The ancient Indo-Aryan root-word "rt", meaning "to fit together", is to be found embedded in the words of many European languages. Some examples are the English words "order", "ordain", "rite", "ritual", "rhythm", "articulate", and "art", to name but a few.

In this vein it can be seen that art is a process of refining and ordering perception through making and doing. It is a conscious activity wherein awareness is brought to bear throughout, thereby opening the mind to deeper underlying levels. The state of watchfulness or active contemplation through which art moves aligns itself ultimately to ordering principles of mind/reality, at the same time expressing and in turn affecting the spirit of the age. The "art object" is thus a link between worlds, between conscious and unconscious, real and imagined, between the mundane and the mythical, a physical embodiment of human culture.

My work in recent years has included exploration of the forms of landscape, ranging from a formalist point of view to the way in which human beings situate themselves in relation to nature and the realm of experience which it opens - deeply personal and at the same time conditioned by culture (or not) - feelings of awe, curiosity, estrangement, vulnerability, power, and so on, a dichotomy between authenticity and the order of simulacra which infiltrates and undermines a sense of the real. Most recently, I have delved further into culturally mediated responses to physical environment, ideas of seriality and order interfacing with figuration in a landscape context.

A parallel fascination for me has been the relation of order and complexity. Usng a technique of photo-collage/painted images, I have attempted to form a new synthesis, constituting what could be called a "new" modernism - one which is, however, integrative rather than fractured, and thus quite different in spirit from that which heralded the new art movements of the last century.

Viviane White