This residency and exhibition pays homage to the 40th anniversary of a classic text by writer John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972), that has had a profound international influence on the nature of seeing, vision and looking at art and art history. Selected artists have revisited the dialogue between the notion of ‘seeing’, ‘spectatorships’ and ‘looking’.

How can we re-vision and look again, more closely and in a more refined and even ‘ethical’ way at fundamental concepts of sculpture and its relationship to nature?

In what senses can monumental sculpture open up new ways of seeing landscape and in the process, become part of the delicate balance of aesthetic and social relations that a mountain community experiences in the presence of public art works?

To look is an act of choice… the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.
John Berger

Berger, who lives in a remote French Alps community, powerfully argued that the act of seeing and looking is a socially and culturally conditioned choice, an active and not passive process.