Matt Witt – The Great Outdoors

A Conclusion – Matt Witt

This month we have been investigating the relationship between humans and their environments and celebrating the well of inspiration, opportunity and potential presented to us by everything that is “The Great Outdoors”.

This edition investigates what happens when we develop a more outward orientation and become more explorative and sociable. What magic occurs when we give our focus to nature? What happens when we push ourselves to expand and start to overcome our own nature? We touch on nature as a means to grieve, nature in relation to faith, nature as a direct visual inspiration and nature as an artwork in itself.

Nature impacts upon us, not just on the surface, but penetrating right to the bones, tending our wounds, resolving our emotions. Nature can liberate us creatively, provide inspiration when we have none, bring us joy when we have become a little bit undone. It gives us the ground when we have flown too far and the sky when we feel tied down. It provides for us, beyond nourishment, sunlight and water, it gives us a language that we can understand without learning, an intimacy that is bodily and whole, and a love that is unconditional.

The Great Outdoors doesn’t end at the skin, it penetrates us, makes and moulds us and as much as we dig into it, it digs back into us, unearthing new parts of our consciousness, new facets of our personality and creativity. There is a natural ongoing conversation to be engaged, a reciprocity; not just in the act of venturing outside, but in our proactivity and orientation towards meaningful and considered incremental action, through conscious interaction and exchange.

We can explore the outdoors by closing our eyes, and get to grips with our innermost drives by venturing outside; this is the paradox and the resting point for my thoughts on the great outside. There is no difference or distinction to be made between in and out, between internal and external, between human and nature. We are not opposites. Nature is not beyond, nor is the human restricted to its physical form. The energies we emit every day, the love, the creativity, whatever, travels from us; turning over into other people, encountering other consciousnesses, developing into new ideas, new moods, new alchemical magic, steadily unfolding our human potential. 

15 artists have responded to this theme, collaborating on our most in-depth, eclectic edition to date. The pages speak for themselves; packed full of articles, interviews and art of all kinds, intriguing insights into the varying relationship between humans and their environment, fleeting glimpses and exposing revelations in an all-out exploration of The Great Outdoors.

Visit page 1 of edition #9 – The Great Outdoors.