For the last 10 years, the ongoing series Mountainworks has been developed in relation and response to mountains as places of both real and imaginary exploration. Until now, the series was framed by its continued commitment to one particular alpine community, Engelberg. Mountainworks (Montafon) is the first new chapter in this sustained enquiry into our complex relationship with mountainous landscapes. Through photography, video and sound, the work investigates both historical and contemporary notions of the sublime and the complications that term evokes in relation to current climate politics. This underpins investigations into the ways we look after the places temporarily in our care, as well as the processes of maintenance carried out by the mountain industries that facilitate and shape the reciprocal relationship between environments and our use of them. In these works, the mountain stops being the purely natural environment that we know from romantic representations and becomes a stage where we are introduced to the machinations necessary to establish a subtle balance between our desire for control and our attachment to the idea of nature as wild.
