Perspective Shifts

This publication, entitled 'Where Do you See Yourself in the Environment' playfully shares and performs insights from a research collaboration between Phyllida Bluemel, lecturer in Illustration at Falmouth University, and Dr Emmylou Rahtz, Research Fellow at the University of Exeter’s European Centre for Environment and Human Health – funded by the FX Creative Exchange programme – exploring visual scale, awe, and individuals’ sense of orientation in relation to the environment.

Together, Phyllida and Emmylou had conversations with researchers and specialists who work with, or at, different visual scales; Microbiologists, a woodland conservationist, an oceanographer, a remote-sensing professor, and an archeo-astronomer. Their conversations always started with the question “Can you draw yourself in the environment?”. They asked their conversationalists about what they do, what they see, and how they look at the world – often ending up in surprising places.

The thread running through their conversations, and down the spine of this paper artefact, is a restless interest in the frames we create, and boundaries we make, in order to 'see' and to understand the world both scientifically and personally. And, what happens when those frames necessarily break - and take on new forms...

Phyllida uses design and the material qualities of paper to develop ideas, and used this publication to play with scale; to think through the relationship between the body - the book - and the rest of the cosmos. Quotes from the conversations form new resonances and relationships as the differently-sized pages turn.

The size and dimensions of the book, and the use of the page turn, draws inspiration from previous papery journeys through the cosmos, where the scale of the book itself is a device that situates the reader in relationship to the other scales being represented: Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, by Kees Boeke (1957) and Powers of Ten: Flipbook (1998), based on the 1968 film by Charles and Ray Eames. This work forms part of Phyllida’s broader research interests, looking critically at the visual rhetoric of scale; and draws on Emmylou's interests in the psychology of 'awe', mental health, wellbeing, and the natural environment.

The book itself was a conduit for thinking and talking through interdisciplinary ideas. We presented the book and our research at the Environment and Sustainability Institute at Exeter University, to a mixed audience of artists and scientist. The book has been distributed across both universities. Conversations faciliated by the project have since developed into new collaborations (Phyllida is working on a paper with Dr. Karen Anderson and a group of Remote Sensing researchers) and a paper reflecting on the creative research process is in progress.