In the uncertain nature of our present time generated by conflicted relations with the material and virtual landscape, dispersal (as opposed to distribution) becomes a productive strategy. My landscape orientated, processual, critical-documentarist art practice presents images of sorts, and effects that move through space, and offers experiences of concrete realisations of movement, abstraction, and figures which are actualised within the field of encounters. My practice-based research develops close readings of moving image works, that documented trans-continental structures as paths through the landscape, and an interpretation of Joyce Wieland’s La raison avant la passion / Reason over Passion (1969 – 1983), Robert Smithson’s The Spiral Jetty (1970 – 1972), and Sophie Calle’s Double Blind / No Sex Last Night (1996). This research argues that structural film strategies are at odds with the concept of the frame as a device marking a bounded space. My videos: we all look at the same sky and water drawing (2019), and video installation: the sky is taught by falling (2023), move through the landscape while investigating the conceptual thinking around the transitional edge, a paradoxical understanding of the frame.

In the works discussed in this research, the frame is conceptualised as a link between transition and movement. The nonlinearity of perceptions is brought into play to inform interpretations of different sites and practices, reaching out in directions beyond art practice. The reading of artworks considers abstraction and presentation, practices that are necessarily material, the space of a journey and Derrida’s punning neologism, différance to derive a theoretical position, a picturesque nonlinearity. These are strategies to which my practice refers, while pointing outwards to framing of space as space/time put forward by cultural geography, holding open the possibility of an open future. Smithson’s multiple artwork, Wieland’s earlier structural film, and Calle’s recursive diaristic procedure disassemble the political realm’s picturesque and sublime manifestations while documenting with, and near to, the essential daydream. This thesis argues, strategies of dispersal, within landscape-based critical-documentarist art practice, produce and expose an interpretation of the frames, the image frame and the frame as a conceptual device in these works. By working creatively and re-creatively with understandings of transition and movement art practitioners and others using moving image and videoing transform uncertainty and address conflicting ideas about spaces and the landscape. Practitioners are empowered to recognise new ways to address being in the world. Dispersal (as opposed to distribution) becomes a productive strategy as the nature of the process of production of space.