Making A Place: Art, Writing, and a More‐Than‐Textual Approach

Abstract

In this article I discuss both process of making artwork about particular landscape--the forests in parts of north of Scotland--and an arts practice that has expanded to include ethnographic fieldwork. Not only have I shadowed foresters, ecologists, and other people who work in these outdoor spaces, I have actually performed tasks with them. My work is concerned with familiarization of that can come through repeated visits, processes of coming to know, and exploring how others' knowledge can be brought to bear on process, practice, and outcome. In following description and discussion of some of my work, I explore ways in which concerns and interests of my practice-based research may sometimes overlap with concerns and interests of geographical inquiry. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] I am interested in how than written (and, perhaps, other-than, or not-quite, explained) can add value to investigations of and how kind of writings on landscape and that Hayden Lorimer described as more-than-representational--the diverse work that seeks better to cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds (2005, 83)--can add texture, depth, and context to an arts practice. In doing so, I draw on writers such as J.-D. Dewsbury and his coauthors, who argued for accounts that leave space for something else to happen (2002, 439), and John Wylie, who wrote about how forms of narrative--memoir, montage, travelogue, ethnography--are being used both within and beyond academia as creative and critical means of expressing post-humanist philosophies of place (2005, 237). More recently, Wylie has claimed that there exists a desire for different types of writing, methods, formats and 'outputs,' and shared stress also on affective, emotive and praxis based aspects of life (2010, 213). My interest is in how theoretical writings, my own narratives, and narratives of people I encounter and walk with in these places intertwine and influence process of art-making, which itself contributes to understandings of place. The work I go on to discuss has evolved through being in and passing through places, journeying, resting, and revisiting, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. Whereas Rebecca Solnit likened journey to something that unfolds rather like story does (2001, 72), Doreen Massey asserted that space could be seen as of interrelationships and that perhaps we could imagine space as simultaneity of stories-so-far (2005, 12). I am interested in weaving interconnections between lines of walking, discovery, making, stories of place, and in creating paths of narrative, with and beyond text. In this article, lightly flecked with insights from theory (Lorimer, in Peter Merriman and others 2008, 197), I reflect on some of different iterations of my arts practice before focusing on series of works more directly evolving from fieldwork practice that entails more deeply rooted and task-based immersions in place. I also discuss role that line of walk has come to play in this work. As an artist-researcher, my engagement with landscape has sometimes involved standing back, looking upon, recording, and extrapolating. At other times--particularly during fieldwork that has come to be part of my work--it has come also to include immersion and performing tasks within landscape. The works I have created about these places include: two-dimensional photographs, drawings, and etchings; pieces that are potentially more immersive (video, sound, and installation); interactive pieces such as bookworks; and explorations with essay form. Intrinsic to scope of these enquiries is an openness to world, to as it appears--or becomes apparent. Beth Greenhough understands that geographies take into account fact that the world does not wait passively to be enlivened, but is already lively, active and capable of intruding upon us (2010, 41). …