Until recently, to think of my work as having any relationship with notions of the sublime would have seemed absurd. My understanding of the sublime was tainted with romantic notions of yearning, of agony and ecstasy, and the quest for truth and beauty. One was dwarfed by the sublime. A stormy sea or a mountain seemed to deliver a message of divine mystery.
"...a pleasure mixed with pain, a pleasure that comes from pain. In the event of an absolutely large object the desert, a mountain, a pyramid or one that is absolutely powerful a storm at sea, an erupting volcano which like all absolutes can only be thought, without any sensible/sensory intuition, as an Idea of reason, the faculty of presentation, the imagination, fails to provide a representation corresponding to this Idea." (1: Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Sublime and the Avante-Garde, The Continental Aesthetics Reader. Cazeaux, Clive, ed. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. 453-464)