Surface: Land Water and the Visual Arts Symposium, 2004

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edited by Liz Wells and Simon Standing

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Land/Water and the Visual Arts


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Land/Water and the Visual Arts University of Plymouth


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Paperback edition first published in the UK in 2005 by University of Plymouth Press, c/o Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK.

Paperback edition first published in the USA in 2005 by University of Plymouth Press, c/o Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon, USA.

© 2005 University of Plymouth Press A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library Electronic ISBN 1-84150-945-0 / ISBN 1-84150-936-1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Publisher: Paul Honeywill Book design: Yulia Razina Cover image: Susan Derges

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

Printed and bound by Orchard Press, UK


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CONTENTS 5 6 10 28 42 58 70 82 94 95


Thomas A Clark: Poem Liz Wells and Simon Standing: Introduction Iain Biggs: Unearthing other voices – a “polytheistic” approach to landscape Patricia Townsend: Transitional Spaces: surface, fantasy and illusion John Goto: Landscape gardens, narrative painting and High Summer Ingrid Pollard: Lost in the Horizon Interviews with Susan Derges Christopher Cook: re:surfacing Statement: Land/Water and the Visual Arts Biographies

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the roof and the gables accept light light is poured onto the hill shapes green distinguished from green grey from gold a surface is anything that answers the light with texture and form the eyes are hungry for what the hands might reach and touch intelligence of the senses brought to light the whole body of the water dancing

Thomas A Clark Exeter 2004


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INTRODUCTION

through the deployment of medium and materials has been a concern within fine art practice, especially since the Impressionists, one which more recently has been pursued particularly through installation and video. There is a tension between the fixity of the image and the fluidity of the elements which has stood as a paradoxical challenge for many artists. Increasingly ‘landscape’ is also associated with the idea of inner landscape, the realm of the unconscious. Hence, it is the emotional and spiritual responses, as well as literal objects, that may be unearthed,

Surface:

illusion, optical/visual or metaphoric medium and materiality unearthing/bringing to the surface

brought to the surface. It is no accident that a research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts has developed in the Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth. The South-West has long been associated with landscape practices and

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for surface is lengthy. Given

creative investigation of the littoral. In Cornwall, the Newlyn School

definitions include, ‘the outermost limiting part of a material body’,

dates from the late nineteenth century and St Ives is associated with

‘the outward aspect of something, what is apparent on casual

Modernism in painting, sculpture and ceramics (Heron, Hepworth,

viewing or consideration’, ‘the upper layer or top of the ground…

Leach). Dartmoor and Exmoor in Devon have offered spaces of creative

the top of a body of liquid’, ‘an extent or area of material considered

exploration by artists and craftspeople. The Land/Water group includes

as a medium’, ‘a magnitude or continuous extent having only two

artists, curators and writers, and encompasses photography, painting,

dimensions… whether plane or curved, finite or infinite’; also, ‘raise

installation, film and video. Individual creative practice and critical

to the surface’, ‘make known or visible’, and ‘become fully conscious

reflection is central, but collaboration, in the form of exhibitions, texts

or alert’. Read together, such phrases become hyper-evocative. Surface

and publications, is viewed as offering significant opportunity for

is not superficial. In landscape what we see is a two-dimensional

dialogue and reflective debate. Given that a number of members of the

layer or visible edge emergent from and, metaphorically, standing for

group are concerned with photography, a certain emphasis is placed on

geological, meteorological and oceanic formations. Furthermore, what

photographic methods and references.

we see can never be settled; land and water are in constant, inter-

Land/Water references: the sea (e.g. as boundary, as access to the

active flux. The possibility of imaging effects of movement and change

sublime); the coastline (e.g. as a shifting margin, as no-man’s land);

6 Introduction


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river as symbol or conceit (e.g. time/memory); geological formation,

dichotomy and interface, hence the potential richness of ‘surface’ as

and the use of charts and maps; and finally, but significantly,

the theme for our annual symposium, June 2004.

landscape as a genre within art practice, historically and now.

Speakers were invited to address the theme in relation to their

Dialogue between real and imagined geographies embraces much of

own work, articulating their interpretation of the notion of ‘surface’

the research pursued. The Land/Water ethos invites interaction rather

accordingly. Thus, some speakers chose to critically discuss their work

than opposition; the forward slash of the title also indicates a point of

more in psychoanalytic terms, others focussed more on

transition or change, metaphoric as well as actual. The interaction of

medium and materiality, or on reference and metaphor. The first

wet and dry (photography, painting, printmaking) may also be taken

speaker, Iain Biggs, used his long-term exploration of the Southdean

as metaphor for geological, physiological and psychological events.

area in the Scottish borders, as a springboard for discussing ways in

A primary concern of the group is to promote an understanding and

which historical layering nuances psycho-physical spaces. He takes

dissemination of individual practices in order that other dimensions

the confluence of histories and (Celtic) myth, recounted in stories and

(spiritual, ethical, political) can be considered as embodied within the

songs, as a starting point, not with a view to resolution or synthesis of

physical practice rather than added to it by text and context.

conflictual experiences, feelings and perspectives but as a tapestry of

process,

As a research group we are also concerned to work with others.

sources which he acknowledges as influences. He also set a quizzical

Collaboration falls broadly into two categories. The first category involves

tone for the event through suggesting that research conventions

institutions and individuals already operating within the field, (galleries;

associated with academic contexts constrain practice, in effect,

funding bodies; other artists, curators and writers…). The second is

commenting on consequences of bringing artistic practice within the

more inter-disciplinery, intending to extend theoretical, procedural and

orbit of the research audit exercises now mandatory within Higher

communicative possibilities by moving into new sites, situations and

Education in Britain. Patricia Townsend draw upon psychotherapeutic

academic contexts (hospital; scientific enquiry; international and cross-

notions to analyse what might be ‘brought to the surface’ through video.

cultural liaisons...). Within this category projects have been pursued

Like Biggs, she is concerned with that which outer surface conceals and

with institutions such as the Eden Project, Jurassic Coast as a heritage

with the relation between inner and outer worlds, memory and fantasy,

site, Oxford Museum of the History of Science. We see reflection and

conscious and unconscious and ways in which such interactions are

evaluation as dialectically central to our activities. From the perspective

dynamically articulated through the image.

of theory and critical debate, the notion of discourse presumes an

John Goto and Ingrid Pollard variously addressed questions of

interactive difference, which is usefully paralleled in the land/water

process and reference – in terms of making, and in terms of viewer

7


Introduction

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interpretation. Goto’s digitally constructed images in High Summer

paintings in graphite emerge through a process with striking geological

specifically reference well-known European post-Renaissance paintings

connotations, although at times there is an equally strong dialogue with

and landscaped gardens wherein the rules of pictorial composition were

black and white photography. Using a sequence of physical journeys,

pre-eminent. The digitally-produced surface is flat, lacking the depth and

he explores the serendipitous route to this development, revealing

textures of oil (or, indeed, of landscape gardens themselves). Picturesque

how a re-engagement with specific surface qualities transformed his

scenes are variously interrupted by contemporary visitors (tourists,

practice, and provoked a return with new eyes to earlier themes of

terrorists…). Content and surface combine to suggest an ironic comment

landscape and the unconscious.

on art, class, and the Arcadian. Pollard’s discussion drew upon recent

As organisers and editors it was interesting to note certain

residencies in Northumberland, including the Farne Islands. She reflects

convergences of interpretation of the theme. Perhaps reflecting the

upon the relation between the surface of the print and the surface of the

centrality of psychoanalysis within contemporary culture, all variously

land which it references, using the camera close-up to explore the effects

acknowledged the surface of land or water and the surface of the image

of light, textures, and visual detail, microscopically. Resulting images

as metaphorically reflecting unconscious, as well as conscious, reponses

shift our sense of scale as, for instance, photographs of organic mass are

to sites, circumstances and personal histories on the part of artists (and,

rendered larger than human scale, at one level echoing the artist’s own

by extension, audiences as spectators). All the speakers also situated

curiosity about the relation between the minuteness of the everyday and

their work in terms of cultural currencies, described in terms both of

the enormity of the cosmos.

personal experience and in terms of art historical, philosophical or

Susan Derges and Christopher Cook both focus on sources,

environmentalist debates. Whilst ‘surface’ might seem an archetypical,

aesthetics, and the materiality of the image surface. Derges has a long-

and relatively static, modernist pre-occupation, re-articulations

standing interest in issues associated with making visible that which

variously proposed more rhysogenic sets of relations and developments

is normally unseen, for instance, the pulse of a strobe light, or the

within which surface figures, literally and metaphorically, as a point

resonances of sound through water. Surface and viewpoint are often

of exploratory inter-relation. Immanent concerns with material and

ambiguous; with no horizon or vanishing point our sense of image

meaning, with art as process, and with imagery as a particular sort of

content and viewing position may not be immediately clear. Although

presence here are inter-woven with, and within, the broader contextual

working with photographic principles, much of her work is not lens-

remit of contemporary visual culture.

based. Her encounter with nature is direct, whether working out of doors or gathering material to work with in the darkroom. Cook’s

Liz Wells and Simon Standing

8 Introduction


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Iain Biggs


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Unearthing other voices – a ‘polytheistic’ approach to landscape


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I start here because this commitment to ambiguity is central to Edward Casey’s concept of landscape as ‘the world-text on which the much more discrete texts of history… are inscribed’ (Casey 2002: 275) and also to the idea of ‘polytheistic’ landscape I am concerned with here. When originally asked to participate in this symposium, I envisaged making a conventional slide presentation of recent work. However, having done some slide presentations on the Southdean project, I realized that I was avoiding the core issue it raises: that of the ‘other Taking his own long-term project exploring the Scottish borders as an instance of approaches to artistic practice, Biggs explores the interdiscursive spaces which frame and influence artistic exploration and production. Since he did not use slides, no images are reproduced here. However, the project has been published as Iain Biggs (2004) (ed.), Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig, Wild Conversation Press and TRACE.

Introduction

voices’ that Mary Watkins calls ‘invisible guests’ (Watkins 2000). So this paper is an experiment, an attempt to write about those ‘other voices’ or ‘invisible guests’, of which I have direct experience of a kind, but also about the powers they mediate and the significance of this in terms of what I have called a ‘polytheistic’ landscape. During the course of this paper I will repeatedly suggest that to be changed by an image or text, including landscape, we first need to be in some sense lost, ‘at a loss’. Only then are we able to ‘hear’ or apprehend something other than our own authorial monologue, the voice that speaks constantly to confirm that we are ‘in control’, are already ‘at home’ with ourselves. Since we are professional specialists

My point of departure is a quotation from Merleau-Ponty, who writes:

of some kind, that monologue will usually be colored by what I will call ‘Apollonian’ assumptions or habits of mind. One of these habits is a

Everything is cultural in us (our Lebenwelt is ‘subjective’) (our

profound distrust of phrases like ‘other voices’. When academics think

perception is cultural-historical) and everything is natural in

about the construction of identity they usually name abstract categories

us (even the cultural rests on the polymorphism of wild being)

like ‘history’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘gender’, ‘class’, ‘geography’ and ‘politics’,

(Merleau-Ponty 1968: 253)

rather than use phrases like ‘invisible guests’. Distrust of phrases like ‘invisible guests’ protects us against the discomfort that fantasy and

12 Iain Biggs


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imagination can bring to our self-image as rational, professional people.

at exactly the point where the phrase ‘invisible agents’ enters the text to

Phrases like ‘invisible guests’ embarrass us, suggesting something naive

acknowledge the part ‘invisible agents’ play in our work. I have no idea

or childish. There is a truth in this, as an example makes clear.

why a ‘breathless little girl’ chose to send this tiny, disruptive ripple up

A while ago I was asked to help edit material for a book. One of the papers was by a poet, playwright, scholar and translator who publishes

through the immaculate surface of the author’s prose at just this point, and it would be impertinent to speculate here.

in both English and Bengali. Her paper was both beautifully written

My point is that it is in this almost subliminal manner that ‘invisible

and lucidly argued. However, in a paragraph discussing her creative

guests’ announce themselves, often unearthing a sense of buried or

work, she wrote:

forgotten times and places in the process, in this case the childhood classroom. If we acknowledge them the barriers we normally erect

I may be sitting alone... but what I write will be shaped as much by

between physical and psychic space, rationality and imagination can

me as by a host of other agents, visible and invisible. I am a child

become more permeable.

of the world I inhabit, but not a passive child, for to some extent I

If, as Edward Casey maintains, being in place is prior to the possibility of thought, I need to ask where are we placed today, here

create my world too.

and now? On occasions like this we use the conventions of titles to I queried the clumsy phraseology in the first part of this sentence and the author replied that what she had meant to write was:

indicate ‘where we’re at’. So what has my title – ‘Unearthing other voices – a “polytheistic” approach to landscape’– got to do with the title of this symposium: ‘Land/Water and “surface”’? Very little if we

… what I write will be shaped as much by other agents, visible and

take either title too literally. However, if ‘Land/Water and “surface”’

invisible, as by myself.

is understood imaginatively in terms of the relation of earth to water,

She was clearly taken aback and slightly embarrassed both that she

and to issues of ‘unearthing’ what is beneath literal surfaces, we come closer to a common topic.

had made, and then missed, this simple error. She observed that: … the childish ‘me’ remained tucked within the phrase, somewhat incongruously, like a breathless little girl who says to her teacher: ‘It’s me who’s done it, Miss’.

James Hillman, writing of the Greek understanding of distinct levels of earth, refers to the Goddess Ge – whose name still echoes in geography, geology and geometry, who can be ‘imagined as the physical and psychic ground of an individual or community, its “place

I think it is significant that what she calls ‘the childish “me”’ appeared

on earth”’ (Hillman 1979: 36). I take this to mean that in Ge we find



13

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a personification of our ‘home turf’, our natal territory, our community

Ph.D. supervisor I was in danger of becoming a ventriloquist’s dummy,

or group’s place of origin. Today we are a professional gathering of

a mouthpiece for conventions of academic research that went against

artists and academics that work for, and/or were educated in, higher

the grain of my own understanding and judgement. My response was

educational institutions. So it is probably fair to say that, as a gathering,

to start a project to ‘unearth other voices’ – to journey away from what

the psycho-physical space of Higher Education is our professional birth-

I was experiencing as the monologue of academic research and out

place. Consequently to speak of landscape here is not to imagine some

into another, polyvocal, landscape. I was encouraged in this by reading

other place, elsewhere, out of doors. Our dialogue with landscape,

Mary Watkins who, writing about imaginal dialogues and reason,

seen from the perspective of Ge, starts now, in this room.

notes that reason is only ‘a prescriptive and valuative notion of what

If Ge figures earth in this sense, how then are we to understand

thought should be like, ideally speaking’ and, as such, has no ‘natural’

water? For Casey, water ‘is somehow the ultimate medium… in the

superiority over other forms of thought (Watkins 2000: 12). This paper

literal sense of standing between things’ (Casey 2002: 35), a point

is, then, both an account of a ‘return journey’ into the landscape of

to which I will return. In the context of the Goddess Ge, however,

academic research and about landscape in a more general sense.

water suggests the moistening or dissolving of earth and brings to

My concern to unearth ‘other voices’ in our landscapes follows

mind the figure of Dionysus. It is Dionysus who, after all, dissolves

Casey in seeing landscape, at least in the first instance, in terms of the

the literalisms that ‘keep us on the straight and narrow’, ‘in our

inextricable interplay of ‘Apollo and Dionysus, self-revealing surface

place’. Seen in this way, the processes that govern the elements water

and self-concealing depth’ (Casey 2002: 269–270). It also contests

and earth begin to suggest the processes through which different

Alex Seago’s argument that ‘Dionysian’ research should be subsumed

forms of thought interact. For example, Paul Ricoeur observes that

within an ‘Apollonian’ position, used to justify the ‘normalisation’

‘the power of metaphor’ is that it has the ability ‘to break through

of practice-based research at the Royal College of Art (Seago 1995).

