I didn’t set out to be a painter of landscapes. I set out to be a painter of people, specifically, of the invisible forces that move between them. My foundation is a Semester at Sea journey to fifteen countries during my years at Carlow University: Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey, Morocco, and beyond. What I brought back wasn’t a sketchbook full of places. It was a set of questions about how human beings navigate unfamiliar terrain and how a person leaves a mark on a space just by passing through it. Those questions became shapes. I call them wayfarers.

For twenty-five years, I have been sending those wayfarers through atmospheric, luminous space on canvas, painting environments in oil, copper leaf, enamel, and interference pigment that shift and glimmer as you move around them.

My current series, Higher than the Sun, is the most light-driven work of my career, paintings that seem to hold heat and radiance in their surfaces, shapes moving through space with a new urgency and warmth. The titles tell you something: Phenomena. Sun in My Mouth. Chasing Light Around the World. These are paintings reaching toward elemental things.

Nicole is an experiential systems designer. Her work centers on a single question: what do people notice about the spaces they move through?

It didn’t start as a question. It started as observation. When we opened BoxHeart in 2001, she was running a gallery and she was also, without knowing it yet, running an ongoing perceptual study with a fresh cohort every five weeks. She watched what people did, not what they said. Where they slowed. What they walked right past. She had no formal methodology for it. That was the beginning of something she didn’t yet have a name for.

Naming it is what her current research is about. Twenty-five years of informal observation like visitor behavior, exhibition rhythm, or the gap between what people feel inside a space and what they can articulate on the way out, formalized into a framework for measuring what experiential design does. She is testing it in live conditions now, against BoxHeart’s longitudinal data, building an evidence base for something she’s understood intuitively for years.

For twenty-five years, we have approached the same question from different directions: what does it take for a person to really see where they are?

I approach it through painting. Nicole approaches it through observation, environment, and public interaction. Together, our work sits in the space between image and experience.

Wayfarers at the Edge of the World is an evolving project exploring how landscapes, artworks, movement, and human attention continuously shape one another. The project asks what people notice when they are inside an environment and how artistic intervention changes the experience of being there.

Wayfarers at the Edge of the World is an artistic research project investigating how environmental conditions, sustained observation, and artistic intervention alter human perception of place.

The project combines environmental immersion, painting, participatory perception studies, and observational documentation across environments where landscape, atmosphere, instability, and human systems visibly interact.

At its center is a shared inquiry developed across twenty-five years of collaborative work between painter Joshua Hogan and experiential systems designer Nicole Capozzi:

What does it take for a person to really see where they are?

The project operates from the belief that perception is not passive. Landscapes are not experienced neutrally, and environments are not encountered equally. Attention is shaped by atmosphere, movement, scale, memory, environmental conditions, cultural systems, and the structures through which people learn what matters inside a space.

Wayfarers investigates whether artistic intervention, sustained duration, and repeated observation can alter that perceptual relationship.

The project combines artistic production, environmental immersion, participatory observation, and reflective documentation.

1. Long-Duration Environmental Immersion

Field stays prioritize:

• sustained presence

• repeated observation

• environmental acclimation

• perceptual change over time

• continuity rather than rapid encounter

Locations are selected for environmental intensity, perceptual distinctiveness, and visible interaction between human and natural systems.

2. Site-Responsive Artistic Production

Paintings are created within direct relationship to environmental conditions.

The landscape is treated not simply as subject matter, but as an active force shaping:

• light

• movement

• material response

• atmosphere

• perception

Environmental instability is considered part of the work itself.

3. Participatory Perception Studies

The project incorporates public-facing perception studies examining how artistic encounter alters environmental awareness.

Participants are asked:

• What do you see here?

• How do you feel here?

Responses gathered before and after engagement with artworks are compared to examine perceptual shifts.

4. Observational Documentation

Documentation methods may include:

• field journals

• visitor responses

• image sequences

• weather observations

• movement studies

• installation photography

• comparative visual records

Documentation functions both as archive and as part of the perceptual process itself.

The project focuses on environments where landscape, instability, atmosphere, and human systems visibly interact.

These may include volcanic regions, maritime edge environments, glacial landscapes, high desert environments, isolated island systems, and sparsely populated regions.

Infrastructure and Perception

The project treats perception as infrastructural.

Environmental experience is shaped by movement, weather, pacing, institutional framing, tourism systems, spatial design, and social behavior.

The project investigates how artistic intervention can temporarily reorganize those systems of attention.

Intended Outputs

Wayfarers at the Edge of the World produces site-responsive paintings, participatory perception studies, and public-facing installations developed through direct environmental engagement.

The project includes:

• three substantial paintings created on-site across distinct locations

• a Perception Map built from handwritten visitor responses collected before and after engagement with the artwork

• a physical installation accumulating visitor observations in real time

• field journals documenting environmental conditions, perceptual shifts, and visitor interaction

• photographic documentation of landscape, atmosphere, artistic process, and public engagement

• a public workshop centered on perception, place awareness, and environmental attention

Future field projects will adapt and expand this structure across different environmental conditions and locations.

Working Principles

• Perception is environmental.

• Observation changes experience.

• Duration alters visibility.

• Landscapes are active participants.

• Art can function as a perceptual threshold.

• Attention has spatial and temporal conditions.

• Repeated exposure changes understanding.

• Environmental instability produces perceptual awareness.

• Continuity is often mistaken for invisibility.

• The observer is part of the system being observed.

Status

This charter is a living framework intended to evolve through continued fieldwork, artistic production, and comparative observation.