Countershade
Community Interest Company

Camouflage Artwork by Stephen Whitehead

The work is a call to action. Aesthetic contemplation of the painting can, to some extent, draw you into an engagement with nature, but to use the canvases as zeltbahns provides opportunity for a deeper aesthetic experience.

As the photograph is a shadow of the object, so viewing the object directly is a shadow of the experience of using the object interacting with the forest. Unused they are art souveneirs, deployed in your life they are tools to engage with nature.

The objects are displayed on coat hooks and are viewed fully by being handled, asking for their utilization.

line drawing of a manequin wearing a zeltbahn
Zelbahn in the trees Zelbahn in the trees
Zelbahn in the trees
Zelbahn in the trees Zelbahn in the trees
Zelbahn in the trees
Zelbahn in the trees Zelbahn in the trees
Zelbahn in the trees

"The object teaches one how to act according to a plan for action: its human and social significance consists in the fact that, since behaviour is a way of life, in designing objects one designs life itself."
( Giulio Carlo )

camouflage water bottles hanging on coat hooks

The Philosophy of Camouflage

THE PROCESS OF DEVELOPING A CAMOUFLAGE SCHEME FROM THE STUDY OF NATURE AS PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Mimesis- To become one with our environment through its study and adoption is not a simple act of imitation, it is a creative act that requires empathy.

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead
camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

Why I use this art form.

As empathy is produced my mimetic behaviours to the subject, it is logical that the close study of nature through an immersive practice such as art will produce an affinity to it.

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

Camouflage as an art form is an abstracted rendering of an ecology, designed to assimilate into the landscape. The artistic process of studying natures patterns and colours and then developing a design to blend with the subject is deeply meditative/mindful as an experience.

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

It is for this reason that I use camouflage in relational interventions as a way for people who may not normally find ways to connect with nature. For those who already have empathy but may focus in seperate identities and elements within an ecology, it is a way to see nature more as a whole.

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

“Mimetic behavior does not imitate something but assimilates itself to that something.”
-Theodor W. Adorno

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

“In contemplation of an aesthetic composition we become 'one' with that composition, as we give ourselves over to it in aesthetic contemplation..... We surrender ourselves to the 'other', in order to live on through the 'other'.”
-Theodor W. Adorno

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

“Aesthetic engagement does not require a sense of separation from the world as instrumental rationality might promote, but a close affinity with it.”
-Theodor W. Adorno

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

“The language of vision determines, perhaps even more subtly and thoroughly than verbal language, the structure of consciousness.”
-'Art and visual perception' R.Arnheim

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

“All perceiving is also thinking.
All reasoning is also intuition.
All observation is also invention.”
-'Art and visual perception' R.Arnheim

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

“ To cease looking at things atomistically in visual experience and to see relatedness means, among other things, to lose in our social experience, as Mr. Kepes argues, the deluded self-importance of absolute 'individualism' in favour of social relatedness and interdependence. When we structuralize the primary impacts of experience differently, we shall structuralize the world differently.

camouflage design
Camouflage design by Stephen Whitehead

The reorganization of our visual habits so that we perceive not isolated 'things' in 'space', but structure, order, and the relatedness of events in space-time, is perhaps the most profound kind of revolution possible- a revolution that is long overdue not only in art, but in all our experience.”
-'The Revision of Vision'- S.I.Hayakawa ( Illinois Institute of Tech. essay in 'Language of Vision'( Gyorgy Kepes)