LONGITUDE and LATITUDE
When thoughts originating in different domains can engage together, the result is an almost limitless capacity for imagination.” - British archaeologist Steven Mithin (The Prehistory of the Mind, 1996)
LONGITUDE AND LATITUDE is a series of international exhibitions where art and travel are united through an ongoing dialogue with nature and culture. Moving to these locations with exhibition invitations, residencies, adjunct work and workshops Copland has created a series of works unified only by the imagination and not restricted by “style” or genre.
Experiencing new imagery through travel is a tradition for the Romantic artist. This hardly serves to describe the Longitude and Latitude series. Romanticism being about forms of behaviour is political and spiritual in its intention.
This is expressed in the symbolic aspects of of the works where nature, the book and habitats reveal a shared human narrative.
Do the Vermont snowmen and the dark icy rivers become a political comment on US foreign policy?
Could the Habitat series speak of homeland as a construction of various pages like a work of fiction, a novel, part imagination and part nostalgia?
Does the Jassim series become a new narrative about what the desert could represent in the context of the 21st century?
FLAG 2004 Lebanon
HABITAT 2007 Slovakia
WINTER IN VERMONT 2004 America
BOOKWORKS 2006 Austria
JASSIM AND THE AL FAVA CAFE 2008 United Arab Emirates