Jane Burton

As the one who sees via the camera it’s tempting to imagine Burton as the reference for this animating presence, but the character isn’t a surrogate. She explains, “I certainly do want the viewer, whilst experiencing the book, to see certain points of view… that exist in this dramatic landscape. At the same time, I like the landscape to be symbolic, or psychological. I like to create plausible worlds, narratives, and points of view, whilst at the same time, these are not necessarily ‘real’ places. They are imagined, felt, remembered.”

The landscapes here are not identifiable as markers of a particular place; instead they embody a weight of meaning or emotional intensity, as much by formal means as by their placement in each chapter’s sequence. These formal means — colour, improbable lighting, density of tone, and framing devices — frequently recall Romantic painting where landscape was made to register the same emotional intensity and generally overshadowed any human presence.  Ingrid Perez, on Jane Burton's series Other Stories