Someone asked me if I thought people moving from business into the Arts was in part a response to the proliferation of AI, adding that he wondered whether that was linked to universities looking to more actively teach Creativity and Critical Thinking to support the appropriate management and use of AI. This was before Pope Leo XIV issued Magnifica Humanitas. On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. At that the time I made the following response as a tentative expression on a complex topic.

Speaking entirely personally, I don’t think it’s a response to AI proliferation or, if it is, only recently and in a minor way. I say this because, as a phenomenon, the move has roots that pre-date the rise of AI by three, maybe four, decades. Rather than AI, I’d hazard a guess that the nameable drivers of that exodus are awareness of, and a desire to respond practically to, the deepening socio-environmental crisis, a therapeutic need after a punishing job and, intellectually, an awareness of the rise of eco-feminism and so of relational thinking.

There are two reasons, in my view, why all this hasn’t been taken up in the media in anything like the way AI has. The first, obviously, is gender-related – almost all the people I know, or know of, who’ve made this cross-over are women. (I work with some eco-arts projects that are almost entirely made up of women – I’m invited in and stay because deep mapping encourages ecological, relational thinking). The other, related, reason is the economic and political investment in maintaining the status quo and the relationship between power and Elon Musk’s world of boys with toys like weaponised drones.

I think another factor in this is the crisis in our education system, one that’s particularly obvious in university science teaching. I’ve been working for a while as an “informed” outsider involved in my daughter’s care with an interdisciplinary group of medical science people at Edinburgh University. They’re aiming to improve the research culture for interdisciplinary data scientists, trying to ensure that multiple voices – including those of patients and carers – are properly heard when addressing the growing number of wicked” problems at the intersection of health, the environment, etc, and to devise ways to foster a more inclusive, collaborative environment. The very real problems they’re trying to address have regularly been carried by past science graduates into business, the NHS and the “care” industries.

It’s become clear, at least to me, that the fundamental issue is not, as a lot of people would like to believe, that science and industry need more “imaginative”, lateral-thinking, people. It’s that they need what our education system fails to teach – the humility and open-mindedness to really listen to other people with views that differ from our own, to find common ground, and so ways to address what’s required. It may be true, as Sarah Thornton has argued, that “top” artists are seen s ‘models of unrivalled creativity’ due to ‘their ability to make markets for their work and ideas’, to ‘inspire entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders of all kinds; … professionals increasingly positioned by the wider world as ultimate individuals with enviable freedoms’, but all that’s predicated on the same old assumptions that have got us mired in our current socio-environmental mess.

A core element in eco-feminist thinking, and so at least somewhere in the peripheral vision of enquiring women in HE, is the rise of relationally and the resulting challenge to the whole mesh of specialist, discipline-based assumptions on which the hierarchy of authority in universities, the sciences, and to a large extent in industry, is still based. So, I’d guess that the move out of business into the arts, particularly by women with the range of skills that allows them to work productively there and make some kind of living, is a response to an interweaving of these issues.

I should say that I know very little about the rise, or the complexities, of AI, nor about how universities are responding to these. I’m also an agnostic. However, because I felt that my answer above was given too hastily and is perhaps too bound up in certain of my current preoccupations, I read Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter, which is not simply addressed to Catholics, but also to ‘men and women of goodwill’.

I find that I share many of Pope Leo’s views and aspirations, although inevitably perhaps not all. What most impresses me is that the letter demonstrates an understanding of our situation in the face of AI that is profoundly relational, placing AI perceptively in the wider context of our eco-social situation. So, what follows below is my revised response to the question of why some people are moving from the business world into the Arts, drawing on Pope Leo’s insights.  

The letter clearly identifies the current lack of any adequate ethical scrutiny of the world’s dominant economies and criticises the ‘technocratic paradigm’ that reduces ‘everything to an object to be dominated’, resulting in very real threats to the dignity of human labour by a mentality that’s indifferent to ‘the pursuit of the common good’ and blind to the fact that individuals ‘learn to recognize that they themselves are interconnected and jointly responsible for the res publica’. He insists that everyone has an inherent right to benefit from the natural world that sustains us and is openly critical of the status quo allowing its benefits to ‘accrue solely to a select few’, adding that this ‘applies not only to material goods, but also to immaterial and cultural goods’. It insists that the principle of shared access should apply to: ‘new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data’. That the benefits of these are: ‘concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access … widens ‘the gap between the included and the excluded, between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those who remain on the margins’. 

The letter notes that AI ‘is now embedded in decision-making processes across many sectors and at multiple levels: in communication, management and control’, and adds that while certain benefits follow for this, the current rapid and uncritical adoption of AI exposes us to many risks, not least environmentally. It points out that: ‘Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources. As their complexity increases, especially in the case of large language models, the need for computing power and storage capacity grows too, which requires an extensive network of machines, cables, data centers and energy-intensive infrastructure. For this reason, it is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home’. 

