Proposal Update

    As a student of landscape architecture, the Wild pervades the development of my work.  Embedded in the creative process is a wild sensibility, one of divergent and experimental means coupled with a discrete, narrowing precision.  The unrestrained design practice rejects preconcieved outcomes and provides the release for unexpected development through the agency of imagination and material engagement. Built landscape works designed for the unfolding of unrealizable wilds lend an analogous agency to the landscape and a potential imagination to the visitors and participants in its making.  Wildness exisits within us and we exist in the Wild.
    The Wild, a term so deeply embedded in the American imagination, owes its ideation to its European descendants, particularly in their conception and travel to the New World.  For centuries the European landscape has been defined by the taming and cultivation of the land, even in its most remote and pristine locations.  Europeans have been on the search for the unknowable Wild for centuries, visiting the New World and traveling their own continent in hopes of acquainting themselves with the images and profound experiences offered by the Romantic notions of nature: the Beautiful, the Picturesque and the Sublime.  While the Wild has been sought out in remote locations and designated to bounded wilderness entities, we have all too often forgotten the wild of our everyday lives.
    In the tradition of The Grand Tour and the European quest for Picturesque and Sublime natures, I propose to travel to Europe in search of a reconfiguration of the Wild, not one of separateness from the everyday, but one deeply embedded in the concept and construction of cities and familiar landscapes or territories. 
    The trip will be organized into journeys at three locations chosen by the range of wild they possess: the post-Franco wild of Barcelona’s abounding contemporary landscape architectural works, the post-industrial wild of Lille, France, and the archipelagic wild of the Inner Hebrides of the Scottish Isles.  One-two week stays will provide me with the opportunity for an American/ Thoreauvian experience of walking, exploring the Wild through the repeated wandering of an expressed homebase.  Starting each day with a walk, the journeys will be arranged on a gradient from the highly structured to the widely amorphous. 
    In Barcelona I will start with multiple destinations in mind, structuring my movement in an orderly manner from image to image, design to design, garden to garden.  Will the wild occur in the movement through the city, between destinations, or in the careful consideration of landscape interventions? 
    In Lille, my travel will be structured around a single destination, Parc Henri Matisse, where a 1 acre and 7 meter high section of the park is partitioned off from the public to the wild development of flora and fauna.  Everyday will start with a departure from my residence and an arrival at the park, providing an opportunity to wander the city in a different manner each day, revisiting and experiencing afresh the familiar and the new of the city. 
    In the Inner Hebrides my travel will be open-ended, based on word of mouth with travelers and residents, local maps, advertised destinations, and chance encounters with opportunities for movement.  The travel will be unrestrained and divergent, starting and ending in the same location, but completely open to the events of the day in its movements and chance destinations.
    Throughout the journey I will engage in a pre-plannned and consistent representational technique documenting the difference of each wild through a regular approach in imaging.  This technique will be based in photographic and written annotation which will be completed en route.  (see example)  Additionally, each location will call for its own unique response and representation, granting a material agency to the particularities of each landscape and city.  This work will at times be based on found material (sound, video, objects), temporary installation, collaging of maps and postcards, drawings and sketches, timelines and writings.  Through these documents, I will explore the range of possibilities the Wild has to offer in the logic and freedom of my movement, representational methodology and language, and landscape potentials.  With an eye to the Wild, I will propose a new definition, one based on a relationship to travel and habitation, moving and representing, a reconfiguration of wildness through its origins and its futures.