From the Artist: Kenneth Jackson
Kenneth Jackson is 1 of 4 artists currently exhibiting at Castell Photography as a part of our invitational group exhibition, Lens on the Land: A Collection of North Carolinian Landscapes. Kenneth is the third of 4 Lens on the Land artists that we will be featuring!
“Let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form.” James Hillman
I have photographed the images in this series at places where I’ve felt some intuitive affinity or attraction, mostly within easy reach of where I lived for some years in southeastern North Carolina. Certain things that I find especially seductive are commonplace features of our world. Paths are traces that people and other animals have made since the very beginning, and as I’ve grown older the archetype becomes even more compelling. Water - streams, seas, swamps - is the element where the strongest spirits of a place dwell. Trees speak to me about the human as well as the natural history of a place, and they are richly mysterious beings in themselves.
At all stages in the process of making these pictures, I’ve tried to be alert to the sense of a threshold between ordinariness and underlying mystery. Between the physical and spiritual aspects of our human nature, of Nature itself, is a dark and fertile other world from which images arise - often in memory and dreams, and even in ordinary waking experience. The things of the world may be seen as embodying these seminal soul images. When an image or potential image moves me in ways that I can’t readily explain, I take that as a good sign.
Work from Lens of the Land will be hanging through the end of June, and can also been see on our web site. Stay tuned for features on the remaining 2 artists….