previous categorization and to establish new logical boundaries on

I want to ask why Seago wanted this other voice excluded from

the ruins of the proceeding ones’ (Ricoeur 1991b: 81). This might be

research, from the task of orienting our ways of understanding of the

better understood, however, in the more fluid terms of the constant

world, of better articulating our perceptions? More importantly, what

‘dissolving’, ‘evaporating’ and ‘solidifying’ of categories.

does this exclusion mean in terms of our understanding of landscape’s

Fixed categories can become so constraining that we feel silenced

‘self-concealing depths’?

by them, voiceless because our thinking cannot flow. The research I am

Barbara Bender suggests an answer to the first question when,

drawing on today came about because, five years ago, I felt that as a

writing about landscape, she reminds us that ‘even in the most scientific

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of Western worlds, past and future will be mythologized’ (Bender 1993:

However had you asked me at the time what I was actually doing, my

2). We see the world, and in particular the ‘natural world’, in terms of

answer would have been;

what Ricoeur calls ’the imaginary nucleus’ of our culture - the ‘hidden ... matrix of distribution’ that assigns to the institutions and functions

I still don’t really know. It’s to do with growing up in the country

of a society different roles in relation to nature, to individuals, to other

and narrative identity, and Janet Wolff’s essay ‘Eddie Cochran,

institutions, and to other societies (Ricoeur 1991b: 482). In Western

Donna Anna and the Dark Sister: Personal Experience and Cultural

Europe that matrix is shaped by the secular reconfiguration of the

History’ is important. So are various songs and their relation to

monotheistic, Judeo-Christian tradition.

places or landscapes. I’ve linked Southdean to versions of the old

Perhaps the research culture of the university, an institution founded

Borders ballad Tam Lin. I’ve walked to, identified and photographed

by the Church, wants to exclude ‘other voices’ because monotheistic

Bronze and Iron Age sites, the remains of fortified farms and two

thinking favours the subordination of ‘voices’ to one Voice – in our case

graveyards. I’ve been working away in the studio and I’m reading

the instrumental rationality of the secular Logos that has replaced the

up the archaeology of the Borders region, but also wolves, fairies,

Word of God. So, for example, when I need money for research I must

witchcraft and their histories. Oh, and I’ve been listening to a lot of

translate my particular concerns into a special language. In the case

music that relates to my teens and early twenties.

of the Southdean project those particular concerns became something else, a formal research question about the relationship between

This haphazard description is nothing like a research proposal, but

memory, place and identity, a neat clustering of abstract concepts into

it does have the single advantage of conveying something of the

a respectable research topic. That question reads:

strangeness, ambiguity and uncertainty implicit in the dialogue I was having with the landscape of Southdean, qualities entirely hidden by

Is it possible to represent something of the complexity of our

the formal research question.

contemporary understanding of identity by working with a hybrid

Ambiguity and uncertainty are, as I have already indicated, central

‘creative research’ model; one that interweaves various types of

to my topics because they are characteristics shared by landscape and

creative and scholarly material in such a way as to explore and

what I will call, borrowing from Ricoeur, the ‘hermeneutic wager’

critically reflect on issues of the role of memory and place in the

(Ricoeur 1991a: 88). This is the gamble involved in first losing, and

construction of identity?

then finding ourselves, in our encounter with texts and images. We lose ourselves in order to enter their world. We then find our selves renewed,



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the result of having been changed, however slightly, by encountering

appear at any time. Historically, these Divinities then metamorphosed

that world. Like walking in a landscape, common sense tells us that

first into the figures of the pagan counter-culture Christianity associated

in this process something is ‘always slipping away and something is

with ‘witchcraft’, and then into the characters in folk tales and songs that

constantly gained’ (Tilley 1994: 31). However, as Hamish Fulton makes

are still narrated and sung today.

clear by using the word ‘deaf’ in relation to walking in nature, we

The particular nature of this ‘space between’ depends on the

cannot ‘gain’ anything new unless we are first drop the screen of our

tensions inherent in both the title Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel

habitual thinking, our fixed concepts (quoted in Auping 1983: 88). It

Rig (Biggs 2004) and Tam Lin’s name. The title refers to two specific

was this understanding that led me to spend five years ‘listening’ to the

places. The first, Carterhaugh, is fictional or mythic, despite Sir Walter

metaphoric resonances of an old song and the Southdean landscape.

Scott’s suggestion to the contrary, and locates the unfolding narrative of Tam Lin. The second, Tamshiel Rig, is a physical site in Southdean parish, just over the border into Scotland. The Rig was once the most

The Southdean project

complete remains of an early Iron Age farm system anywhere in Britain. In 1947 it was over-planted by the Forestry Commission as part of the

The focus of the Southdean project is a one hundred and sixty seven page

post-war drive to replenish woodland in Britain. Although still marked

artist’s book. It exists in an edition of five hundred and there are copies

as an impressive archaeological site on large-scale maps, it is now

in the five national libraries and various collections, including those of

almost impossible to find on the ground.

both the Tate and the V & A. In addition to a text of about forty thousand

The imaginative space of the book is located somewhere between

words, the book includes documentary landscape photographs, altered

the psycho-physical terretories represented by these places. Carterhaugh

maps, small monochrome drawings, and two visual chapters each made

is associated with the end-of-year Celtic festival of Samhain Eve; a time

up of twelve digitally produced images. The book is focused by what

that mutated, via All Saint’s Eve, into our Hallowean. Samhain Eve

Richard Kearney calls ‘testimonial imagination’ and is concerned to

was the period between sun set and sun rise when time and space as

‘remember the repressed, to represent the unrepresented’. ‘Between’

we normally understand them were dissolved, as were all the normal

Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig I set out to find the unrepresented

distinctions between the living and the dead, Divinities and mortals.

‘voices’ behind an old folk culture implicit in Border ballads, traces of

Tamshiel Rig, on the other hand, is in part identified with the increasingly

a polytheistic pagan culture in which the landscape was originally itself

dystopian nature of rural life since 1945 and with the recent foot and

both divine and a thin surface through which particular Divinities might

mouth epidemic, itself emblematic in a local history where plague and

16 Iain Biggs


14/10/05 2:23:30 pm

famine have been central since at least the sixth century.

is best summerised by the epigraph from Geraldine Finn that opens

The title’s coda, the phrase ‘borderline episode’, is taken from

Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig. It reads:

classical psychology and refers to experiences or events in which a person is seen to be bordering on the psychotic – he or she may,

… the contingent and changing concrete world always exceeds

for example, hear ‘imaginary’ voice. Anthropologically speaking,

the ideal categories of thought within which we attempt to express

however, such experiences are central to major rites of passage,

and contain it.

taking place in liminal spaces where Divinities are sensed, heard or

And the same is true of people.

otherwise met with. The ‘borderline’ events and images that make

We are always both more and less than the categories that name

up part of the book’s narrative are ambiguously located somewhere

and divide us (Finn 1992: 113).

between these two understandings. In the Celtic languages, a lin is a pool and Tam Lin’s name marks

It is, I suggest, through apprehending ‘other voices’ that we are

him out as a man dedicated to the Goddesses associated with water

temporarily rendered fluid, dissolved, and so briefly freed from our

and particularly reflective pools or lakes. Places which, as already

habitual ideal categories of thought. We will, of course, of necessity

indicated, mediate between the sky, the surface world of the living

return again to categories that, following each metamorphosis, may

and the hidden depths or underworld. Tam Lin’s intermediary status

have become more apt, better attuned to the world – at least for

is important to the book because, as Casey reminds us, ‘to be “in-

the moment. This is a constant process of metaphoric, polymorphic

between” in a landscape is not to fail to have a place’. Rather it is, as

creation that stands in opposition to the myth of a single, originating

he puts it, ‘to be a place in a formative sense’ (Casey 2002: 35). Tam is,

Logos, but instead echoes the constant metamorphosis of the landscape.

then, ambiguously, somehow both a person and a representation of a

This notion of constant metamorphosis links to work on landscape

place. I will return to this in connection with Griselda Pollock’s view of

undertaken by Rebecca Solnit.

landscape painting. As I have said, I started to find my way into this ‘space between’ about five years ago because I felt hexed by the university research culture and needed to hear voices other than those of its particular rationality. To rephrase Ricoeur, I needed to lose a little of my ‘reason’ in order to find a voice again. What I ‘hear’ in the Southdean landscape

Unearthing other voices – a ‘polytheistic’ approach to landscape 17


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that rationalist discourses are somehow more ‘objective’, ‘truer’ than

Another landscape

imaginal articulations. The implications of this challenge are taken up and made explicit by Ginette Paris, a professor of social psychology in

In As Eve Said to The Serpent, Rebecca Solnit claims that we now find

a Department of Communications. She asks, paralleling the concerns

ourselves:

of both Solnit and Finn:

… in a psychic landscape without the partitions and exits that defined

… why should the concept of communication be more credible or

the Judeo-Christian landscape, find ourselves in a landscape that is an

more useful than the Hermes image, which the ancients treated as

ecology of systematic interconnection, of relationship, of locality.

if it were communication personified? (Paris 1990: 1)

Having observed that metaphors about land ‘resonate between the

As discussion of the hermeneutic wager has suggested, there are good

psychic and geographical landscape’, so that experience and metaphor

reasons for us to question the ‘abstract and falsely precise vocabulary’

‘inform each other, cross over’, she goes on:

that often characterises ‘discursive practices’ underpinned by ideal categories of knowledge. I am not suggesting that we abandon the precise

… how we inhabit the landscape is determined by our metaphors

and logical articulation of knowledge, carefully framed within rational

for how we live on earth (Solnit 2002: 56).

methodologies, that is able to shed real light on the subject of its enquiry. That is the task of academic researchers seen as ‘servants of Apollo’, as

The relationship between metaphor and the Judeo-Christian mythos

Ginette Paris might put it. I am suggesting that we learn to recognise the

becomes, from this perspective, central to the politics of habitation

Apollonian voice, with its passion for judgement based on conceptual

and landscape. The psychologist Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig reinforces Solnit’s claim

criteria, as just one voice among many; and in doing so acknowledge the potential to see the academic landscape as polytheistic.

when he writes that, ‘in the humanities, all theories, opinions, and

At this point the reader may be wondering whether this approach

explanations’ are symbolic or metaphoric statements, and that this ‘is

is a rhetorical game or whether it is oriented to some practical purpose?

true not only in psychology, but also in the arts, history, politics, and

There are a number of possible answers to that question, two of which,

every field which deals with human behaviour and its background

taken together, may illustrate the underlying point I have been trying to

(Guggenbuhl-Craig 1991: 41). This challenges a culture that assumes

make. A more or less Apollonian answer might read as follows:

18 Iain Biggs


14/10/05 2:23:31 pm

metaphors for how we live on Earth’ then, to soften and hopefully – The argument I am developing here is ‘polytheistic’ in the

transform the assumption embedded in the Judeo-Christian mythos,

particular sense proposed by the anthropologist A. David Napier, who

contemporary artists must find ways to represent landscape as

sees polytheism both as ‘a distinct mode of thought’ and as a ‘unique

‘an ecology of systematic interconnection, of relationship, of

way of assessing appearances’ (Napier 1986: 4). Following the cultural

locality’. Given that the figures, rhetorical modes or perspectives of

geographer Peter Bishop and Edward Casey, both of whom draw on

polytheistic thinking are metaphors that place ‘psychic events that in

Hillman’s polytheistic psychology, it is clear that we need to rethink the

an only human world become pathological’ (Hillman 1998: 35-36),

relationship between cultural landscapes and issues of identity.

then this thinking provides a basis for reworking the relationships

What has become increasingly obvious in the last thirty years

between ourselves, the monotheistic mythos, and landscape.

is that literalist versions of the monotheistic notion of identity are

The play between the perspectives associated with these

inseperable from the legacies of nineteenth century humanistic

rhetorical figures provides a system of thought that, appropriately

liberalism, Cartesianism and ‘Christianism’. For Hillman, the

deployed, can equip us to identify and raise to consciousness

monotheistic self that inhabits the cultural landscape of colonialism,

the increasingly global pathology generated by the monotheistic

industrialism and capitalism rests on an ‘elaborate fantasy of

imaginative nucleus as interpreted by competing fundamentalists

individualism’ inseparable from the assumption that human beings

within the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.

are made in the image of ‘the theological God of monotheism’ (Hillman, 1994, p. 33).

In its own terms I think this analysis is accurate, but that is not the

It is, then, entirely appropriate that Solnit should see the critical

whole story. It also makes the typically Apollonian assumption that

issue facing contemporary landscape artists is to recognize that we

its diagnosis points authoritatively to solutions to our present socio-

dwell in a new psychic landscape, one ‘without the partitions and

pathology. However, because Apollo, like the Christ figure with whom

exits that defined the Judeo-Christian landscape’. Engagement with

he is sometimes identified in Renaissance paintings, is the son of a High

that new psychic landscape requires artists to develop a polytheistic

God, statements made from his perspective adopt an authoritative or

alternative to hidden assumptions in the mythos of Genesis, Eden

salvational tone that contrasts fairly starkly with the sense of ambiguity

and the Fall, assumptions still implicit in much contemporary

and loss necessary to the hermeneutic wager discussed earlier. In doing

landscape art.

so, they may alienate rather than persuade.

If ‘how we inhabit the landscape is determined by our

This should give us pause for thought, not because Apollonian



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analysis is ‘wrong’, but because it’s practical value may be limited by its

‘a meeting place’ (Massey 1991 in Daniels & Lee 1996: 244) that is also

very strengths. It also works at a level of abstraction that tends to exclude

a Dionysia. That is, a place of celebration that emerges from a complex

particular anomalies that do not fit its existing categories and criteria. In

sense of community without strict boundaries: ‘a sense of place that is

extreme cases it will deny the very existence of particular differences that

extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider

do not conform to its terms of reference. In practice-based arts research

world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local’ (ibid:

we avoid such exclusion by ‘translating’ art’s meanings into Apollonian

244). This claim is, of course, wholly consistent with Dionysus’ role as

terms so as to legitimate them academically. However, in doing so we

the God who introduces us to the world of otherness (Paris 1990: 51).

constantly create a situation that deprives it of the very metaphoric force that makes it potentially transformative in terms of Apollonian thinking.

You will have noticed that I have failed to give you a second answer. My evasion derives from the fact that it is difficult to give a Dionysian

There is, of course, another answer to my question as to the

answer to the question of whether this paper is rhetorical or works

value, if any, of what I am attempting here. We might look, for

towards some practical purpose. There are, I think, two possible answers:

example, for a Dionysian approach.

one is ‘only you can know’; the other, perhaps more honest, is ‘both’.

When Zygmunt Bauman characterises postmodernity as ‘a state

As I have stressed, Ricoeur argues that, as readers of texts or images,

of mind’ that is ‘marked above all by its all-deriding, all-eroding, all-

we will find ourselves renewed only if we are first willing to risk losing

dissolving destructiveness’, we might assume this to be related to

ourselves, to take up the ‘hermeneutic wager’. I suggest that the purpose

Dionysian ‘excess’ (Bauman 1992: vii–viii and Paris 1991: 20). Perhaps.

of making imaginal texts and images is not to create ‘new knowledge’–

That would, however, be itself an Apollonian viewpoint. We have only

in the sense of Apollonian ‘answers’ or authoritative instructions as to

to think of Apollo’s flaying alive of Marsyas who, as a satyr, is close to

how we should understand the world. Instead, perhaps, our task as

Dionysus, to realise that Bauman’s claim supports the fact that he sees

makers of images and texts located in a sense of the landscape is to hear,

the destructiveness in postmodernism as at least in part the product

and give form to, new metaphors that show just how the Apollonian

of a rage against a world increasingly disinterested in Apollonian

orientation has misunderstood, or only imperfectly mastered, what it

authority. Despite Bauman’s critique of postmodern intellectuals

thought it knew. That task is, in my view, inseparable from the attempt

many contemporary cultural geographers, for example, are listening

to understand landscape as a place between psyche and geography,

carefully to Dionysian voices. In Doreen Massey’s essay, ‘A Global

both water and earth, a task central to engaging with Solnit’s claim that

Sense of Place’, a sophisticated theoretical exposition of contemporary

how we inhabit the landscape is determined by our metaphors for how

experience of time and place sits along side her pleasure in Kilburn as

we live on earth.

