Soil: Threshold Spaces of Subjectivity, Pedagogy, and Place in Landscape Art

Abstract

Abstract Through intersections of place, art, and pedagogy, normative ways of understanding landscape art and subjectivity are opened to other possibilities. With the creation of eight pieces of art, and the various activities related to them, I offer alternatives to the metaphor of wilderness that informs nationalism. With this a/r/tographical inquiry into elements of the land that serve as structural and heuristic supports, interwoven with the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida, I draw on understandings of subjectivity theorized and performed from the premise that it, like learning, is an unpredictable, relational activity of emergence that exists as a threshold space. In the early spring, the Boreal is brown beneath and above me: the colour of nature’s sleep. By burying a piece of cloth, I foresee that I will initiate a drawing, making an arc of soil and dead grass. It will be a brown, gestural line cracking the future uniformity of the lawn. But that is not what happens. It all turns green and weeks later I have to move blades of grass and search carefully to find the thin scar that is the only evidence of my art. The grass covers and erases the art, laughing in silent chorus.