Thinking more broadly about the context in which AI is being developed he is emphatic that a civilization’s quality ‘is measured … by the care it is able to offer, by its ability to recognize the other as a face not merely as a function’. Wishing ‘neither to demonize nor idolize technological tools’, he stresses that we should ‘utilize them on the basis of a fundamental principle, namely that truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence’. He is equally concerned with the importance of work as an expression and enhancement of ‘the dignity of our lives… a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment’; noting that AI is transforming the organization of markets and that the resulting competitiveness ‘is rarely concerned with social sustainability’. He asks that ‘political leaders, labor organizations, the business world and the scientific community’ rapidly develop ‘adequate shared regulations and protections’, not least ‘at the international level’. It also argues that AI needs to be understood in relation to the need: ‘to move beyond the current metrics of development’ since these ‘almost systematically neglect aspects essential to the overall wellbeing of people and the environment’. To rectify this, it proposes: ‘the introduction of new parameters’ to ‘allow for a comprehensive and timely assessment of how legislative and regulatory decisions impact the dignity of work, shared prosperity, inequality reduction and environmental protection’. 

Given the letter’s perceptive and inclusive understanding of the broader socio-environmental context within which AI is playing an increasingly important role, I would now suggest that, in addition to my original response, reasons for people leaving business for the arts may relate to finding themselves increasingly at odds with the values of dominant economic paradigm. Alternatively, it may be because they believe the arts offer forms of work more compatible with a sense of human dignity and value. Whatever the case, to focus on the problematic aspects of AI, without seeing it in the wider context Pope Leo identifies, is to blind ourselves to the nature of the real issues facing us.    

In the final chapter of Tana French’s novel The Trespasser, a character describes reaching a point when he feels as if the rest of his life has already happened. As if he is simply reading from a pre-existing script that won’t now alter, one in which there will be no unexpected twists, no surprises. He describes this as like watching a third-rate film where, half-way through, you just know what’s going to happen next and how it’s all going to end, but not why you’ll be bothered to watch the rest. To his boss he attributes this feeling to going through a midlife crisis. But I suspect that what French has him describe will be familiar to many of us as something more regular, if only by moments, and particularly if we’re over a certain age. That, hopefully brief, sinking feeling that your life is starting to run on fixed rails and can only become increasingly predictable as it moves towards its end. 

At seventy-six I’m aware of this feeling occurring to me more regularly and lasting longer, along with its equally uncomfortable counterpart: the growing sense that, with the global environmental and political situation getting more and more unstable, any unexpected twist or surprise that does occur is very unlikely to be a welcome one. I’m also aware that the best response to these feelings is to make a conscious effort to shift my attention to sensing my bodily presence, to being more aware of just where I am in the here and now. That might be to open into the way that the warmth of the early morning light transforms the wall at the head of the stairs, the particular way the wind shimmers the leaves of the sycamore trees the grow along the river bank, or to notice how our almost twenty-year-old cat chooses where to ensconce himself on the grass in front of the cottage, having first taken account of sun, wind, and the indignation of the family of sparrows that nest in the porch. Having worked for a university for so many years I all too often find myself living in my head, immersed in preoccupations, worries, and abstractions that find subtle but seemingly endless ways to shut me off from the material present of actual living. 

In writing this I’m not setting up an argument to reject my long engagement with work of theoretical or academic thinkers, not least because I’m only too aware that I owe a very real debt to any number of such thinkers. What has increasingly been nagging me, for want of a better term, is that the state of mind I so often fall into is bound up, to a greater or lesser extent, with an underlying academic attitude. One that Ursula K. Le Guin identifies, in her Bryn Mawr Commencement Address –  – as articulated through, aligned with, the ‘father tongue’, the linguistically-embedded mentality that speaks authoritatively ‘from above’. and neither invites nor expects an answer, the ‘language of capital M Man’. It’s a mentality I’ve come to associate with Paulo Friere’s ‘banking model of education’, an understanding of education in which those who are taught are regarded by those who teach as passive, as more or less empty vessels who are expected to receive, file, store, and be able to regurgitate on demand, the information bestowed on them. Le Guin contrasts the ’father tongue with a ‘mother tongue’, language ‘as relation’, language that connects, is predicated on exchange, the ‘language spoken by all children and most women’. Le Guin also speaks of a third language, one that marries ‘public discourse and the private experience’, a third form of language that constitutes ‘a wedding and welding back together of the alienated consciousness’ of ‘the father tongue and the undifferentiated engagement’ of ‘the mother tongue’. (I’ve not able to do justice to Le Guin’s thinking here, so please read her address for yourself). 

I have spent many years reading and writing texts that presuppose the need for attention to the theoretical positioning and argument on which the notion of the “intellectual progress” of academic thinking depends. But I’m now finding it increasingly hard to read or write such texts. Instead, I’m increasingly drawn to reading poetry and the prose of poets, forms of writing that I feel actively engage in wedding and welding back together Le Guin’s “father” and “mother” tongues. I return again and again to Imaginary Bonnets With Real Bees In Them,the texts of three lectures that Paula Meehan gave as the Ireland Chair of Poetry; also to Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, in which I first read her Bryn Mawr Commencement Address. I’ve come to recognise that there’s a very real need behind this shift. 