20 Iain Biggs


14/10/05 2:23:32 pm

Let me come at this from another direction. Casey points out that to

an excursion, not a business trip’. If it includes the word ‘on’ in its title

understand the importance of journeys we do not need to know their

that is, he claims, to be understood to mean only that the essayist:

cartographic detail. We do not need to know exactly which route Odysseus took on his return to Ithica, or down which streets bell hooks travelled

passes over a certain field – but with no intention of surveying

in order to cross town to her grandparents’ home. What is important

it. This field will not be ploughed or cultivated. It will remain a

‘is the course and direction of the journey itself, its tenor and import,

meadow, wild (Hamburger 1975: 3).

whatever its precise path may be’. He adds that: ‘to demand literalism of the path, whether in word or image, is to convert the plasticity of places

Hamburger presents essayists as walkers free to cross any number of

into the rigidity of sites’ (Casey 1993: 306). This suggests that taking any

academic fields in pursuit of their own particular, even idiosyncratic

landscape literally turns it from place to site, forgets that ‘understanding’,

interests and to report on those interests in whatever way they see fit.

unlike knowledge, ‘is never a collective phenomenon’ and that both

For Hamburger:

plasticity and understanding are ‘always based on sympathy, on intimate knowledge, on participation’ (Hillman 1997b: 49).

Everything is permitted – everything except the intentions of

So my preoccupation with the interplay of different voices or

surveyors, farmers, speculators (ibid).

imaginal perspectives is an attempt to find and sustain the openness and flexibility of place, including our place here, to acknowledge its

He sees the essay as the antithesis of bureaucratically useful expertise

many faces or voices. And this is necessary because of the nature of our

or applied research and, by implication, presents the essayist as artist.

journeys in this place, in academic territory where, for reasons I will

This is, of course, a type of simplification that results in the artist being

explore in a moment, those of us who work with images may all too

dismissed in academic circles as an intellectual vagrant or vagabond

easily appear as vagrants or vagabonds.

rather than, as Hamburger insists, ‘a seeker’, someone ‘without designs’,

So far I have moved between Apollonian and Dionysian perspectives, focusing on the arguments between the voices they inspire. I now want to suggest that this dualist approach still keeps us from appreciating the significance of polytheistic landscape.

free to ask questions that he or she may well be unable to answer – a claim that, in any case, holds for any serious research. Although some artists may identify with Hamburger’s position there is, as you will probably have noticed, a simple difficulty with his

I want to turn to an essay about the nature of essay writing, by the

image of the ‘wild’ meadow. A meadow, as the Chambers Dictionary

poet Michael Hamburger. Hamburger argues that the essay is ‘a walk,

reminds us, is ‘a level tract producing grass to be mown down: a rich



21

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pasture-ground, especially beside a stream’ – and so is cultivated rather

Aphrodite speaks particularly of beauty and, in turn, of the particularity

than wild land. The survival of ‘wild flowers’, identified by Hamburger

of beauty. Hillman writes that:

as one possible source of the walker’s interest, in fact depends on the farmer’s labour, as does the meadow’s entire complex ecology. In fact

Aphrodite’s beauty refers to the lustre of each particular event; its

the meadow, like any academic field, is actually the highly complex

clarity, its particular brightness; that particular things appear at all

outcome of specific forms of cultivation over time.

and in the form in which they appear (Hillman 1981: 28).

I want to suggest that unless our metaphors and images are ultimately grounded in empathy for other people’s lived experience,

That is to say, Aphrodite speaks to us of all that the ideal categories of

they risk becoming inflated, empty. To understand and empathise with

conceptual knowledge must disregard, overlook or repress to maintain

the lived experience latent in an image like Hamburger’s meadow,

the objective, diagnostic authority from which the university’s power is

we may need both to employ ‘testimonial imagination’ and to think

derived. And it is questions of power that make beauty so contested an

historically, even undertake research. Against Hamburger, I would argue

issue in contemporary culture. The Puritan fear of beauty is the fear of

what any responsible walker knows, that ensuring that rights of way stay

being seduced, of having to face the fact that: ‘there are things stronger

open places certain restraints on the freedom of walkers. Artists, like

than reason, than agenda’ – an understanding that is anathema to the

walkers, may regard themselves free of the Apollonian perspective of

Apollonian consciousness. ‘Fear of seduction’ is also ‘fear of one’s

their academic peers, scholars who dwell (in a Heideggerian sense), as

own vulnerability to others’, which is why Aphrodite’s power is so

cultivators with tenents’ rights in their own academic fields. However,

unsettling. So, beauty speaks in the name of Aphrodite and, as Rebecca

they need none the less to pay their respects to Apollo if they wish to

Solnit insists, ‘keeps speaking, keeps surprising us’ and, in doing so,

thrive. However, and this is critical, they also have the right to expect

contests the seduction of other types of power, contests the desire of

that their own Divinities be respected in turn. This brings me full circle

those in power ‘to have the last word, to close the conversation’ (Solnit

to Alex Seago’s attempt to argue that ‘Dionysian’ research should be

2001: 83 – 84). Beauty is too profoundly subversive, too particular; to

subsumed within an ‘Apollonian’ position, thus ‘normalising’ practice-

sit comfortably with research that takes itself seriously.

based research at the Royal College of Art in the early 1990s.

I am arguing that the ‘other voices’ I am concerned to unearth are,

Let me take Aphrodite’s virtual absence from the official landscape

then, those of a multitude of creative ancestors – the patrons, imaginal,

of the university to make a point. It is not difficult to see why the research

living and dead – whose voices mediate to us the powers that inform

culture, even when it claims to support art practice, fears Aphrodite.

the work of imagination. This takes place in a polytheistic landscape

22 Iain Biggs


14/10/05 2:23:32 pm

largely unacknowledged by the official culture of academic research

descriptions of what is spoken by imaginal texts and images. Shameful

as represented by, say, the AHRB. Jung called these voices the ‘little

as this betrayal is in some respects, it is the necessary price we pay for

people’, the multiple souls who inhabit the night world of our dreams;

clarity, brevity and AHRB funding.1 So for all official purposes we will

the voices in the everyday complexes we speak with and through;

no doubt continue to claim Apollo’s patronage for our work, knowing

but they are also the heartfelt fantasies that animate and quicken

full well that its conception was under another sign. In the case of

creative thinking; the ‘invisible guests’ who visit our imaginative life,

the Southdean project, that of Hermes – enemy of literalism, patron of

often returning us inexorably to places we believed we had long

tricksters, dealmakers and mediators, the wanderer whose style informs

since abandoned. Acknowledging their place in this landscape is vital

both that project and, for better or worse, this paper.

because, above all, it is they who catalyse the transformative power of the hermeneutic wager, who bewitch us, temporarily breaking our identification with Apollonian assumptions, and by doing so allow us

The politics of the polytheistic landscape

hear ‘other voices’. Why else, I have to ask myself, would a University Reader spend

I want now to revisit my earlier question as to whether psychological

five years investigating an obscure and largely abandoned rural

polytheism is just a rhetorical strategy or whether it has practical

landscape, albeit one haunted by old Borders ballads that deal with the

implications for our understanding of the politics of landscape.

ambiguities of fairy abduction?

Reflecting on the military sites in the desert east of the Sierra Nevada

I wanted to acknowledge these ‘invisible guests’ and the Divinities

in October 2003, Solnit, writer, caught a sense of the relationship

that stand behind them here to because it is in this landscape that we

between that landscape and religious identity. She surmised that: ‘the

always betray them. We constantly return to the abstract categories

US is really more like the lands it’s been bombing lately than like

and terminology of conceptual thought and, in doing so, mislay the

Europe’ (Solnit 2003: 39). Some eleven years earlier, during the first

particular tone and perspective given by those other voices, neglecting

Iraq war, Guggenbuhl-Craig wrote to Hillman suggesting that: ‘The

them in the name of an Apollonian rationalism that the sociologist

United States is not really a nation but a religion’ (Guggenbulh-Craig

Ernest Gellner has characterised as ‘the continuation of exclusive

1992: 62). As Solnit has done since, he addresses the myth of ‘the

monotheism by other means’ (Gellner 1992: 58). This betrayal may be

American-religious, secularized-messianic envisioning of paradise’

both necessary and productive, but its productivity is bought at the

and its political implications (ibid: 65). Like them, I suggest that only

cost of always producing poor translations, partial accounts, ‘thin’

by understanding what is suppressed by monotheistic, exclusive

Unearthing other voices – a ‘polytheistic’ approach to landscape 23


14/10/05 2:23:33 pm

envisionings of paradise – which as Solnit notes bind the US to the

thus challenging the assumptions about nature hidden with the Judeo-

vision of Islamic terrorism that currently haunts it – will we better

Christian mythos (Solnit 2001: 12). She challenges the assumption that

understand the links between power and the ways in which we imagine

‘the creation is first static, then flawed’; a view in which ‘the evolving,

and use metaphors derived from landscape.

the mutable, the temporal, the unstable are imperfect, and perfection is a

Solnit’s sees the assumptions derived from the myths of ‘Eden,

standard against which all things are measured – and fall short’ (ibid). She

Paradise, Arcadia, and the Promised Land’ as having a particular

asks that we recognise the subliminal perpetuation of such assumptions in

temporal locus and value, and as implicit in ‘most political and

much supposedly radical landscape art; guard against the traditionalism

environmental arguments, since they are arguments about how to

implicit in work organised ‘in terms of the ‘before/after, virgin/whore,

make the world better’ (Solnit 2001: 1). She notes, for example, that

pure/polluted’ when representing the landscape, which perpetuates the

environmentalism is passionately committed to retelling the oldest

‘binary schism’ of the Fall (Solnit 1994: 125 – 126).

story in Western civilization: ‘the Fall from grace, the Expulsion from

Casey, like Solnit, invites us to identify and articulate ways of

the garden, and the subsequent sinfulness of human beings’ (ibid p.

dwelling in the world that encourage what is ultimately a polytheistic

12). Her interest in an artist like Lewis deSoto, whose ancestry gives

understanding of place (Casey 1993: 109 – 145). His focus on ambiguity

him direct access to the traditions of the Cahuilla Indians of California’s

is shared by Griselda Pollock, who understands landscape painting as ‘a

southern desert, is that his work syntheses those traditions with Buddhist

poetic means to imagine our place in the world’; given that the ambiguity

and phenomenological thinking, thus remaining open and contingent

or paradox of landscape is that ‘it is both what is other to the human

in unusual and particular ways (Solnit 1994: 225 – 228). His work

subject: land, place, nature; and yet, it is also the space for projection,

articulates alternative values in which creation, culture and nature are

and can become, therefore, a sublimated self-portrait’ (Pollock 1997:

understood as inseparable so that, for example, there is no conceptual

25). Pollock suggests that landscape painting is the representation of

distinction between sacred and profane, presenting a view of creation

‘a space that is neither geographical nor physical’, adding ‘its absent

as ‘a continuum of change without a fall from grace’, one in which

centre is always the spectator, the human consciousness reflected in this

‘imperfection is original to the world, and creation is never finished’

brilliant exercise of formal invention coupled with a ”field of dreams”’

(ibid: 126).

(ibid: 25): one that is both literally and metaphorically charged, the

Solnit is particularly concerned to draw attention to work that

habitation of what I have called ‘other voices’ and ‘invisible guests’. To

allows us to see the creation of the world as ‘a continual and sometimes

return to Casey’s understanding of ‘being a place in a formative sense’,

comic improvisation, without initial perfection or a subsequent fall’,

we can see Pollock’s argument as confirming the understanding shared

24 Iain Biggs


14/10/05 2:23:33 pm

by Solnit and Casey that we have our place in the world, in a certain

‘interdiscusive space’ that is ‘the realm of imagining, of image-making,

sense, on the basis of the metaphors through which we locate ourselves

of bottomless speculation and reverie’ (ibid: 16). I began by saying that

in the landscape. Consequently if, as artists, we avoid reproducing the

this paper is something of an experiment. That experiment is ongoing,

implicit values of monotheistic landscape traditions we are reanimating

seeking to identify and promote metaxy wherever we concern ourselves

the original link between pagus (the Latin root of ‘pagan’), meaning

with the representation of landscape.

‘rural’, ‘from the countryside’, and its use to designate what is ‘other’ for the Judeo-Christian myth. If, as artists, we avoid reproducing the implicit values of monotheistic landscape traditions then we may be reanimating the original link between pagus and its use to designate what is ‘other’ from the perspective of the monotheistic mythos of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Greenwood 2000: 4). As will by now be obvious, the position I have outlined above is neither original or even new. In 1992 Peter Bishop suggested that the ‘key issue’ in the ‘rapprochement between depth psychology and postmodern geography’ was that of identifying ‘an “interdiscursive space”’ that he identifies with the thinking of Richard Kearney, Henri Corbin and Gaston Bachelard (Bishop 1992: 9). He also called for the reinstatement of fantasy and imagination in understanding place and specifically advocates the use of Hillman’s polytheistic psychology, which he sees less as ‘a system of ideas, or a new psychological school, than a way of metaphorising’; one that, crucially in the context of the representation of landscape, counters the traditional Western ‘fear of the image’ – of ‘its sensuality, its polyvalency, and indeterminacy’ (ibid:10). Peter Bishop also asked whether we can establish a new type of relation between imagination and reality and identified this relationship with the Greek term metaxy – an


14/10/05 2:23:33 pm

Bibliography Auping, M. (1983) ‘Hamish Fulton: Moral Landscapes’ in Art in America, February 1983, Vol. 71. Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity, London & New York: Routledge. Bender, B. (1994) (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, Providence & Oxford: Berg. Bishop, P. (1992) ‘Rhetoric, memory, and power: depth psychology and postmodern Geography’ in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space ,Vol. 10. Casey, E. (1993), Getting Back into Place. Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place World, Bloomington & Indianapolis:Indiana University Press. (2002), Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps, Minnieapolis University of Minnisota Press: Finn, G. (1992), ‘The politics of spirituality: the spirituality of politics’ in Berry, P. and Wernick, A. Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion, London & New York: Routledge. Gellner, E. (1992), Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, London & New York: Routledge. Greenwood, S. (2000), Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: an Anthropology, Oxford & New York: Berg. Guggenbuhl-Craig, A. (1991), The Old Fool and the Corruption of Myth, Dallas: Spring Publications Inc. (1992), ‘America’s Political Fantasies’ in Spring, 52. Hamburger, M. (1975), Art as Second Nature: ocassional pieces 1950 – 1974,

Manchester: Carcanet New Press Ltd. Hillman, J. (1975), Re-Visioning Psychology, New York: Harper and Row. (1979), The Dream and the Underworld, New York & London: Harper & Row. (1981), The Thought of the Heart, Dallas: Spring Publications Inc. (1994), ‘”Man is by nature a political animal” or: patient as citizen’ in Speculations after Freud. Psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture, London & New York: Routledge. (1997a), ‘The Practice of Beauty’ in Beckley. B (ed.) Uncontrollable Beauty. Towards a New Aesthetics, Allworth Press: New York. (1997b), [1965] Suicide and the Soul, Woodstock: Spring Publications Inc. Kearney, R.(1991), Poetics of Imagining: from Husserl to Lyotard, London & New York: Routledge. Massey, D. (1991), ‘A Global Sense of Place’ in Daniels, S. & Lee, R. (eds.) Exploring Human Geography: A Reader London & New York: Arnold. Merleau-Ponty (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Lingis, A., Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Napier, A. D. (1992), Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art and Symbolic Anthropology, Berkerly: University of California Press. Paris, G. (1990), Pagan Grace: Dionysos, Hermes, and the Goddess Memory in Daily Life, Dallas: Spring Publications Inc. Pollock. G. (1997) ‘Lydia Bauman: The Poetic Image in the Field of the Uncanny’ in Lydia Bauman: Landscapes, Warsaw: Zacheta Gallery. Ricoeur, Paul (1991a), From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics 11, trans. Blamey, K. & Thompson, J. London: Athlone.

