Unseduced by romantic notions of wild nature as a wellspring of recovery or transformation, 'The Eye That Articulates Belongs on Land' is a reminder of how our perceptions of the natural environment are often deeply subjective, and prone to being clouded by myth, or partial knowledge. Alternately embraced as a paragon of virgin wilderness or scorned as a baleful harbinger of a post-human no-man's-land, our fallback readings of these two different landscapes belie the fact that they are each continually evolving; subject to complex internal dynamics, and never standing still. Outside the margins of everyday experience, and requiring a step into the unknown, Shiretoko and Fukushima are uncertain, liminal spaces - as porous and as shifting as the shoreline locations Kramer repeatedly returns to over the course of her film. A place where the solid ground of familiar existence is met with daily incursions and periodic breaches, the shoreline also has metaphorical significance: as a threshold between the material and the ethereal. As the title of Kramer's film implies, there are oceanic thoughts in our minds for which we cannot always find adequate expression, as well as unseen forces in our lives whose future consequences remain equally mysterious and unfathomable.
—Film and Video Umbrella