Brian D Hodgson

I search for places to be where my spirit can breathe. Going into wild places is performative – a meaningful action. Exploring wild space is to consider our own place and existence within something much bigger. My practice of working with an etching plate on location condenses and focuses this experience.
I recreate and draw on the ongoing processes and forces that transform our environment, both natural and human-made, over time. I integrate this practice, myself, and my personal psychology with that environment and resulting work. It is performative and psycho-navigational: a way of finding my location and direction; my means of survival.

Self-integration within environments over time, the physical and mental experience of exploration, human exposure to the cold, wind, and rain, are translated into drawing on location into grounded etching plates. The plates themselves are influenced by environmental factors: they carry an acquired, attritional history, including the ghosts of photographs eroded and markings made by the sea itself.
The corrosive, erosive processes I use – the etching, inking, and printing – also present opportunities for further discovery within the surface of the plate. The viewer, also, is invited to enter into these created artworks.