Elizabeth West: Beyond The Frame

Beyond the Frame examines the shifting boundary between seeing and being. Between the detachment of viewing a landscape and the embodied act of engaging with it. It responds to the ways Western landscape traditions and technology have shaped our encounters with the natural world: framing, capturing, and containing it within an image that can only ever suggest a fragment of experience. Yet what lies outside the frame holds the true pulse of ecological life. This work resists the fixed perspective. Flowing through the space, it reflects that landscape cannot be contained or possessed. The work asks what happens when we step beyond the passive gaze, when we recognise that looking is not neutral, but an act that carries consequence. Rather than depicting a landscape, Beyond the Frame embodies it. What emerges is not a view to be consumed, but a continuum, an invitation to step through the frame, into the living terrain beyond it.