Books On Books

“Not long ago I visited the limestone and chalk cliffs on the North Norfolk coast. As I walked below them I remember constantly looking up to the top of the cliffs, overwhelmed and cautious of the overbearing layers of rock that towered above me. Placing myself in relation to the cliffs made me feel so insignificant, so small, and so fragile. I was unable to understand both their overwhelming scale and materiality….

Whilst drawn to natural landscape formations I am both overwhelmed and cautious in their presence. I find myself shrinking, hesitant to interact fully. I feel dwarfed, unable to understand the immense scale and materiality before me. My practice is an attempt to make sense of the natural landscape around me, to create my ideal.  I understand and resolve through making, responding to forms and growths found in the natural world.  I interpret by shrinking and condensing, implying forms by combining materials.”   Statement, Kyle Kirkpatrick

Kirkpatrick’s imagined landscape works by being carved from an archetypal monumental man-made object — a visual encyclopedia — taken out of context and  populated with human figurines dwarfed by the swirling, layered cutaway text.  What is he pushing us to see beyond what he presents before us?  That this human work of attempting to understand and make sense of the great world around us by capturing it in words and illustrated plates is a shrinking and condensing, an implication of forms by artifice?  That even though the landscape is man-made, it overwhelms us?