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(1991b) (ed. Valdes, M), A Paul Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination Seago, A. (1995), ‘Research Methods for MPhil and PhD Students in Art and Design: Contrasts and Conflicts’ in Royal College of Art Research Papers Vol. 1 no. 3 1994/5. Solnit, R. (1994), ‘Lewis deSoto’ in Visions of America: Landscape as Metaphor in the Late Twentieth Century, New York: Ambrams. (2001), As Eve Said to the Serpent: On landscape, Gender and Art, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, Athens. (2003), ‘Diary’ in London Review of Books, vol. 25 no. 19. Tilley, C. (1994), A Phenomenology of Landscape, Oxford/Providence, USA: Berg. Watkins, M. (2000), Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues, Woodstock: Spring Publications Inc.

Footnotes 1

For a critique of the AHRB’s policy from a more ‘academic’ point of view, but

one that parallels the argument set out in this paper, see my paper at: http:// www.ntu.ac.uk/ntsad/nafae/debate/item2.shtml

27


14/10/05 2:23:34 pm

Patricia Townsend


14/10/05 2:23:34 pm

Transitional Spaces: surface, fantasy and illusion


14/10/05 2:23:34 pm

Landscape as metaphor for the body is a familiar notion – the physicality of the surfaces of land and water translates directly to the texture of skin or the contours of the human figure. In this paper, however, I want to consider land and water as images of the mind, to suggest that the surfaces and spaces of landscape reflect the topography of our inner worlds. Margaret Atwood in her novel The Robber Bride writes: Tony felt safe this morning, safe enough. But she doesn’t feel safe This talk centred on a series of video pieces, each appearing as a short single ‘take’ (albeit manipulated digitally, perhaps with added sound). That they appear as animated photographic scenes is no accident, since Patricia Townsend has worked in still photography for many years, using double exposure to construct complexly resonant scenarios, often offering critical (feminist) re-readings of Christian or Greek myth. The recent video work less obviously addresses cultural tropes, and appears as if casually shot in real time. We witness the actions and re-action of deer caught on camera as they traverse their field, or the slight movement of leaves in an avenue of trees responding to breeze, or the swirl of water circling the plughole, but then we note the reversal of the swirl of the water, or the way the trees on the left mirror those on the right of the carefully composed animated landscape, and realise that, despite surface appearances, these are highly constructed illusory, meditative spaces intended to question boundaries between inside and outside, mind and matter. They are made for video installation (not cinema screening). Full Circle (the water) plays on the small screen (perhaps the size of a bathroom sink); the others are projected largescale, positioning spectators centrally, but in the dark.

30

now. Everything has been called into question. Even in the best of times the daily world is tenuous to her, a thin, iridescent skin held in place by surface tension. She puts a lot of effort into keeping it together, her willed illusion of comfort and stability, the words flowing from left to right, the routines of love; but underneath is darkness. Menace, chaos, cities aflame, towers crashing down, the anarchy of deep water.1 Atwood conjures up a picture of a skin, a surface, that separates conscious from unconscious. Her image is of a tenuous, unreliable boundary, keeping our everyday, logical world apart from the anarchic, chaotic deep water of the dreams and unconscious fantasies that are always threatening to break out. These ideas tie in closely with the way Freud pictured the mind as the id full of our repressed desires, separated from the ego, that part of us which relates to the outside world. Indeed, in using the metaphor of water to symbolize the unconscious, Atwood was following in the tradition of Freud who once described psychoanalysis as ‘a cultural achievement somewhat like the draining of the Zuyder

Patricia Townsend


14/10/05 2:23:35 pm

Zee’.2 Here Freud implies an analogy between the surface of the sea and the border between conscious and unconscious and it is this idea of surface as a boundary within the mind that I want to explore here. In 1950, Marion Milner published her book On Not Being Able to

idea that awareness of the external world is itself a creative process, an immensely complex creative interchange between what comes from inside and what comes from outside, a complex alternation of fusing and separating.4

Paint. She came from a background in education and had misgivings about the traditional methods by which children were taught. So she

My photographic and video work has, amongst other things, been an

decided to approach the problem in a novel way by analyzing her own

attempt to explore this area of interaction between inside and outside,

attempts to learn to paint. She studied a wide variety of books which

the area where perceptions are coloured by memories and fantasies,

described the process of drawing and painting and she attempted to

where conscious and unconscious meet. In my earlier still photography

follow their instructions, noting how she felt about her efforts. One of

I was, in a sense, aiming to use the two dimensional surface of the

the observations she makes has to do with outline drawings:

photograph to represent an interface between inside and outside, between the world and the imagination; to be Atwood’s iridescent skin

… the outline represented the world of facts, of separate touchable solid objects; to cling to it was therefore surely to protect oneself against the other world, the world of imagination.3

or the fusing and separating area described by Milner. At this stage I used techniques of photographic montage to embed the human figure in the landscape, using elements of the landscape to allude to the workings of the mind.

Milner’s thoughts about outlines relate closely to the thin iridescent skin

These images are about transformation, about a dynamic

of Atwood’s image. Eventually, she left the books behind and began to

relationship between the human figure and land or water in which

make free drawings, inspired by but not copying what she saw in front

landscape represents what is under the surface of the human or vice

of her, letting her hand produce whatever ‘the eye likes’. It was through

versa. There is a fusion between the two but the union seems unstable,

these drawings that Milner found she could begin to express her own

as if the human may break the confines of the landscape or the land may

creativity. One of her conclusions was that the creative process has to

erupt through the human form. The ancient Greeks and Romans were

do with getting under the surface of what is represented, of allowing the

familiar with such ideas of transformation. In Ovid’s Metamorphosis

world of imagination to emerge and affect one’s perceptions:

men and women are transformed into trees or stone or become animals at the whim of the gods. Daphne becomes a tree, Aglauros a marble

Observations of problems to do with painting had all led up to the

statue, Scylla a rock, Charybdis a whirlpool. At the same time, the stories

Transitional Spaces: surface, fantasy and illusion


31

14/10/05 2:23:35 pm


14/10/05 2:23:45 pm


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of the myths are enactments of universal emotions and psychological conflicts and, for this reason, they continue to fascinate across the centuries. It is no accident that psychoanalysis has appropriated two stories from Greek myth – those of Oedipus and Narcissus – on which to base the cornerstones of its theories. In the 1990s I produced a series of installation pieces, Transforming Myth, in which I reworked seven of these stories through text, image and installation. In some of these (particularly Echo and Ariadne) water is an important element in the images. The idea that water symbolizes the unconscious is well established. Freud, in his essay ‘A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis’ uses the phrase ‘tauchte immer wieder auf’ (to surface out of deep water) to refer to the sudden emergence of a previously forgotten memory, that is, an emergence of the memory from the waters of the unconscious.5 Following some time experimenting with various media, with text and image and with digital editing, I began to use video two or three years ago. This seemed to be a natural progression in that I had always been interested in movement – in transformation and change and the dynamic relationship between inside and outside. At that point I began to be interested in the symbolism of the spiral. Carl Jung thought that a clockwise spiral in a mandala represented the unfolding of the unconscious into consciousness. Spiral shapes appear in many cultures, often having a spiritual or mystical meaning, representing a continuous or eternal movement.6 Bachelard chose the image of the spiral to represent the nature of humanity: But what a spiral man’s being represents! And what a number of

34

Full Circle 9:06 minutes silent looped

Patricia Townsend


14/10/05 2:23:56 pm


14/10/05 2:24:05 pm

invertible dynamisms there are in this spiral! One no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the center or escaping.7 These ideas suggested to me that spiral movement would be a good vehicle for exploring the dynamic relationship between inside and outside and led to my first video piece, Full Circle. This piece is again dealing with transformation, though here it is the shape of the circle which is transformed and distorted, together with reflections from the surroundings. The water rises and falls in a continuous loop from this central ‘eye’ which seems to be observing us as we observe it. Symmetry both of time and of space are central ideas in this piece. Time is not linear. Distinctions between before and after, forwards and backwards, are dissolved. Similarly, inside and outside, up and down, seem to become interchangeable and indistinguishable. The psychoanalyst and mathematician Ignacio Matte Blanco8 describes the commonsense logic by which we live our everyday lives as ‘asymmetric logic’. This is the logic of the conscious mind which deals with discrimination and difference. It is the means by which we categorize objects in order to understand and live in the world around us, or we understand the linear passage of time. However, according to Matte Blanco, this is not the only form of logic. He suggests that the apparent chaos of the unconscious has its own organization, its own form of logic, symmetric logic, which deals in terms of interchangeability and equivalence. Apparent opposites (that is, opposites according to our conscious everyday thinking) such as past and present or inside and outside may be treated as equivalent by the unconscious. We can experience this in dreams in which we can

36

The

Spectators

11:00 minutes

Patricia Townsend


14/10/05 2:24:06 pm


14/10/05 2:24:18 pm

move from the distant past to the present and even to the future from one moment to the next. The symmetry of Full Circle alludes to these processes of unconscious logic. These ideas influenced my next piece, The Way. I revisited an avenue of trees I have photographed many times before, but now I introduced the element of movement and created a mirrored image. The mirroring has several purposes: again, the symmetry alludes to unconscious processes but it also creates an uncanny effect, subverting the initial impression that this is a natural avenue of trees. The symmetry of the branches references the aisle of a cathedral leading to the brightly lit and constantly changing area in the distance. When I made this piece I had been interested in accounts of neardeath experiences and the questions they raise about what is ‘real’. Then my mother was taken ill and a few weeks later, after she had recovered, she told me that she herself had had a near-death experience with all the classic elements of a feeling of euphoria, and a sensation of being drawn along a tunnel of light. So, for me, this piece suggests that experience – the sense of being drawn towards an enticing other world. Around this time, I also worked on several video pieces on beaches, at the water’s edge, in which the borderline between sea and land represented, for me, that intermediate, shifting area I wanted to explore. Present Absence is probably the darkest of the pieces. It was shot in colour but I wanted to introduce a more sinister note to emphasize the ambiguity between play and loss and death. The relationship between seeing and being seen is another area which has interested me – a number of my earlier montaged images

38

The Way

3:28 minutes silent looped

Patricia Townsend


14/10/05 2:24:19 pm


14/10/05 2:24:29 pm

included disembodied observing eyes and the plughole of Full Circle

derived his ideas from his study of the early relationship between

resembles an eye observing the ‘eye’ of the camera as well as that of the

mother and infant. According to Winnicott’s theories, at the beginning

viewer. My next video piece, The Spectators explores this theme again.

of life there is a symbiotic relationship between mother and infant in

The deer observes me as I observe it. Eventually it walks out of the

which the infant does not yet recognize her mother as separate. Only

picture and its place is taken by another. They take it in turns to stare at

gradually does the baby gain a sense of herself as an individual with an

the camera before, one by one, walking away. This piece is concerned

inside and an outside, separate from her mother (or primary caregiver).

with the influence of the observer on the object of observation. One

In other words, the baby has to discover her own surface, both physical

of the discoveries of quantum physics was that it is impossible to

and mental. As Winnicott writes:

observe and measure phenomena without changing that which is being observed. As Stapp writes:

Of every individual who has reached to the stage of being a unit with a limiting membrane and an outside and an inside it can be said that

The observed system is required to be isolated in order to be defined, yet interacting in order to be observed.9

there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world which can

Stapp is referring to particle physics here and his ideas are not strictly

This recognition of the difference between what is inside and what is outside

applicable to the macro world but they have a parallel in our observations

in a psychological sense, between the real world and the imagination, is a

of animate objects – whether of humans or, as in this video, of animals.

hard struggle for the infant and never fully established in any of us. According

The deer would not have behaved in this way if I had not been present.

to Winnicott, the infant on the way to this acceptance uses transitional

be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war.10

Returning to the idea of surface as membrane between conscious

objects, such as the corner of a blanket, or activities like plucking wool, to

and unconscious, between inner and outer reality, in these video

stand in for her mother. These objects or activities represent the mother and

pieces the screen has taken the place of the surface of the photograph

are simultaneously in the outside world and also a part of the infant, a part

but there is also a further difference, the introduction of the element of

of the child’s imagination. According to Winnicott, there is a value in this

time has opened up a new dimension both literally and metaphorically.

sort of illusion which persists throughout life:

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott coined the terms transitional phenomena and transitional states to describe an area of experience which relates to the one I am trying to explore in these videos. He

40

... the third part of the life of a human being, a part we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner

Patricia Townsend


14/10/05 2:24:30 pm

reality and external life both contribute. It is an area which is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related.11 In these videos I hope to create a space for the intermediate area of experiencing described here. The use of rhythmic movement, the static camera position and the concentration on small transformations are intended to induce a meditative state of mind in the viewer. Beyond this, the symmetry of time and space and the uncanny quality of pieces

Footnotes

such as The Way allude to unconscious processes and to the transitional

1

Margaret Atwood (1993), The Robber Bride, Nan A. Talese Doubleday, p. 35.

space between inside and outside.

2

Sigmund Freud (New Introductory Lectures) quoted in Bruno Bettelheim

Returning to the idea of surface, the starting point for this paper, I

(1983), Freud and Man’s Soul Chatto and Windus, Hogarth Press, p. 62.

have moved from the concept of surface as a two-dimensional membrane

3

separating conscious and unconscious and represented by the physical

Books, p. 17.

surface of the photograph towards the idea of an intermediate or

4

ibid, p. 146.

transitional mental space in which conscious and unconscious meet in

5

Bruno Bettelheim (1983), Freud and Man’s Soul, Chatto and Windus, Hogarth

a dynamic and transformative relationship. It is this transitional space

Press, p. x.

that I attempt to evoke through the space-time qualities of video.

6

Jill Purce (1974), The Mystic Spiral, Thames and Hudson.

7

Gaston Bachelard (1958), The Poetics of Space, Boston 1994, p. 214.

8

Ignacio Matte Blanco (1975), The Unconscious as Infinite Sets, Duckworth.

9

Henry Stapp (1971), ‘S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory’. Physical

Marion Milner (1950), On Not Being Able to Paint, Heinnemann Educational

Review, Vol. D3. Pages 1303-20 10

D.W. Winnicott (1986), Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena in

Essential Papers on Object Relations, New York University Press, p. 255.


14/10/05 2:24:30 pm

John Goto


14/10/05 2:24:30 pm

Landscape gardens, narrative painting and High Summer


14/10/05 2:24:31 pm

The paper was first delivered within a symposium held at the Holburne Museum, Bath, in conjunction with University of Plymouth in 2002, during the exhibition of the full series of fifteen images which constitute ‘High Summer’. Exploring what has become a familiar trademark Goto combined his fascination for ironic contrast and political satire as an artist within a post Cold War world. Goto took the audience on a ‘Grand Tour’ of his own mix of the everyday and the Arcadian dream, exploring the encoded statements of the ideal that form his own combination of Utopia and Arcadia; an alternative fictitious and constructed English landscape.

