The ecstatic near-by: Exploring psycho-rurality through the film Time:Distance (Holly Antrum 2012) and the Weather Diaries (c.2008) of painter Yasmin David

This critical reflection attaches personal post-pandemic perspectives to Yasmin David’s Weather Diaries ( c .2008) in which the painter focuses on her observations from the near and middle distance in relation to nature and weather, revealing the impact that Devon’s light can have on the psyche, and perception. I add to this the subjective ratios of energy which also reflect on the relationship between my mother’s way of life and myself as a witness shaped by her invisible disabilities as this appears in my film Time:Distance (2012). Within the article I draw on the title of my film and punctate the text with David’s handwritten observations. Through autobiographical pairing – ‘near-by’ each other in place and concept – I critique painterly traditions representing English landscapes, framing them as learned ways of seeing. Using Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory , I argue that pictorial ideas relating to the ecstatic can align with a distancing of the viewer; I re-contextualize these exquisite, temporal readings of light, and the artist’s framing of embodied, close-up views, as within the experience of ill health, helping me outline what psycho-rurality could mean. Thirteen years after making my film, I discuss the shift in context that enables me to re-frame the psycho-rurality of my film as particular and personal, rather than attending to rurality as mythic and distant. Using ‘interdependence’ – a state tied up in ecological and mother–daughter relationships – as an approach to mapping the range of ideas in this text, I make a case for the ‘near-by’ of Weather Diaries and Time:Distance to designate ways in which ecology, personal horizon and physical limitation impress on contemporary readings of landscape.