Notes on Staying in Nature

Nature is a space we explore, move through and observe. We return to it, because we need it. It allows us to be ourselves, let go of everything and embrace it. And just be. The artist Kristína Mičová escapes to nature so she can concentrate on its finest little details, phenomena and miniature stories that take place there, like the direction of a butterfly’s flight, subtle movements of an earthworm, the trajectory of the moon or sun rays hitting a rounded stone…

Kristína’s work repeatedly returns to man and nature. She explores human experience, presence and memory in a specific space – the natural landscape. How the environment we come from or we find ourselves in affects us from the beginning. How the outer world mirrors our inner world. She collects “artefacts” – objects, photographs, drawings, videos and texts and keeps them as records which she then uses to share her personal experiences and impressions which she has found and experienced in nature. They document her personal sensory experiences, personal feelings, natural curiosity and openness, but also deep contemplation about the passing of time and her own existence or meaning of life in space and both real and experienced time, which also represents change. 

Her contact with nature allows for the process of searching and finding unknown environments and herself and the subsequent return to herself. However, it is preceded by our inattentiveness to the world and environment we live in and our inability to perceive ourselves in this environment. By spending time in nature, we can compensate this deficit, personal anxiety and frustration by the pressure of society and replace it with a seemingly simple, but actually rare
joy of life. 

The feeling of freedom which comes from staying in nature brings along the artist’s attempts at creating without the contemporary feeling of being forced to be productive and create the largest possible number of works just for the sake of it. Kristína doesn’t create them, she finds them. Her inspiration appears randomly, spontaneously, slowly and without any rushing or pressure. Notes on Staying in Nature is a collection of the artist’s observations of the world, diary records immortalising memories of specific moments.