Pasturelands

pigment inkjet print on cotton paper 63 x 95 cm

44 John Goto


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The last thing to be made after a series of pictures is completed is the

the use of ironic contrast.

lecture accounting for it. The danger in such hindsight is the tendency

The scene is set in a functions room in the fictional constituency of

to correct false turns, erase blunders and give to the development a

‘Guzzledown’. Outside the window the Tories are parading under the same

steadfast and inevitable direction never discerned at the time of

banners as the Whigs, who now occupy the hall they have just vacated. With

making. Such presentations tend, for example, to foreground ideas

no real difference between the two parties the election has degenerated

and to present these as if conceived fully formed and separated from

into a slanging match over trivial issues and the bawdy electorate are seen

unconscious wanderings and the graft of making images.

making the most of the bribe of a free lunch. At one end of the arrangement

I must say that increasingly I think that my pictures ‘speak for

of trestle tables the ambitious and foppish politician Sir Commodity Taxem

themselves’. My earlier work, that concerning twentieth century history,

seems over whelmed by his drunken supporters. In the foreground of the

required some unpacking as the public could not be expected to have

picture a Whig attorney collapses as he is struck on the head by a brick

an intimate knowledge of the subject matter; whether it be early Soviet

thrown through the window, and to his right the mayor is bled by an

history or the fate of the Jews of Bohemia during the Second World

apothecary to help him recover after a surfeit of oysters.

War. Recounting these historical narratives offered a productive way

The picture alludes through its form and subject to Leonardo Da

of speaking about my pictures. But since I have turned my attention to

Vinci’s The Last Supper. Hogarth creates an ironic contrast between

contemporary Britain... I have felt lost for words.

that painting’s sense of obligation and sacrifice and the corruption and

I intend, therefore, to write here about some of the paintings and

fatuousness of the present scene. In High Summer I too attempt an

gardens that I was looking at whilst making High Summer, in the hope

ironic contrast, between the idealised Arcadian setting and antics of the

that the connections linking these disparate images and places will best

contemporary tourists wandering though it.

be revealed in the work itself.

The seed of the High Summer series was planted twenty years

For some years now I have been studying the marvellous body of

ago when I first visited Rousham Park near my hometown of Oxford.

work left to us by William Hogarth. I would like briefly to discuss his

Rousham is a small landscaped garden offering vistas framed by

An Election Entertainment (www.gallery.euroweb.hu/html/h/hogarth/),

trees, winding paths, streams, classical statues and garden buildings

which was the first in a series of four paintings Hogarth made concerning

which include temples, a Palladian gateway and a variety of follies.

the 1754 election campaign in Oxfordshire. It is presently housed in

Its importance is as a prototype where the ideas associated with the

John Soane’s labyrinthine museum in London. I learnt something from

English landscape garden were first worked out by designers Charles

this picture which I have employed in my recent work, and it concerns

Bridgeman and William Kent. They in turn were influenced by the

46

John Goto


14/10/05 2:24:49 pm

classical landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin

Fields’ and ‘River Styx’. With James Gibbs, who replaced Vanburgh on

(of whom more later). The dominant style of garden design when Kent

his death, he designed ‘The Temple of Ancient Virtue’ containing statues

began working at Rousham in 1738 was still the formal geometrical

of amongst others Socrates and Homer. Nearby, and in implied contrast,

garden with its straight vistas and clipped trees. Bridgeman’s most

stood ‘The Temple of Modern Virtue,’ which was a ruin containing a

important innovation had been the ha-ha; a ditch surrounding the

headless figure generally taken to be that of Walpole. Further political

garden in place of a fence or wall, which gave the impression of

inscriptions were made in the ‘Temple of British Worthies’ with its busts

including the surrounding landscape within the garden’s design. Kent

of Whig heroes and the ‘Temple of Friendship’ containing a statue of

treated the construction of the garden as if making a series of painted

the Prince of Wales and other opposition figures.

views, connecting one to the next by serpentine walkways.

As has already been mentioned, one of the major sources of

I also used two other gardens from this period, at Stowe in

inspiration for these gardens were the landscapes paintings of Claude

Buckinghamshire and Stourhead in Hampshire, which are larger and

and Poussin, brought back from Rome in quantities by English aristocrats

more elaborate than Rousham. Stowe offers a particularly interesting

and their agents. For the wealthy the Grand Tour formed an obligatory

example of how a political statement could be encoded into a

part of their education. These were the original tourists, travelling for

seemingly innocuous garden design. Its owner, Viscount Cobham,

pleasure and self-improvement rather than for war or religion. Like

along with other radical Whigs took Republican Rome as their

modern tourists some encounter mishaps, were robbed or fell ill, and

model. The Palladian houses they built in fact became badges of this

once away from home others indulged in promiscuous sex, gambling

ideology. Cobham began his garden in 1715 when he was dismissed

and gluttony. Nevertheless, many also cultivated a great knowledge of,

from the army for his Whig beliefs and retired to his estate. He had

and love for, Italian painting and their legacy is to be found in our

John Vanburgh rebuild the house and design temples for the garden

national collections. Firsthand experience of European art was also

whilst Charles Bridgeman laid out the grounds. The Viscount resumed

considered essential in the training of an artist and William Kent, for

his army career but again resigned in 1733 over Walpole’s Excise Bill.

example, had travelled in Italy for ten years before commencing his

A new coalition of disaffected Whigs and old Tories formed against

career as a landscape designer.

Walpole who had by this time been in power for twenty years. This

One can still see in some of these English country houses the effect

group gathered around Fredrick, Prince of Wales, and the new style of

of a Claude painting hanging beside a window which opens up onto

gardening was associated with this disgruntled coalition.

an echoing classical landscape by William Kent. Part of the designer’s

At this point William Kent arrived at Stowe and laid out his ‘Elysian

artistry was in adapting the grand scale of the Roman Campagna to



47

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that of the English country estate with its meadows and rolling hills. An interesting reversal of this scaling down can be seen in the fine watercolour by JMW Turner The Rise of the River Stour at Stourhead c.1824. The artist brought an epic sense of scale to the scene by trebling the height of the hill bordering the lake and diminishing the size of the Pantheon across the water, thereby increasing the size of the tarn. It is a most Claudian of views. Turner’s admiration for his predecessor is also exampled by his donation of two important paintings by himself to the nation on the condition that they should hang alongside Claude’s

Society

pigment inkjet print on cotton paper 72.5 x 110 cm



49

14/10/05 2:25:05 pm

landscapes, which they do to this day in the National Gallery. So now let us turn our attention to the ideal landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Landscape had developed as a genre firstly in Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where a new source of patronage was to be found amongst the rising merchant classes who purchased small paintings for their homes. Rather as if zooming in on the landscape background to a religious painting, the genre now placed nature centre stage. Nature was a source of pleasure and individual contemplation, and in this sense it was seen as politically democratic. It could also be

Beach

pigment inkjet print on cotton paper 72,5 x 110 cm

50 John Goto


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14/10/05 2:25:22 pm

shown as potentially uncontrollable and awe-inspiring. An important component of these early landscapes were signs of

a metaphysical level they invited speculation on the role of God in the formation of the natural world.

civilisation, without which they were considered to have no real subject

There is one further landscape painting I would briefly like to look at,

matter. The industry of peasants observed working on country estates

as it too has echoes in High Summer. The Forest Fire by Piero Di Cosimo

typically provided such reassuring subjects. The genre of landscape

hangs in my local museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford (www.cwrl.utexas.

embraced high and low – it encompassed both sublime imitation and

edu/~bump/oxford/Ashmolean/Cosimo-Fire.jpg). Painted around 1505,

every day reality. Through the skill of the artist in rendering detail,

its size and shape suggest it was a spalliera panel, whose function in a

nature was given a visible and tangible reality, but it was also assumed

domestic context was as a backboard to a chest or bench.

that behind that reality lay the workings of God.

The collection of animals depicted strikes us as rather odd and

There was a troubling erotic element to nature’s reproductive

improbable. For although many are native to the countryside around

fecundity, which was often expressed through the actions of satyrs and

Florence, the oxen, red deer, domestic pig and even the brown bear which

shepherds. These transgressive subjects might cause unease and moral

at that time still roamed the forests, others are decidedly alien, particularly

turbulence in the viewer but they could be legitimised by idealisation,

the lion and lioness. There is shown a great variety of birds, some of which

and the myth of Arcadia accomplished this.

look drawn from dead specimens in the market. They include starlings,

The main sources of Arcadian myth are Theocritus’s ‘Idylls’ and

partridges, a pigeon, a woodcock, peregrine hawks, goldfinch and a

Virgil’s ‘Eclogues’, which situate it either in the little known Peloponnies

common crane. The picture begins to look like a catalogue of species,

or distant Sicily. The depictions of temples and other buildings in the

motivated possibly by an interest in the emerging natural sciences.

paintings of Poussin and Claude do not strictly accord with these

But this does not explain the fire and the two strange hybrid figures.

accounts of Arcadia. They are in fact based on observations made in

Theories abound; that the fire is a metaphor for love; that taming of fire

the Roman Compagna of Ancient Roman ruins and again testify to

was seen as the first step towards civilisation and language; or that it was

the important model classical civilisation continued to offer in the

simply a test of the painter’s virtuosity. But what of the addition of satyr’s

seventeenth century.

heads to the pig and deer? It remains a troubling and enigmatic picture

Ideal landscapes provided a setting for the drama of human emotions and actions whilst also showing a Utopian world evoking

with its odd mixture of natural and unnatural elements. Pasturelands was the picture most directly influenced by it in my High Summer series.

the dream of some longed for perfect life. Precedence was given to the

I would like to turn now to someone I felt to be a fellow traveller

laws of pictorial composition over the strict observation of nature. On

whilst making this series – Dr Syntax. The creation of Thomas

52

John Goto


14/10/05 2:25:23 pm

Rowlandson, the good Doctor was a cultural tourist and eccentric who

‘John Bull’s Blood’. The print is a satire on a partial reconciliation

first appeared in Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque in 1812 (www.

between the Prince and his parents after Pitt had recommended

isresearch.bham.ac.uk/SClocations.asp). The tale is told through a series

a settlement of his debts, and the granting of additional income,

of pictures with verses by William Combe attached. On his journey all

including the revenue from the Duchy of Cornwall.

manner of ills befall Syntax, he is robbed, lost, made drunk and near drowned, all in the search for an illusive picturesque landscape. Here

The final historical ingredient I would like briefly to discuss are the

Rowlandson satirises the Rev. William Gilpin’s ideas of picturesque

scenes of every day life found in Dutch Genre painting. I must say

beauty, developed in the 1760s, which celebrated texture, roughness

that I think it a great achievement when I see people still laughing

and ruggedness over the smooth lines of the parklands of Capability

in front of humorous paintings made some 300 years ago. (Humour

Brown. In Dr Syntax pursued by a Bull we see Syntax sketching outside

is maybe the most difficult of art forms.) We can still recognise the

Oxford and Combe’s accompanying text reads:

types portrayed and understand much of the symbolism. My favourite is the irascible Jan Steen. As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young, Steen,

But as he ran to save his bacon,

c. 1663, represents a popular proverb and makes a punning play on

by hat and wig he was forsaken.

children smoking and blowing on pipes in imitation of their elders (www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/craws/images/05878r.jpg).

The

well-

Political satire has seemed to me an increasingly relevant means by

humoured family group includes the characteristically wayward Steen

which an artist can deal with the post Cold War world. And so, along

who appears as the father, mischievously teaching his son to smoke.

side Hogarth and Rowlandson, I have been looking at James Gillray’s

Its stance is morally equivocal and therefore appealing to modern

work. The marvellous image, Monster Craws at a New Coalition Feast

sensibilities. The expressive animation of the figures and the technical

was made in 1787 (www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/craws/images/05878r.

quality of the paintwork I find extraordinary.

jpg). I quote from the recent Tate catalogue:

A brief word about the term ‘genre’. It was used historically either to describe a type, kind or category, as in ‘the genre of landscape’, or

The subject is a familiar one; the greed and miserliness of the

specifically to denote representations of everyday life in the term ‘Genre

King and Queen, and the perpetual need for funds of Frederick,

Painting’. In the latter sense it was often contrasted with the weightier

Prince of Wales. All three are seated in front of the Treasury gate.

category of History Painting, whose subjects were drawn from religion

They sit gorging themselves on a great bowl of guineas, inscribed

and classical mythology (as we have seen, for example, in Claude’s

Landscape gardens, narrative painting and High Summer 53


14/10/05 2:25:23 pm

work). The two offer again a ‘high / low’ opposition. In The Merry Threesome c.1670 (www.alpha-plus.info/newpage84. htm), Steen takes the familiar and well-worn theme of a lustful and foolish older man being flattered and fleeced by an attractive young woman whilst an old crone distracts him with wine. Steen gives the story a new twist by the attention the young woman is drawing to her own activity, pointing to the thieving hand, yet the laughing fellow knowingly goes along with the deception. (There is no fool like an old fool.) This treatment makes the theme less moralising and more

Eco Warriors

pigment inkjet print on cotton paper 61.5 x 92.5 cm

54

John Goto


14/10/05 2:25:35 pm


14/10/05 2:25:38 pm

comic and theatrical. Steen’s casting of himself as the leering musician enhances the self-deprecating humour of the image. I hope in this brief account to have shown the value I place on the study of such paintings. Contemporary art education seldom introduces students to art much before their own era, and so if they wish to

Yale University Press. Godfrey, R., James G. 2001), The Art of Caricature, London: Tate Publications. Lagerlof, M. R. (1990), Ideal Landscape, Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Yale University Press.

learn from the narrative tradition in painting, they have to become

Langdon, H. (1989), Claude Lorrain, Phaidon.

autodidacts. They are fortunate in having great national collections and

McWilliam, N. (1993), Hogarth, London: Studio Editions.

galleries in this country, in which the student of landscape can learn as much as by travelling the land, like poor Dr. Syntax, in search of the elusive picturesque.

The above text was originally offered as a lecture accompanied by slides and was not therefore footnoted. Rather than attempting some years later to do this retrospectively, I have listed below the most important texts and sources I consulted. Batschmann, O. (1990), Nicolas Poussin, Dialectics of Painting, Reaktion Books, London: Reaktion Books. Black, J. (1992), The British Abroad, The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century, Sutton Publishing. Brewer, J. (1997),The Pleasures of the Imagination, English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Harper Collins. Brown, C. (1984), Scenes of Everyday Life, Dutch Genre Painting of the Seventeenth Century, London:Faber & Faber.

Paulson, R. (1989), Hogarth’s Graphic Works, London: The Print Room. Roethlisberger, M. (1971), The Claude Lorrain Album in the Norton Simon, Inc. Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Savory, J. J. (1997), Thomas Rowlandson’s Dr. Syntax Drawings, Cygnus Arts. Sutton, P. (1984) (ed), Masters of Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Verdi, R. (1995), Nicolas Poussin 1594—1665, London: Royal Academy of Arts. Westermann, M. (1997), The Amusements of Jan Steen, Zwolle: Waanders Publishers. Williamson, T. (1995), Polite Landscapes, Gardens and Society in EighteenthCentury England, The John Hopkins University Press. Wright, C. (1984), Poussin Paintings, a Catalogue Raisonne, Alpine Fine Art Collection Ltd.

Chapman, Perry H. (1996), et al, Jan Steen, Painter and Storyteller, National Gallery of Art, Washington & Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Donald, D. (1996), The Age of Caricature, Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III,

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Ingrid Pollard


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Lost in the Horizon


14/10/05 2:25:39 pm

in the largest open space that exists on earth… every sensation of speed amplified... as she screamed down the wave. I found myself repeatedly holding my breath as we took off over the crests of the waves… we accelerated faster and faster’. 1 This paper considers two bodies of work Near & Far (1995) and Landscape Trauma (2000). These works originated in Northumberland’s coastal area and the Farne Islands. Ingrid Pollard discussed work emanating from residencies in the 1990s in Northumberland and the Farne Islands (of which the best known is Lindisfarne). Employing methods similar to those deployed in previous residencies, such as one in Lee Valley, East London, 1993/4, she talked with and worked alongside rangers responsible for the islands and coastlines, thereby acquiring some understanding of their perspectives on the places for which they are responsible. She photographed in documentary style, recording their daily activities and surrounding scenery. She also investigated the land geologically, using the camera to record details of movement, light and texture of organic matter. The resulting prints experiment with scale, surface and illusion. (Images reproduced here should be treated as illustrative, as book reproduction can give little sense of the impact of size and gallery installation).

