In a recent  post on his art blog  the art historian Sasha Grishin makes a useful distinction between a landscape artist and an  environmental artist. Grishin is writing about an exhibition featuring the landscape work of John Wolseley, Mulkuṉ Wirrpanda and Mary Tonkin.

He  says  that:

"The basic distinction between a landscape artist, in the old-fashioned understanding, and an environmental artist, is that a landscape artist stands in front of something to capture, convey or depict it, while an environmental artist is part of the landscape or environment and seeks to convey it, its rhythms and patterns, from the inside."

A 2017 collaboration between Wolseley and Mulkan Wirpanda is here.  

I slow walk in nature and I make photos of minutae:

The question is:  how can photography explore  how we dwell and move within landscape or country? How can photography relate the minutiae of the natural world -ie., shell, feather, seaweed - to the abstract dimensions of the earth's dynamic systems?

What puzzles me as  I slow walk in the littoral zone on the  poodlewalks  and often photograph the minutiae  in this coastal world  is  how do I relate this minutiae  to the earth's dynamic systems in a photographic way?

Is this one way?

This would be trying to  do so through the relationships in nature -- in this case between  seaweed, lichen  and rock. But it cannot represent the effect biological weathering., eg.,  lichen's acids breaking down the rock into sand.  

The relationships  in nature probably cannot be represented  with a single image -- but maybe it could be done through using  a grid with 3 rows  with 5-7 images in each row. The individual photos can treated as  raw material to work with. 

I forget about the walking and photography  and just work with  the prints in front of me.   The idea would be to start from a pile  of prints and work them into a collage that would attempt to convey the   rhythms and patterns of the littoral zone from the inside.