2016 PhD thesis and presentation (public performance-lecture and exhibition, University of Exeter/Porthmeor, St Ives)
This thesis brings feminist ontologies into a renewed dialogue with post-phenomenological landscape studies through development of a critical arts- foregrounds landscaping practices as performative; visual studies, similarly influenced by phenomenology, critiques the powerful fixings of representation; and current commentaries on art-geographies focus on questions of interdisciplinarity, rather than the potential for art practice-as-research to be generative of politically complex cultural geographies. Landscape, replete with complex power geometries and tension, both resists fixing and framing, and also becomes defined or imaged by these same operations. My goal in this thesis is to find a way of working, as an artist, with an understanding of landscape as being continually in eventful-and sometimes violently eventful-process, beyond conventional framings of image and landscape.
Initially, this art practice (undertaken as research within cultural geography) worked with a violent flash flood and resultant loss of life, and was set against the backdrop of picture-postcard West Cornwall. Whilst focused through practice on this usually trickling mile-long moorland stream, something happened. This research became infected by concurrent geo-political events. Through practice in the studio, the violent life-world of the stream collided with an activist project associated with the 2014 Gaza conflict. Land and image became both occupied and ghosted. This corporeal and material collision of practice(s) afforded a productive entanglement of practice and theoretical engagement. My search for a way of working with landscape as an artist that accounts for the unpalatable dimensions of material formations, for the dying within living, for the exclusions, subjugation, violence, or even extinctions of landscape-led me to realise that I cannot stand back innocently and safely behind the camera, outside of the frame.
I propose that landscape is inherently violent, and that as such, landscaping practices are always politically differentiated and situated. It is a violence in which there can be no innocent place of on-looking; we are all mutually implicated in landscape and landscaping-practices, and indeed, the ghosts of our own vulnerabilities are never far away. The thesis demonstrates that the unpredictability and riskiness of researching through a critical arts practice, can produce the conditions for disruptive interventions generative of new ways of (body)knowing in the world. These ways of knowing confront the violence and contradictions of a fast changing enviro/geopolitical landscape. Working from within an art practice as geographical research contributes a perspective of political complexity and generative encounter, in which unexpected collisions, between things, practices, and bodies function to produce spatial connections beyond contemporary analysis.
2020
Place has meant home for me, perhaps even a yearning for home — frequent house and
school moves as a child had left me feeling un-homed, out of place. During times of life change, my work as an artist and geographer always seems to come back to this feeling of displacement as a starting point from which to work. Now is one such transitional moment, a moment marked by an upcoming move from Cornwall where, for the first time, I have lived in the same house for more than three years. This house in which I have brought up my family has been our home since 2001; a settling in one place that has been life-affirming. Those who know me well are therefore surprised to hear that I am leaving West Cornwall and moving to a city. Bristol is very different from these remote cliff tops near Lands’ End, four hours further west. A house became a home,
only to now, once again, become a house.
(Abstract)
2019
This chapter brings a geologically focussed inflection to landscape studies. Using a non-representational approach to practice, informed by geo-aesthetics and feminist materialisms, I reflect on a performance in a stream, the site of flash-flood in Cornwall (UK). This reflection neither precludes thinking landscape in terms of the political consequences of visual representation, nor as performed, subjective process. Using the disruption of performance by the accidental demise of my mobile phone, I speculate that landscape is additionally marked by ephemeral material process and agential geologic process, human and of the Earth. As a result, I suggest there is a need for artists to attend to the political landscape via the intimacies of mundane, everyday narratives to engage with material and geologic landscape encounters.
(Abstract)
