winter.
Design the shapes of that field in winter that interprets rather than depicts.

This design is still too much of a depiction!

Experimenting with resist using clamps, wood and pegs but may try using the wax to have a more exact definition                                                                                                              

Sometimes the stain from the wood gives a useful colour but cannot be planned.