Both works are concerned with construction of the representations of landscape. The works were produced at similar times but with differing concerns and issues. I now have the opportunity to revisit these works within the context of ‘Surface’. I will explore the idea of the ‘print surface’ and the construction of the surface of the land. There is an interrelationship between surface, horizon and foreground. The foreground within the image offers a route, a way to breach the surface, to move into the image and towards its horizon. Near & Far is concerned with issues of scale, illusion and craft. These are elements, which have been, and continue to be a tool to investigate sites in my work. The finished works were presented as digital prints, cyanotypes and colour prints. My three areas of research were geology of the islands, the unique ecosystem of the islands, and the transformative effects of the wildlife’s migratory patterns. Important

The wind felt incredibly powerful, Kingfisher just seem to rally,

added elements are the man-made architecture of the larger islands

sailing faster and faster, and surfacing for longer and longer as

and the work of the rangers who manage everything about the islands.

the waves built around her... This was what we had come down here to see, the enormous waves, the feeling of being

Spending days and nights on the Farne Islands gave me the profound experience of island life. Big open skies, star gazing, clouds

60 Ingrid Pollard


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and weather systems. I developed a strangely fresh appreciation of the

systems offer different ways of mapping the world.

Radio 4 shipping forecast. I joined the warders at their nightly avid

The view of the panoramic camera echoes the way our eyes more

consumption of the broadcast, waiting for the possibility of westerly

readily scan a scene horizontally than vertically. The panoramic view

winds, the bringer of bad weathers that would cut us off from the

enabled me to suggest looking into and out of the depth of the view

local islands. I watched the watchers; the warders, who spent a large

and to use the horizon line as a middle point when looking up to the

proportion of their working time watching; watching the tourists, the

sky and down to the ground. Gazing to the horizon I thought geology

westerlies, the birds, the skies, and the seas. There were moments when

and the solar system are linked through the science of Physics in the

their watching is scaled down to the peculiarities of that particular

physiological transformation of a sand stone mountain into a miniscule

environment and they count bird eggs and chicks, search for basking

grain of sand. I wondered if we could plot the sea journey of island

seals passing porpoises, count crabs amongst the sea weed, spiders in

seaweed by tracking the effects of the moon on ocean motion.

the plants, collating records of sea bourn rubbish, and star gazing. As I arrive by boat to the shore, I looked towards the horizon.

I was reading Ellen MacArthur’s Taking on the World at this time. I recalled her almost sublime description of weather, sea and sailing.

The view changed as the weather changed. I appreciated the simple occurrences of evaporation and heat rising. Movement and changes

The motion though is quiet violent – the waves now building

in cloud shape that I saw were part of the global weather systems. I

… and it’s a fragile balance between sped and safety. 2

considered the effects of the weather on land formation and use. The geology of the Northumbrian coast is volcanic dolomite, a harder rock

… the clouds grew, and suddenly we were surrounded by a group

than the eroded surrounding land. This enables the islands to loom out

of particularly ugly one… the clouds grew nearer the wind

of the sea. I can see that most of the islands have their high cliffs on the

increased… each cloud had it’s own character – each cloud

western edges, with the land sloping down to beaches on the eastern

it’s own wind… being sucked under those clouds makes it

edges. The diagonal lie of the land is caused by the volcanic action and

often feel like dusk. The sky darkens – the horizon is lost in the rain

reaction, the results are from shifts and folds in the layers.

and the wind blows, and blows…3

Another UK geological feature which influenced this work is the chalk ridge who’s widths runs from the Pennines to Kent; a feature that

Macarthur’s descriptions of her awe of the sea are often linked in

has no respect for political boundaries as it moves through England,

my mind with the eighteenth century romantic poet Anna Barbauld.

under the channel and on to France. The weather and geological

Barbauld writes of a vast heaven, terrifying in nature. Her descriptions

Lost in the Horizon


61

14/10/05 2:25:40 pm


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Abbey Curve cyanotype

Herringbone cyanotype


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Pink Sand c – type print 20 x 40 cm


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Dehiscence – passing through interstices membrane digital print on vinyl 310 x 252 cm


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Parabiosis – solid generated by rotation digital print on vinyl 310 x 252 cm


14/10/05 2:27:12 pm

are a combination of awe and Newtonian scientific language of the

and the remains of a fifteenth century Abbey. I used cyanotypes to

universe, a kind of ‘visible darkness’.

represent the built environment and architectural forms, such as the wooden interior features of the chapel, the weathered walls of the abbey,

To the dread confines of the eternal night To the solitudes of vast unpeopled space, To the desarts of creation, wide and wild Where embryo systems and unkindled suns Sleep in the tomb of chaos… 4

signature Lutchyens details of herringbone flooring and distinctive doorlatches. These all echo the decorative art within a definition of ‘Craft’. The arts contained within the craft of the illuminated Lindersfarne Gospel, and William Fox-Talbot’s calotype of Walcot Abbey Windows. The four images that form ‘Landscape Trauma’ record organic forms in the same area. The images take the form of large-scale

Other useful reference points were: the flick book Powers of Ten (1997)

digital prints on synthetic canvas, 10’x 8’. Their large scale affords the

based on Charles & Ray Eames film of the same name (1977)5 and

possibility of a real examination of the canvas; it’s woven texture and

From Here to There by Marin Kasimar (1998).6 Both books function in

the surface created by the build up of inks. The scale of the work means

a quasi-scientific way and as material objects. Their materiality is an

the audience is dwarfed by the images. At close viewing the images are

integral part of their concept. The two books introduced the elements

abstracted while at a distance they are also abstract. The abstraction of

of scale and duration. The images travel between the individual pixel

the content engenders a feeling of disease and confusion. A number of

and a continuous ‘whole frame’ and from the individual nuclear cell

questions arise. Is the image micro or macro? Is it manipulated? Is this

out to the solar system.

the surface of the skin? The surface of the earth? The cosmos?

My intention was to retain my perspective as a visitor to the islands. I continue to grapple with the notion of ‘romantic idyll’, that when in the

The title of each piece refers to the properties and qualities of light, the physics of action, reaction and speed.

presence of the rural, the countryside, the natural, there is supposedly a release of ego as the visitor and the surrounding vista conflate – ‘I would somehow find myself’. I was there to work; to work with the pink sand, the yellow, pink and green pools amongst the lichen, the over-sized red seaweed and the seal skeletons on rocks. It was all too beautifully bizarre.

Asymptotic – not falling together. Parabiosis – solid generated by rotation. Dehiscence – passing through interstices of membrane Quondarn – one that was but no longer

Amongst the islands, Lindersfarne is the most inhabited. There are villages and farms. There is the Edwin Lutchyens ‘holiday fake castle’

68

We are safe within the confines of the gallery space and at the same

Ingrid Pollard


14/10/05 2:27:13 pm

time confronted by the unknown. The titles do not offer up a simple explanation of the work. They add another layer of complexity. Then and now these works conjure the idea of fearful but safe, the sublime. Like the palpable feeling of an approaching thunderstorm, we can sense the change in air pressure, the clouds darkening and the whisper of cool breeze passing by. Together they signal stormy weather and the excitement of something else. As I considered this work again I was absorbed by the ‘deeds’ of two versions of the ‘modern-day hero’, the yachts-woman Ellen MacArthur and the illusionist David Blaine. They appear to have reversed their roles within the definitions of a gendered sublime. Blaine hangs passively within his glass box, above the Thames, available for 24-hour observation. The combination of Blaine’s vulnerability and safety is a visual external prompt to the sublime for the viewer.

Footnotes 1

MacArthur, E. (2002), Taking on the World. Michael Joseph, p. 282.

2

It is the illusionist belief he’ll experience a high spiritual state and

ibid., p. 322.

3

that living without food and human contact will lead to the

ibid., p. 325.

4

Barbauld, A.L. (1773), ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ from

5

Powers of Ten (1997 dba Eames Office) based on Charles & Ray

6

Kasimar, M. (1998), From Here to There Kunstverein Graftschaft

7

http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/D/

8

MacArthur, E. ibid., p. 325.

purest state you can be in’.7

Poems. Also see ‘A Hill of Science’.

MacArthur on her heroic deed races across the Atlantic in ‘Vendee Globe’ challenge. Her vulnerability and safety is visibly inaccessible. Feelings of

Eames 1977 film of the same name.

the sublime are activated by an internal prompt for the viewer.

Bentheim E.V.

it’s great feeling to be back up there. It’s both exhilarating

david_blaine/

and frightening… I watch David.


I wait for Ellen

.

14/10/05 2:27:14 pm

Susan Derges


14/10/05 2:27:14 pm

Interviews with Susan Derges


14/10/05 2:27:14 pm

through or from beneath the waters surface. There is a sense of being immersed physically and psychologically and the title refers to this. ‘Dark waters’ is an alchemical term used to describe the chaotic source of matter out of which the elements in their ideal state are born and it seemed an appropriate reference for the images. They all in different ways use the macrocosm of the landscape as a metaphor for the creative processes of internal, psychological or spiritual life; the necessity of darkness and chaos for the creative process of transformation and change. For the symposium Derges extemporised on two interviews, conducted with curator Sarah Brown and David Chandler, Director of Photoworks; hence the interviews are reproduced here. The artist described the significance of both surface and materiality within her practice, drawing on her interests in the relationship between art and science and of image and sound; ostensibly a practice that makes the non-visible world tangible. Dark Waters was shown at Harewood House, W. Yorkshire, early Spring 2004.

SB The decision to include your films Hermetica and Smoke in this exhibition, offers an insight into your interest in materials. The film Hermetica demonstrates how a small piece of mercury, placed in a speaker cone, behaves when sound is played through the cone and Smoke shows the trail of smoke from an incense stick when it is vibrated. Both films show the visual impact of sound, and the resulting relationship between the seen and unseen or making the invisible visible. These films hint at the world that you make visible in your photographs and the interest in materials?

Sarah Brown The title of the exhibition Dark Waters reflects the selection of photographs that we have made, I wondered if you could talk

SD Hermetica did, as you say, come out of an interest in natural phe-

about this?

nomena and how sound could be made visible through it’s interaction with a material like mercury. Equally I was interested in the reflective,

Susan Derges The photographs are all night time images of star fields

liquid qualities of the mercury which enabled the seeing eye of the

or moons floating within a landscape that is both liquid or earthly and ce-

camera to be mirrored within the pulsing image. It was a first attempt to

lestial. The viewer is in an unfamiliar relationship to these elements – what

use a scientific phenomenon as a metaphor for the way the observer is

appears to be night sky is watery and one is somehow looking up at it

implicated within the observed. The idea that there is no possibility of a

72

Susan Derges


14/10/05 2:27:15 pm

neutral or objective gaze on the world. Smoke is more ephemeral, but

the resonating, liquid surface of the prints. Smoke is much more recent,

both videos suggest the presence of internal states through the agency

but like Hermetica focuses very clearly on one simple phenomena of

of an exterior phenomenon and act as a kind of introduction to the

sound interacting with a material, smoke, but the flow forms are the

photographs in the exhibition.

same as those found arising out of the complex interractions of water on a river bed, clouds in the sky, or our thoughts even.

SB Could you talk about the relations between the diverse materials of mercury, smoke and water in relation to sound and making the invis-

SB You initially trained as a painter, and later turned to photography,

ible visible?

but have always made photographic work where each print is unique, and there is a very painterly quality in your photographs both with the

SD These works span a period of about 10 years and the theme of sound

use of light and water?

has reappeared throughout a number of different ideas over this time. Hermetica could be seen as the progressive stages of order and ‘ideal

SD I hoped that photography would provide a way of circumventing

states’ arising out of chaos, depicting the whole process that the title

the degree of artifice and translation required by image making, rather

Dark Waters suggests. It was made at a time when I was fascinated with

like Fox Talbot’s notion of photography as a ‘Pencil of Nature’, but as

the phenomena of sound vibration, not only because of it’s potential for

soon as I got involved it felt like painting with light and increasingly so

allowing the invisible to be visualised, but because it offered a visual

as the images are now constructed in the darkroom rather than being

analogy for things that seemed impossible to grasp, like the behaviour

made outside in the landscape. It is a kind of return or full circle.

of matter on a subatomic level, particles and waves, and the intervention of the conciousness of the observer. More recently the scientific

SB When we met, and you first visited Harewood two years ago, what were

metaphors have seemed less necessary, because the focus has moved

your ideas or thoughts about making work in response to Harewood?

closer to inner or imaginative processes, but sound has remained a means of, for example, in the moon and star field prints, making visible

SD When I first visited Harewood I was just beginning to think about

the idea that all the elements of the image are connected on a vibra-

making more constructed images some of which are now in the show.

tional level, the moon or stars, earth, life forms, water, internal state of

The work has developed since these prints were put together in a fairly

the observer. I suppose it’s an attempt to dissolve, visually, the boundar-

naturalistic, painterly way, similar to a Capability Brown landscape, to

ies between these aspects of experience by merging them together in

thoughts about much more formal designs that are yet to be made that

An interview by Sarah Brown 73


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Aeris 2001 ilfochrome print 141 x 102cm


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Vessel 2001 ilfochrome display transparency and light box 41 x 29cm


14/10/05 2:27:34 pm

would have more resonance with the formal garden outside the gallery.

of this water body could be used to hone the ideas about the above

The red kite was recently introduced to Harewood and on my first visit

and below down to a much more condensed and pared-down kind of

there I saw the first flight of the kites that had until then been caged in

image. A fountain and its container could mirror the stars and capture

preparation for release into the landscape. It is one of a number of envi-

their light or, one could imagine, as with the other prints, being below

ronmental projects. The mediated nature of landscape and the inappro-

the water’s surface, looking up at the night sky through it. Either way the

priateness of the divisions we create between nature/culture seemed

central source for the water would be dark, and light would appear to

quite tangible as a microcosm of what is happening everywhere: the

emanate out from it with stars and ripples floating within the same liq-

mindset of those who inhabit and control the land is inseparable from

uid medium. It reminds me of Richard Fludd’s alchemical engravings

what unfolds there. In that sense it becomes as important or valid to ex-

of Genesis or other cosmological diagrams of the creation in which

plore and represent the invisible, potential, imaginary landscapes that

the primal, dark chaos is divided into light, darkness and the spiritual

are going to give rise to the external forms around us .

waters, which unite the microcosm and macrocosm. Hence the title Dark Waters. I think increasing the formal nature of the images will

SB The work in the exhibition spans over ten years, from 1993,the film

allow a much more direct and perhaps specific referencing of internal

Hermetica to Study for Alchemical Garden in 2004. The latest photo-

or psychic processes. In a way there is a kind of return to the ideas

graph Study, 2004, moves your work into a new direction, how do you

around the first video Hermetica that is so much about mirroring of

think this will develop?

inside/outside, above/below.

