"I began thinking about whether how you feel internally affects how you see your environment, or if the environment actually guided my emotions?" writes Deborah Segun about her solo exhibition A Moment to Myself. Segun's newest body of work continues the artist's introspective deep-dive into ideas of self-reflection, probing pertinent philosophical ideas and a more 'hands-on' approach, through painting.
"In this body of work I wanted to capture the intentionality of being present in oneself, being in tune with your environment, and creating harmony between the two..." writes Segun. Considering the self in relationship to nature has been one of the most enduring and prevalent themes in art, but it wasn't until the German Romanticism of the late 18th century that ideas of nature influencing our physical and psychological selves became popularized. In fact, it wasn't until this time that the modern invention of philosophy as we understand it today began gaining traction. While we may innately feel certain things when we expose ourselves to the natural world, more and more research is proving its benefits on our creative and empathetic selves. In Your Brain on Art, Magsamen and Ross detail the importance of removing yourself from your daily routine and heading specifically away from the city limits. “Nature has a strong effect on our parasympathetic nervous system.” They continue by describing how coming into contact with “plants and vegetation, water and other natural elements" immediately reduces adrenaline, blood pressure, and heart rate after about two hours, and as little as twenty minutes!
For Segun, the natural landscape and the body have almost coalesced into an artistic expression wherein "Mother Earth" becomes anthropomorphized. Here a restful body suggests a curving hillock; a jagged limb refers to our ability to adapt to our surroundings; a calming colour scheme alludes to the peace of mind before bodies of water. The works capture moments of reflection, joy, and even melancholy - similar feelings we might experience in the natural world.
For Segun, these are complex internal landscapes that utilize and transform visual cues often reserved for figurative art into a new genre of painting, existing somewhere between meditative and introspective responses to gestural abstraction, imbued with the intense psychological questioning of figurative or narrative painting, and the compositional arrangements often reserved for landscape.
"I started to respond differently to my environment," she writes in response to her work. "I started to listen to how I responded to places, and I used that to create harmony between environment, body, and a sense of self."
DEBORAH SEGUN: A MOMENT TO MYSELF @SAATCHI GALLERY press release
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