The Landscapes We Carry Inside Us

A viewer stands in front of one of my photographs and says quietly, “That reminds me of the Coromandel.”
Another sees Welsh hillsides. Another sees a South Island valley at dusk. Someone else sees a Californian lake from childhood. The interesting thing is that none of these places exist in the photograph itself.

There are no beaches, no valleys, no aerial landscapes. The images are created using folds of fabric, movement, blur, light, texture, and long exposures. What people are looking at is material - cloth transformed through photography into something hovering between abstraction and memory. And yet people don’t merely look at these works. They enter them.

What fascinates me is not that viewers are “mistaken,” but that the human mind so instinctively wants to complete the image. We are meaning-making creatures. Faced with ambiguity, we reach inward and unconsciously search our own emotional archives for familiarity, memory, geography, atmosphere, and feeling.

Psychology often frames this tendency negatively. We hear about confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, projection, or cognitive dissonance - the ways humans distort reality to protect themselves or reinforce existing beliefs. There is truth in that, certainly. Human beings are capable of seeing what they want to see for reasons that are fearful, tribal, defensive, or ideological.

But there is another side to this phenomenon that feels profoundly human and deeply beautiful. Sometimes we do not impose meaning onto the world because we are deluded. Sometimes we do it because imagination is one of the purest forms of connection we possess.

When someone sees a coastline in a piece of fabric, what they are really seeing is the landscape they carry within themselves. The work becomes less a document and more a mirror - not reflecting physical appearance, but internal experience. Memory, longing, nostalgia, geography, emotion, weather, even grief all begin to surface inside abstraction.

The photograph acts as a catalyst.

In this sense, abstraction may actually be more emotionally truthful than literal representation. A conventional landscape photograph tells the viewer exactly what they are looking at. A mountain is a mountain. A lake is a lake. The visual information arrives already resolved. But ambiguity invites participation. The unresolved image leaves space for the viewer to enter creatively and emotionally. The mind begins searching for orientation: What is this? Have I been here before? Why does this feel familiar?

That moment - the suspension between knowing and imagining - is where the work truly lives.

I think this is why people from entirely different parts of the world often respond to the same image with completely different geographical associations. Someone raised near rugged coastlines may see oceanic weather systems. Someone from inland farming country may see valleys and plains. Someone else may see satellite imagery or glacial terrain. The image itself remains unchanged. What changes is the emotional landscape of the observer.

There is something quietly hopeful about this. In a culture increasingly obsessed with certainty, categorisation, and immediate explanation, ambiguity allows us to rediscover a softer relationship with perception. It reminds us that reality is not always fixed, objective, or singular. Human experience is layered. We are constantly co-creating meaning with the world around us. Clouds become animals. Shadows become figures. Textures become landscapes. A blurred photograph becomes a memory of home.

Children do this naturally. They inhabit imagination without embarrassment. Adults often lose this openness, or suppress it beneath analysis and literalism. Yet abstraction seems capable of reopening that perceptual door. It gives permission to wonder again. Perhaps that is why viewers often linger in front of these works longer than expected. The images resist immediate resolution. They continue shifting psychologically the longer they are observed. The eye searches. The imagination tests possibilities. The mind oscillates between material and illusion.

Fabric becomes terrain. Terrain becomes atmosphere. Atmosphere becomes emotion. And eventually the question of what the image “really is” becomes less important than the experience of inhabiting it.

For me, this is not about tricking the viewer. It is about revealing how beautifully human perception actually is. Not passive. Not mechanical. But poetic. The landscapes we see in abstraction may ultimately tell us less about the artwork itself and more about the vast interior worlds we each carry silently within us.