SD Yes, you could connect the prints with the garden environment in terms of the naturalistic approach to the Moon and Star Field images resonating with the Capability Brown landscaped garden. Whereas the most recent print, Study for Alchemical Garden, is about something structured in a very different way and more related to the Italian terrace. When I first visited Harewood I thought it would be very interesting to do something about the more decorative aspects of the environment and House, and as I was making the work I remembered the fountain on the Terrace outside the gallery and thought the more formal nature

76

Susan Derges


14/10/05 2:27:35 pm

Susan Derges’s new work Under the Moon was shown at the Paul Kasmin Gallery

– became frustratingly limited in terms of the space or depth of field

in New York during January and February of this year. Here David Chandler,

that photograms are capable of providing and I began to look for a

Director of Photoworks, asks her about this work and her evolving engagement

way to extend the space in the image to an almost infinite depth while

with nature and natural processes. (Interview, 2003)

keeping all of the magical detail of the flow forms and undergrowth at the same time. So yes, I was looking for a space that would be

David Chandler Your new work seems related to your earlier River Taw

more painterly than photographic in terms of the possibilities of an

series, but the presence of the moon seems to radically alter the quality

ambiguous surface that would combine sky and ground without a

of the images. The moon immediately brings a sense of space into the

horizon or vanishing point, where looking down into the water could

work, a depth, so that we begin to read the images as ‘landscapes’ in a

suddenly flip into an experience of looking up through it to the sky

more traditional sense, with a horizon, implied if not seen. I have always

and moon. It would also be a far more internal or imagined space

read the River Taw work as flat and shallow – the space of the river - and

than in previous work due to giving up the process-led way of making

of water on paper, watermarks, to be hung vertically to emphasise this

the images. The new work was made in the dark room by projecting

sense of surface disturbance. But now it seems the work has opened

transparencies of the sky and moons down through water onto paper

out, but it is also more static, like a nocturne. As the new works began

that was overshadowed by branches that were resonating to sound

to emerge were you conscious of these implications and the relation

and transmitting vibration patterns into the water. I have often felt that

the work might have, specifically, to a melancholic English landscape

the night landscape around here is very evocative of Palmer and other

tradition, and the work of artists such as Samuel Palmer for example?

romantic painters, and of early Mondrians, too, but the references for working out the construction of the images were a lot more to do

Susan Derges Yes they are related to the River Taw series but in fact

with an oriental quality of space, particularly the woodblock prints of

there was a transitional group of prints made in Scotland last winter

Hokusai and Hiroshige where bodies of water seamlessly dissolve into

when I was working along a stretch of the River Findhorn called

sky, often in night scenes where highly patterned or abstract details

the Streens. The landscape was so bare and exposed to the sky that

are illuminated by distant light sources; also the notion of a journey or

the ‘above’ became as important as the ‘below’ and that was a very

a passage of time unfolding across a series of images rather than the

different experience to the covered, rather secret places I had been

single or selected moment.

working in along the Taw. The way I had been making those images – exposing the paper while submerged in the river to flash light at night

DC You mention the ‘giving up’ of a process-led approach to making

An interview by David Chandler


77

14/10/05 2:27:35 pm

work in this new series. This seems to me to have quite far reaching implications because I have always associated ‘process’ in your work with an affinity to experimentation, in a scientific sense as much as an artistic one. To a certain extent you have always been interested in making nature’s processes visible fairly directly, or at least exploring their visual potential from a position which has drawn quite heavily from scientific ideas about the interconnectedness of matter, and of nature and culture. Much of this interest still seems to be present in the new work, you mention ‘branches that were resonating to sound ... transmitting vibration patterns into the water’ which harks back to earlier experiments with sound waves, but does this move to a more consciously constructed form of working now open things out for you? Is there a sense perhaps in which that kind of purist approach (for want of a better term!) is something you no longer feel bound to conceptually? SD Yes, or rather, no I do not feel so bound by that approach... but when I first started working with natural processes in the landscape it felt like being liberated from all the baggage carried not only by the medium of photography but also by the self – it was an approach that allowed the maker to act more as a facilitator or channel through which natural events could be made visible, with minimal intervention from the author of the work. After a while though this became another kind of limitation or constraint and felt as if the self was being willfully excluded. But if you regard the self or one’s mental world as much a natural process as everything else in nature then the internal imaginative events are as

78

River Taw (Alder) 1998

unique ilfochrome print 170 x 60cm

Yellow Moon – Honeysuckle 2003 unique ilfochrome print 170 x 60cm

Star Field – Thistle 2004

unique ilfochrome print 170 x 60cm

Susan Derges


14/10/05 2:27:36 pm


14/10/05 2:28:06 pm

interesting as say the flow forms in the river. And that could mean going

an attitude within which irony seems irrelevant, since it is so much

with the desire to make particular kinds of images that would need to

about contact with and observation of a materiality which is not

be constructed as they are imagined rather than existing in the outside

manufactured. It is as if, in your work, experience as process bypasses

world. Because we construct internally with the things we have seen

questions about the nature of experience and perception that seem to

and experienced outside – as in dreaming – the imagery and language

preoccupy so many artists.

will inevitably connect with personal experiences. I suppose that is why

It also seems to me that your home on the fringes of Dartmoor

sound vibration patterns have become part of the new work, they were

(and your choice of this place as a creative base) must have played a

such an important insight or way of visualising ‘interconnectedness’. It

very important role in maintaining this sense of an ‘everyday’ bound to

feels as if I am in the midst of it now with this work, rather than outside,

natural forces, an elemental reality that might be experienced directly

using experimentation and metaphors from science to represent an

and personally.

idea of it, as in the earlier prints. SD I don’t feel that my work bypasses these questions about the nature DC I think it’s interesting that you refer to dreams and to the personal

of experience and perception. In fact the earlier work, made before I

in the context of dreaming, because it seems to go against the drift

moved to Devon, was very much about the relationship of oneself to

in current art towards an everyday material reality, a kind of personal

the unfolding of external events, but I would agree that the exploration

experience where the profound is located, if anywhere, in the banality of

was very different. I used science as a source of imagery and metaphor

contemporary life. For most of us when we think of nature now it requires

which provided another way into these issues; a lot of the experiments

a kind of leap of faith to imagine it, in all its complexity, immensity,

I appropriated in my work were from a period of science when wonder

power etc. (it may be why so many people are drawn to the sea, as the

was still a valid response to the world. Now, although those metaphors

one accessible contact with some kind of primal force). Consequently

seem increasingly less necessary in the work, there is a strong desire to

so much art now that deals with nature seems preoccupied with ironic

keep the wonder and magic of that particular gaze.

perceptions of it, how the idea has been debased and compromised by

I can understand why so much contemporary art focuses on an

culture or lost altogether, and how therefore our representations have

ironic, fragmented or alienated perception of nature, but as you’ve said

become formulaic, about pictures (and values) rather than experience

I have consciously sought out the opposite – inclusion, relationship,

itself. In a sense you have always held faith with a kind of magical

belonging. My desire for these things seems to relate to a wider need for

wonder in contemplating, and being part of, the processes of nature,

myths and metaphors of a holistic rather than mechanistic or reductive

80

Susan Derges


14/10/05 2:28:07 pm

nature and Dartmoor as a creative base does feed these concerns. It’s

photograms, but actually brought photographs I had made of the

actually a very constructed landscape where its sustainability as an

moon into the darkroom, combining them with direct prints of water

environment and a community is continually being worked out and

and branches that were vibrated by sound, all of which sounds rather

fought for. It’s a kind of microcosm for the larger issues but also a place

strange but it was an attempt to make visible the relationships between

where it’s possible to dissolve the boundaries a little between interior

the moon, water, living matter and, by implication, the observer.

and external nature in all its complexity.

They were put together much in the way that the unconscious might construct dreamt or imagined imagery, and it hasn’t surprised me that

DC Perhaps you could say a little more about this, about the relationship

people say they are reminded of dreams, fairytales and early memories

in your work between the interior and exterior. It has always seemed

on first looking at the prints. In the process of making I became fairly

to me that the body is a constant presence, not just in the sense that

obsessed with the changing cycles of the moon and particular places

your working processes have often had a performative aspect, but

in the landscape that I was visiting while thinking about the work and

also in the way you embrace systems of growth and decay, of flow

it became very easy to move between a kind of internal landscape

and interchange, as you have said, you can see the workings of the

of imagined and metaphorical imagery and the external counterpart.

imagination as flows forms from a river. And, seeing nature in terms of

Neither seemed more real than the other, they seemed to inform each

the body brings us back to the continual sense of both micro and macro

other in a way that was more fluid than before. The macro cycles of the

scales in your work.

moon and external nature became identified with the changing states of the microcosm of the self, hopefully not as purely autobiographical

SD The size of the prints are body scale in terms of their long, thin

records but of a more archetypal or universal nature.

vertical format and I would hope that prevents any sense of looking through an aperture but rather suggests a more direct relationship, or experience of immersion in the image. In the making, too, there is a very physical experience of working with the water and branches in the darkroom. How the works were made is not particularly important for anyone to know, but as method always resonates with the ideas it might help answer your question to stress that I was not going out into the landscape to make prints in the river at night, as with the earlier


14/10/05 2:28:07 pm

Christopher Cook


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re:surfacing


14/10/05 2:28:08 pm

more than a pinch of salt. As in exemplary mythical journeys I’ll also be heading for a kind of enlightened homecoming, and so to set the scene I need to begin at home, in the English landscape, with an image by Samuel Palmer. Palmer’s works were my first encounter with a view of landscape that offered more than the picturesque – call it an intensity – which accorded with my own reactions to the natural world. I grew up on the edge of a small town, and always chose the same way out of it – walking into the The paper took the form of a narrative journey; a journey of homecoming through the artist’s explorations of materiality, a crucial element in his practice; Cook explained the significance of the rediscovery of surface that took place on returning from research visits to India. The images reproduced here are selected from slides accompanying the paper and represent the catalysts for more recent work, as seen in the

landscape for adventure, pleasure and peace. I studied Palmer’s Shoreham drawings carefully, and made replicas of some. I made drawings of my own in which the landscape was charged with emotional and sometimes religious symbolism, although this was borrowed from Palmer rather than in any way devout. It was however through Palmer I came to appreciate William Blake – this is his Circle of the Lustful – and although I viewed

final graphite image. He refers to one example which was in the exhibition

the two artists as inter-connected, I now see that they were appealing to

accompanying the symposium.

different creative impulses. Some works of theirs would sit happily side by side – as indeed they have to in many permanent displays – but when

I propose today to offer up my own recent experiences to consider how a

viewed close to, the Palmers have a pronounced materiality - a delight

rediscovery of surface reinvigorated a practice suffering from creative doubt.

in the process and, in this case, the resinous surface – whilst Blake has a

I should from the outset admit that to achieve this in the allocated time I

more illustrative intent, whether as here to an extant text, Dante’s Divina

will be forced to take for granted certain contexts and debates concerning

Commedia, or to a mental image, a vision, that in certain cases might

the practice of Painting, and I hope you will indulge me in this.

eventually become a text. Though highly problematic, for the purposes

To structure this creative meander I intend to use a sequence of

of the story I will for the time being hold notions of surface and illusion

physical journeys or relocations. Accounts of journeys – physical or

in tentative opposition, surface as inviting the maker to think primarily

imaginative – are prone to inaccuracies brought on by, shall we say,

about the object being made, illusion as pertaining to an idea or narrative

the disadvantages of hindsight, and I expect you to take this one with

that has an existence elsewhere.

84

Christopher Cook


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As my first degree was in English and Fine Art this debate was

Piero Della Francesca’s Dream of Constantine, part of the Legend of the

very much on my mind, and before applying for postgraduate study

True Cross cycle in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo. Witnessing

I spent two years painting in a remote Devon landscape, trying to rid

them first-hand had a overwhelming impact. I was unprepared either for

the work of unwanted narrative by writing regularly. Once in London,

the scale or for the intensity of the fresco surface. I suppose I’d imagined

lacking the immediate source, I turned to improvisation techniques to

them as huge watercolours – large Blakes perhaps – but it became clear

invent landscapes. I was speaking to a tutor at the RCA, the late Ken

from close scrutiny that, although made at speed, they were worked

Kiff, about improvisational methods, and he urged me to work – as he

up in manageable areas with a careful matrix of thin brush strokes and

was also doing at the time – on primed paper, which would provide a

colour modelling, largely in obedience to a pre-existing design. But

surface allowing easy modification and erasure, and therefore rapid

what fascinated me was not only the surface itself – or at least surface

transformations of imagery and space. As I hope you can sense from

is too limiting a concept here – but also the sense of the painting as

these examples, my excitement with the method is apparent in the

part of the fabric of the church, bound into its location, a rooted quality

translucency of the colour and the energy of the mark-making. This

enhanced by the use of pigments taken from the surrounding terrain. It

excitement produced over two hundred of such works, and such a

was from this solid platform that the leaps of the visionary imagination

quantity made it almost inevitable that many new allusions and symbols

seemed to gain their potency, a transcendence rendered tangible as

began to arise from the process. I recall at the time thinking that this

flesh and bone of the basilica. It was a persuasive combination, and in

unfamiliar imagery was the important breakthrough, allowing me direct

pursuit of this unfamiliar quality I entered a period of imitation. With

access to the unconscious, but I now feel that the real discovery was

these frescoes method submits to image because there is a potent story

that of process as generative force.

to be told, but in abandoning my improvisational process I had also

It was, however, the unexpected influx of allusion that led me by

unwittingly discarded my internal narrative. The resulting sequence of

stages back to the painters of the Italian Renaissance that I’d initially come

work, of which these are just two examples, used the armature of early

across via Blake’s studies. Certain complex fresco cycles began to hold my

Renaissance painting as an empty prop. Of course I accept that there are

attention, and eventually became the motivation to study and paint in Italy

moments when it is necessary to learn in this way – through imitation

for two years, thanks to an Italian government award. For this reason, the

and mistake – but I’d been exhibiting in London for a few years and

next ‘surface’ influence I wish to consider is that of the fresco.

perhaps imagined I was beyond that point.

Here are two individual images from larger fresco cycles, Giotto’s

These next two large canvasses represent a group of related works

Stigmatization of St Francis in the Basilica di San Francesco in Assisi and

made once I was back in England. The impact of fresco remains, they

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are painted onto fine calico, using almost a staining process (1), which meant little change was possible during the making. Although I think the better ones of this group work well, especially in reproduction, they lacked joy in the making. The dry endgame of this approach was played out in what I came to term the Pleasure Dome series, started appropriately enough in Los Angeles in 1994. Taking my cue from the ‘snow-shaker’ souvenirs picked up in Italy – and with a nod in the direction of the Arizona biosphere – I had a series of these ovoid shapes cut from MDF, sanding the edges to a curve to give three-dimensionality, and completing the illusion with a black base. Referencing the compartmentalised cultures of L.A., each subject was imagined as a ersatz version of itself, de-surfaced and hermetically sealed, a subversion of meaning, more a comment on how meaning is formed, rather than significant in itself (2). Although the ‘domes’ set challenging pictorial problems, I think they were also an admission that I had lost belief in – or connection with – my process. It was a difficult time – the mid 90s – the flow was against painterly practice and my gallery in London was about to close. The domes appeared to be, as I suggested, an endgame. Out of the blue came an invitation to teach a workshop in India, and as it was a country I’d wanted to visit for many reasons, I jumped at the opportunity. After an exhilarating month I knew I’d need a lot more time there, and so I arranged further visits, lasting 4 and 2 months respectively, not merely to improve my understanding of such an influential culture, but also because I sensed it as a way out of my creative impasse. As with all good journeys, it proved not so straightforward – a set

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(1)

Ice

Sheet 1995

oil on canvas

(2) Pilgrimage Mountain 1997 oil on panel

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of exploratory drawings using local pigments made in a Mysore studio during the longer visit prove the point, I struggled to make sense of the high key and high intensity information surrounding me. But I want to focus on a particular experience in Varanasi that relates to the issue of surface, and did indeed prove a directional post on the route home. Here we are on the Ganges river looking back at Hinduism’s holiest city. From this perspective it appears elegant and sedate, but the sensory experience was far from that. The underlying principle of the city is much more potent than its illusion. To die in the ancient heart of Varanasi is to be granted moksha – final release from the cycle of death and rebirth, and so in the narrow alleyways behind this grand frontage, the sick and the dying arrive regularly to prepare for death. The mortal intensity of the place is gripping. I walked each morning along the ghats, the stepped banks that protect the city from a monsoon-swollen Ganges. The edge of the river was fascinating, a receptacle for all that the city was about – predominantly death – since most of the objects we see in this slide have come from the bank-side funeral pyres and the silk-clad and flower-garlanded bodies launched following cremation into the holy river, conjoined with discarded ceramic vessels, plastic containers, dead animals, mud, excrement, sand. It seemed a rich enough surface to embrace the city’s polarities in one small area. One day I took a boat to the other side of the river to hear an address by a Buddhist guru. The sand over there was free of detritus, and had an astonishing sparkle. Stuck in an unimpressive lotus position, I found the western-style guru uninteresting, and so began to play in this seductive substance with my fingers. An hour or so passed and the sun

