Domestic
Disturbances
The suburban landscape is our contemporary pastoralism, where nature
is still present but is controlled, tamed and defanged. We
covet such a landscape as a bulwark against an underlying fear that
domestic security and certainty is a small step away from easily
unraveling. Yet
such a construction is never complete.
Despite our best efforts, there are always signs of the lurking
chaos of nature. Indeed such unpredictability is somewhat attractive,
as too much security feels stifling and numbing.
I am
interested in the ambivalence between which should succeed: while
suburbia is claustrophobic in its insistence on order and control,
the intrusion of wildness is also unacceptably dangerous to our
carefully built backyard worlds. There is disappointment that
the unpredictable is ultimately ineffectual, but also anxiety that
it is not.
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