Ben Kilbourne

Ben Kilbourne Artist Statement 12/18/25

Through decades of walking the Colorado Plateau, Ben Kilbourne found the greater part of the soul, the mind, and the self residing outside the body—in the land itself. His paintings address the human/nature connection through rendering phenomena, or the reality of lived experience, as a collaborative process between sensing beings and the intelligence of places. 

Sometimes, when one starts creating art, the intention is hidden. Through the process of pulling imagery from the world and fashioning it into objects, the artist learns something about their desire to create. Learning is partly why we do it, but when we figure out what we’re doing, well, that’s the real gift.

Years ago, when my painting class reviewed one another’s paintings at the end of the semester, my professor walked around the room and pointed to an aspect he found to be common within each of my paintings. He asked the class, “What’s this? What’s this?” as he pointed to a horizon or a window. The class remained silent. He probed with his eyes, a slight grin on his face, waiting for a guess. “It’s desire,” he finally told us. It felt odd to be told what I was painting when I had no clue, but he was right, or at least partly right.

When I left the university and set out on my own as an artist, I was just as much a desert wanderer. In my red, two-wheel-drive, 1993 Nissan Truck, I rambled the Colorado Plateau, often with oversized panels, a toolbox full of oil paints, and ragged camping gear bound to the truck bed with a worn-out, purple climbing rope. I’d park it beneath sunshine and monsoons and then head out into the backcountry on foot for days at a time.

I carried with me the knowledge that I was working with desire, and indeed, I felt it. I wanted the land—I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to connect with it because connecting with it gave me a feeling absent in nearly every other aspect of my life. The land was honest, and in it I felt whole. 

When I saw an image that struck me—violet virgas touching down on a Navajo Sandstone plain with a snow-dusted plateau behind—I felt that wholeness, but simultaneously a great deal of loss knowing that I would have to leave it all eventually and retreat back home. As a short-term salve for that sense of loss I took images with me in photos, words, brushstrokes. 

But the sense of loss arising from my inability to be there constantly only grew, so I began to spend as much time as possible walking the land and less time making art. This acknowledgement nudged me one step closer to understanding what about the world drove me to create, and for years I engaged with art primarily through walking, reading, and writing, not through painting. 

After a few seasons as a backcountry ranger in the High Uintas Wilderness and the rigors of the Environmental Humanities master’s program at the University of Utah, I began to see the wilderness as the ultimate truth that unites us all, and I started to refer to my walking practice as a ceremony in adulation of the indiscriminate nature of death. To an extent, this had a political aim because it established the land as the final authority. After all, none of us gets out of this world alive. Shouldn’t that knowledge give us some reverence? I felt a desire to pay my respects to the land by disappearing into it altogether like Everett Reuss, picked apart by ravens and dissolving into the earth in some nameless sandstone canyon. As a stand-in for an actual disappearance (because I just love life too much), I represented the authority of the wilderness by imbuing the land with agency. I wrote a new artist statement for this developing series, which I titled “Constant Witness.”

“I went to look at the eternal and let myself blend into it… a dissolution of the self in the wilderness, whereby I still end up somehow intact, whole, happy. [In my paintings] the land itself is observed to be agential… and the personhood of the land is recognized. It always has its own experiences. Every juniper, raven, and mule deer is found to be the constant witness of a place.” 

I was partly quoting Ed Abbey, who wrote: “I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.”¹ But now I think we were both missing a piece of the puzzle, because that sense of loss still lingered in the word ‘separate’. While I felt settled in the idea that the land itself has agency (and I still stand by this), the lingering sense of loss made me uneasy.

This unease came from a suspicion that the self isn’t inherently separate from the land, that we are part of it at every stage of life, not just death. I felt it, but I didn’t have words or a theoretical framework to prove it. Without theory or proof (but with plenty of self-doubt), I could still only imagine the dissolution of the self into the land in a cold, uncaring, Cormac McCarthian sort of way. This created a hierarchy whereby nature out there was better than whatever we had going on in the human world. My work continued to follow this train of thought, an instinct that would find a home in Robinson Jeffers’ Inhumanist philosophy.

So I kept reading, writing, and walking. The brushes remained in a drawer. The paints slowly dried in their tubes. And then I found it.

Phenomenology is essentially the lived experience of relating to, communing with, or simply being in the world. Phenomenologists suggest there is no separation between the inner self and outer world because we live in the earth, and the earth is the “original field for all human experience, the ultimate source of, or necessary ground for, all psychological life.”² French Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, “man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”³ All my past and future work finds a home in this theoretical framework, and discovering it frees me up to continue working with more excitement and conviction. Ecophilosopher David Abram further illuminates the path I’ve always been on in his incredible book The Spell of the Sensuous.

“By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the visible world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depths. And indeed each terrain, each ecology, seems to have its own particular intelligence, its own unique vernacular of soil and leaf and sky.”⁴

I understood the fundamentals of Phenomenology since my earliest days as a kid crawling over slickrock in the Utah desert, but of course, I didn’t know that. I just knew in my gut that I wasn’t separate from the land, and my work as an artist has always been an effort to prove it. And when I encountered ideas that seemed to oppose this gut feeling, and in fact try to rip us from the land (capitalism, the internet, Instagram), I was further inspired to find an answer.

Andy Fisher, in his groundbreaking work Radical Ecopsychology, defines nature as anything that can be violated so therefore, the definition includes human nature.² The internet, the attention economy, and other insidious modern ideas such as AI violate not only ecosystems but also human nature because they manufacture immaterial realities that downplay the primacy of the land, our bodies, and their critical interplay. Merleau-Ponty said that we are in the world, and only in the world can we know ourselves. And as our attention strays from the material reality of the earth around us, I believe we are at risk of losing the world, and therefore ourselves.

So now, many years after embarking on my unwitting painting journey down so many horned lark-lined dirt roads, I see my work as a rebellion against humanity’s worst ideas, a desire for us to reclaim the intactness of our human nature, and a desire to reveal the self as inextricable from the land.

My work says that mind is out there, in communion with the place’s mind. Without the long horizons, blue mountains, sandstone canyons, desolation, roiling skies, sweeping virgas, varnish-streaked walls, I am nothing. Without all that, none of us exist.

1. Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. 1968. First Ballantine Books Edition: September 1971.        

2. Fisher, Andy. Radical Ecopsychology. 2002. SUNY Press; Second Edition: 2013.

3. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. 1945. Routledge Edition: 2014.

4. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. 1996. Random House; First Vintage Books Edition: February 1997.