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(3) Kanderiya Temple

Christopher Cook


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(4) Sand Drawing Shore of the Ganges


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reached a position where my marks in the sand were thrown into high

when on a lecture tour some months later the entire set – bar these two

relief, and the sudden appearance of a distinctive pattern reminded me

which were being used by a printer for my artist’s book – went missing.

of the organised yet animated forms of Hindu temple architecture I’d

When I finally returned to the UK it was the sand drawings – or I

been looking at (3). I had only a disposable camera with me and so the

should say the memory of the experience of making the sand drawings

snapshots of the first sand drawings are of poor quality – as you can

– that I had to work with, that complex edge of the Ganges, and the

see – but the action accorded with a growing feeling about India itself

idea of the beach as a margin, as meeting place for objects, an ever

– that its culture hinged on intimate spaces, personal spaces, perhaps

changing still-life.

just a few square metres of dust. Though a vast and complex land, a

I took a studio in Porthleven in Cornwall to try to build on this

large proportion of its huge population live in relation to such intimate

memory, and travelled down from Exeter to work there two or three

space. India of course has many religions, but the Hindu pantheon of

days a week. The studio was beside the harbour – where Peter Lanyon

three hundred and thirty three million gods reinforces this observation

once worked, and so first allusions were to the tide line, using objects

– a tiny niche for each one, small gods for small spaces.

washed up as implements. I was still working on canvas, and initially

The making of the sand drawings also connected with my interest

attempted to add sand into the pigments to provide a more robust and

in the Hindu concept of maya, – the notion that the visible world is an

physical surface. I also tried the same technique using silver graphite, to

illusion, not in the sense of reality lying deeper, or elsewhere, but that it

sully the colour and provide a gritty quality. My first attempts turned out

is an illusion cast in front of us by our preconceptions, preventing clear

much too dark – the graphite was far more powerful than I’d imagined,

or truthful perception. The act of touching earth, finding reality through

and I tried to remedy the situation by pulling some of it off the surface

the fingertips rather than relying on the recycling of imagery, resonated

using sheets of paper a friend had given me, having found no use for

gently with this, and the sand drawings also gave me beneficial physical

it himself. It had a shiny resistant coating – not a lovely surface at all,

contact with the country. It felt good for me to be there, and gave me

but when I looked round at the sheets at the end of the day, remarkable

an excitement reminiscent of my earliest experiences of painting. So on

things had occurred – the oily sand and graphite mixture had begun to

my return to India some months later, I took with me a decent camera,

erode as the mineral spirits ate into it, and had left elegant sedimentary

and borrowed a chair from the guest house to record the drawings over

deposits. The brightness of surface left by this chemical action reminded

a period of eight or nine days. As you can see here, they turned out well

me of a number of things simultaneously: the Gangetic shore, Palmer’s

against the wind-rippled sand (4), but the deliberateness of the activity

gum drawings, Max Ernst’s surrealist experiments (his decalcomania

felt wrong – against the spirit of surface perhaps? – and I half-expected it

paintings and the ‘forest’ grattages). The combination of associations

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seized my imagination and I immediately began to investigate the

receptivity demanded direct contact, and I enthusiastically took up the

material further, using larger sheets of the same resistant paper. In these

invitation to use my fingers along with a variety of implements that

early images I have already completely discarded colour but retained

included delicate tools cut from the original shiny paper. The brightness

the idea of using found implements and – as with the first accidental

of surface also encouraged me to try to retain the feeling of the work

graphites – employing gravity as a potent force within the making, such

having been completed in one session, the image sealed into one thin

as here where leaving the paper on the uneven beach produced the

skin. Strangely this actually encouraged radical revision – total erasure

distinctive patterning. The rediscovery of a medium that asserts its own reality – very

rather than slight modification – to retain the sense of discovery, of the image being found – and held – in the moment.

much an issue of surface – was crucial. Surface, and gesture too,

A fortnight ago I was in London to give a paper to the annual

emphasize non-logical decision-making, and this was an important

conference of the British and Irish Sandplay Society. Prior to the

way back to meaning. I found myself in a dialogue again, rather than

invitation I knew little about Sandplay. It is a therapy that involves

haranguing the image, which had a relaxing affect on my imagination,

the communication – communion – of patient and therapist through

and allowed me to discover again rather than to insist. Using an initial

the medium of sand, usually contained in a tray or box, sometimes

grey ground proved a revelation in another way, because it meant I

involving other objects, which then triggers dialogue which can expose

could suspend judgement about the nature of the space I was working

and release psychological problems. I’d been invited by a respected

into. Not having to decide upon an initial colour leaves the nature of the

therapist who viewed my early paintings – the ones in which narrative

emergent space open to question and actually promotes indecisiveness

emerged through improvisation – as an oblique parallel. Unbeknown

– what Keats termed ‘Negative Capability’ – so this central grey area

to her, sand had played a crucial part in the recent change in direction

could become air or water or earth or cloud, it could even be a number

in my work, and it was a energising moment when I projected my

of those qualities at the same time. This ambiguity – and the vestigial

own sand drawings – a thrill of surprise and recognition ran through

consideration of a beach-like space – helped me lose the habit of the

the audience. Sandplay stresses the importance of the physical – of

conventional Renaissance horizon line, which returned thoughts of

surface – in releasing the unconscious, and I’d unwittingly performed

the intimate Indian spaces, the square yard of dust. I also found the

an analogous therapy on myself.

graphite medium very flexible and receptive, in particular the manner

The final group of graphite works I want to show are those arising

in which it slowly cured from oily and liquid to dry and dusty – in

from my Arts Council residency at the Eden Project in Cornwall,

other words, evoked at different stages both painting and drawing. Its

ironically the result of an initial contact regarding the Pleasure Domes.

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There I began using the graphite onto large sheets of aluminium (5), a ‘surface’ decision made in part to parallel the relationship of Eden’s hi-tech architecture to the friable surfaces of the clay pit in which it is set, and in part simply to increase the scale. The method also served to re-emphasise surface – not least because I could dispense with glazing and framing – allowing the apparently vulnerable image to be displayed in a direct manner. It may seem far-fetched – and you can judge the piece in the exhibition for yourselves – but there is something about this manner of display that for me has a certain kinship with fresco. Although I have no sense that this journey involving the graphite process is nearing any form of conclusion, I did promise a homecoming, and I suppose I am already there, because as you can see the geological quality of the graphite has returned landscape to me as an immediate reference, whilst monochrome led me back to Palmer, and the detail of the surface recalled the intensity of childhood landscape experience. I should say though, that the true homecoming was to raw experimentation with paint – with elemental matter – and in so doing, to recognize that in my enthusiasm for narrative and imagery I’d lost an essential basic enjoyment – of being in the medium, working alongside it and receiving physical and emotional sustenance from the procedure. Without this, the validity of the act of painting is drawn into question; for all the attempts to write painting off as a contemporary art form, its ability to simultaneously engage the practitioner in highly cerebral and highly corporeal experiences remains its compelling feature, a feature (5) tracery and ground cover 2002demanding profound engagement with surface. graphite, oil and resin on aluminium 125 x 167 cm

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LAND/WATER and the VISUAL ARTS The core priority of the LAND/WATER research group is support for the development of individual creative and critical practices. As artists, curators and writers we generate original objects and messages that question, reconsider and renew the nature and use of visual language. These works contribute both to contemporary academic debates within artistic and curatorial practices, and to understanding within related areas of experience and knowledge. Our approach is increasingly interdisciplinary and collaborative. Through exhibitions, books and installations we establish a direct dialogue with the public, often in new and unusual locations and environments. Central themes include: sustainability; representation of change, journey, place and visual practice; West Country and regional specificity. There is particular focus on coast as a littoral space, and interest in exploring relations between site-theme-art process-narrative. Creative practice has only recently been accepted and understood as a field of academic research and has changed significantly as a result. Over the past eight years we have established a strong base for the group through individual works, commissions, residencies, publications, discussions and debates and research studentships and supervision. Members of the group work internationally through research, professional practice and exhibition. Living in the SouthWest of Britain nonetheless crucially informs modes of research and visual perception.

Group Membership

Christopher Cook ( Artist; Reader in Painting) Susan Derges (Artist; Research Fellow, School of Media and Photography) Jane Grant (Artist; Senior Lecturer, Visual and Media Arts) Mike Lawson-Smith (Filmmaker; Lecturer, Fine Art Film and Video) Liz Nicol (Artist/photographer; Head of School of Media and Photography) Dr Derrick Price (Writer/curator; Visiting Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts) Jem Southam (Photographer; Reader in Photography) Dr Simon Standing (Photographer; Deputy Head of School of Media and Photography) Professor John Virtue (Artist; SWADE Professor of Fine Art) Liz Wells (Writer/curator; lectures in Media Arts; Convenor, Land/Water Research Group)) For further information email [email protected] This collection of papers is intended as the first in a series of publications based upon the annual symposia organised by the Land/Water research group. The title of the 2005 symposium is ‘Picturing change: Landscape and Time’ and it is hoped to publish proceedings in 2006.

The intentions of the research group are:

To contribute to knowledge and understanding within the field of landscape studies especially in relation to landscape practices. To foster creativity, debate and experimentation within the field. To enhance the international academic profile of the group, individually and collectively. To develop collaborations both within and beyond the discipline, nationally and internationally. To promote our research to an international constituency through conferences, seminars, publications and joint projects. To foster postgraduate taught and research opportunities, which have a significant focus on landscape and environment.

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Biographies Iain Biggs is Reader in Visual Arts Practice in the Faculty of Art, Media and Design at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Recent publications include Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig: a borderline episode, 2004 (Bristol, Wild Conversations Press - part funded by the AHRB and ‘The Arts and Humanities Research Board, the artist/academic and the politics of research: a “performative essay”’ for the Journal of Visual Art Practice, published at: www.ntu.ac.uk/ntsad/ nafae/debate/index.stmlh Christopher Cook is Reader in Painting, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth. His exhibition and publication, Against the Grain toured in USA 2004 (Diboli Gallery, New Orleans; Art Museum, University of Memphis; Mary Ryan Gallery, New York). Recent solo shows include Eden Project, Cornwall; Heidelberger Kuntverein Germany; Yokaohoma Museum Japan (2005). Susan Derges has established an international reputation over the past 15 years with one-person exhibitions in London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, New York, San Fransisco and Tokyo. Her art is an ongoing enquiry into the relationship of the self to the observed;publications include Thinking River (1998), Liquid Form, with an essay by Professor Martin Kemp (1999) and Kingswood (Photoworks, 2002). She is a Research Fellow, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth. John Goto studied Fine Art at St. Martin’s and Photography in Paris and Prague before first exhibiting at the Photographers’ Gallery in 1981. Since then he has mounted 65 solo exhibitions in Europe and the UK. His first monograph, ‘Ukadia’, was recently published by Djanogly Art Gallery. Goto is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Derby and is represented by Andrew Mummery Gallery, London. www.johngoto.org.uk Ingrid Pollard, photographer, has exhibited and published widely since 1980. Recent solo shows: Canvas & Paper Boats, Houston Fotofest (2004). Recent group shows include The Politics of Place, UMEA,, Sweden (2003). Publications include Postcards Home (2004). She is Research Fellow at London South Bank University. Simon Standing completed his Ph.D. in 2000, in which he developed photography as a primary research method of enquiry investigating the relationship between design and ritual in the Anglican Church. Current research is concerned with the way in which photography represents and interprets time and change, in projects that explore the ideas of the English rural idyll and Plymouth City’s regeneration. Patricia Townsend works in photography and video. Recent exhibitions include: Ecclesia Mater and Spotless in group exhibition Obsessions II, Huddersfield Art Gallery (2002); Full Circle in group exhibition Attentive, Lounge, London (2003); Full Circle in short film/ video screening Houston Fotofest, Texas (2004); The Way in group exhibition ‘Elegant Underground’, raumpool e.V., Frankfurt (2004). Liz Wells is curator of Facing East, contemporary landscape photography from Baltic Areas (UK tour, 2004 – 2006). Recent exhibitions/publications include Liz Wells, Kate Newton and Catherine Fehily, Shifting Horizons, Women’s Landscape Photography Now, London: I B Tauris, 2000 (UK tour, 2000/2001 Other publications as editor include, The Photography Reader, London: Routledge, 2003 and Photography: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, 2004, third ed. She lectures in Media Arts, Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, and convenes Land/Water and the Visual Arts.

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surface as skin, as littoral or coastal space, as history, and as fluid border between conscious and unconscious. These contributions provide a fascinating interference pattern of ideas and experiences and illuminate creative method and curatorial strategy. This collection also includes material about the research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts, University of Plymouth, and a poem by Thomas A Clark written especially for the symposium which took place in Exeter in June 2004.

Contributors: Iain Biggs Christopher Cook Susan Derges John Goto Ingrid Pollard Patricia Townsend


to their own distinctive practices. They consider ideas relating to

surface

Six contemporary artists reflect upon the theme of Surface in relation

uppress.co.uk

cover surface.indd 2

14/10/05 2:02:06 pm

Surface: Land Water and the Visual Arts Symposium, 2004

Meaning in the Visual Arts

Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts

Nonsuch: Land Of Water

Water at the surface of the earth

Opportunities in Visual Arts Careers

Opportunities in visual arts careers

Operator algebras (Abel symposium 2004)

Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum

Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Writing Architecture)

The Visual arts and medical education, Volume 834

Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts

Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings

Resemblance, Signification, and Metaphor in the Visual Arts

Water A Reflection Of Land Use Options For Counteracting Land And Water Mismanagement

Active Visual Inference of Surface Shape

Active Visual Inference of Surface Shape

Opportunities in Visual Arts Careers 3rd Edition

Emotion and the Arts

Communications and the Arts

Hinduism and the Religious Arts (Religion And The Arts)

Encyclopedia of Surface and Colloid Science, 2004 Update Supplement

Land, Water and Development: Sustainable and Adaptive Management of Rivers

Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Visual Learners

The Body and the Arts

Modeling Surface and Sub-Surface Flows (Developments in Water Science) (Vol. 1)

Origins, imitation, conventions: representation in the visual arts

African Americans in the Visual Arts, Revised Edition

Operator Algebras: The Abel Symposium 2004 (Abel Symposia)

Water and the Cell

Cultivating Demand for the Arts: Arts Learning, Arts Engagement, and State Arts Policy

Surface: Land Water and the Visual Arts Symposium, 2004

Meaning in the Visual Arts

Edith Wharton and the Visual Arts

Nonsuch: Land Of Water

Water at the surface of the earth

Opportunities in Visual Arts Careers

Opportunities in visual arts careers

Operator algebras (Abel symposium 2004)

Art and Cognition: Integrating the Visual Arts in the Curriculum

Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Writing Architecture)

The Visual arts and medical education, Volume 834

Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts

Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings

Resemblance, Signification, and Metaphor in the Visual Arts

Water A Reflection Of Land Use Options For Counteracting Land And Water Mismanagement

Active Visual Inference of Surface Shape

Active Visual Inference of Surface Shape

Opportunities in Visual Arts Careers 3rd Edition

Emotion and the Arts

Communications and the Arts

Hinduism and the Religious Arts (Religion And The Arts)

Encyclopedia of Surface and Colloid Science, 2004 Update Supplement

Land, Water and Development: Sustainable and Adaptive Management of Rivers

Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Visual Learners

The Body and the Arts

Modeling Surface and Sub-Surface Flows (Developments in Water Science) (Vol. 1)

Origins, imitation, conventions: representation in the visual arts

African Americans in the Visual Arts, Revised Edition

Operator Algebras: The Abel Symposium 2004 (Abel Symposia)

Water and the Cell

Cultivating Demand for the Arts: Arts Learning, Arts Engagement, and State Arts Policy

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