It’s hard to give an accurate description of that need, but I’m as clear as I can be that it relates to a growing understanding that no number of texts written in the ‘father tongue’ are going to help me meet the endings I must face, not least my death. It’s also becoming increasingly clear that reading poetry, the prose writing of poets, and narratives written in Le Guin’s “third tongue”, might help me do just that. Writing that is able to simultaneously mourn and celebrate the living actualities of our being here, our immersion in this endlessly complex and paradoxical world. Where I once turned to the work of a wide variety of academic thinkers, for example Geraldine Finn, Mary Watkins, Janet Wolff, Paul Ricoeur, Edward S. Casey, or Richard Kearney, to help orient myself, I increasingly turn to poets, to Paula Meehan, Denise Levertov, Grace Wells, Ursula K. Le Guin, Eavan Boland, Philip Casey, Miroslav Holub, Derick Walcott or Adam Zagajewski. A shift that’s changing the whole tenor of how I read more generally.  

Among the various books on my recent reading list have been Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Said The Dead, several novels by Tana French, Suzanne Simard’s When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World and the published version of a PhD thesis for which I was an external examiner. French’s books hold my attention because I sense a very powerful observational and imaginative intelligence informing her narratives. What links the other three books is that they all combine a substantial amount of what any fair-minded academic would regard as serious research, each combining it in different ways with some form of personal narrative. Ní Ghríofa brings a poet’s sensibility to the task of transforming a very extensive body of detailed archival research into a fascinating, and at times heartrending, narrative that shifts between three “voices” – one being that of the author – so as to interweave historical fact reconfigured with something approximating magic realism. Simard’s book is a vivid account of an extensive scientific study concerned with how trees interrelate, the understanding that results and social impact of that understanding, shot through with the intertwined personal narratives of those conducting the project with her and herself. Both books break with the conventions of academic research, in Ní Ghríofa’s case so radically that her archival research could not be extricated from the overall narrative and given an “objective” form as social anthropology. A very patient and skilful editor with the appropriate ecological background, and sufficient grasp of Simard’s scientific field, might perhaps disentangle the scientific for the personal in Simard’s narrative, but to do so would, in my view, be to miss the entire point of her writing the book in the way that she has. The third book, while it is built on a concern with family history and the experience of four journeys undertaken by its author, remains wholly within the standard conventions governing the publication of interdisciplinary academic research. What strikes me is that while Simard, unlike Ní Ghríofa, is no poet, both authors in their very different ways successfully wed and weld back together the alienated consciousness of the father tongue and the undifferentiated engagement of the mother tongue in a way that the author of the third book cannot.

Several poems come to mind as intimations necessary to hold close just now: Paula Meehan’s Of Wrens and Other Singers, Derek Walcott’s Love after Love, Denise Levertov’s September 1961, Theo Dorgan’s Learning Death and more. And I am deeply grateful to the Utopias Bach poetry group for our meetings on the last Friday of each month and for sharing the ways in which poetry helps open us to positive experiments for a better world.   

I have long found reading Rebecca Solnit well worth the effort. In this piece she celebrates an extraordinarily important legal milestone in international concern with climate change and its consequences. It matters that we know what international law now says and, equally importantly, that we prepare ourselves to support those who want to enforce that law. That won’t be easy, given the countries who voted against it, but it may be our last chance to bring about vitally necessary change.

In order (top to bottom):

Loving, Breaking, Ending, Mending & Aftermath.

I was introduced to poetry as a child by listening to T. S. Eliot reading his cat poems on record and, later, some of his other work. Like many other young people, I tried writing my own poems. I soon realised I wasn’t up to it and so stuck with drawing and painting.

In the last ten years I’ve read more and more work by poets, both their poetry and their reflections on poetry. I’ve also found myself less engaged with both visual making and with the visual arts more generally. Reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s short essays at the back of her Collected Poems – “Forsaking Kingdoms”: Five Poets, First Loves (I too learned Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome as a child) and the Foreword and Afterword to her Late in the Day – reminds me why that’s the case.

In 1984’s “Forsaking Kingdoms”: Five Poets, Le Guin wrote that: ‘painting seems more the business of stockbrokers than of artists’. An intimation of the dominance, in the visual arts, of the global culture industry? The essay is a wonderful evocation of the importance of poetry, one that in many respects prefigures the current academic preoccupation with relationally, only written with the lucidity of a poet.

I’ve had to relearn the importance of staying with poetry twice, ironically in each case from painters: first from Ken Kiff and then again from Eamon Colman, neither of whose work falls into the “stockbroker belt” category of art collecting. I’ve also quite recently found myself making two paintings in honour of poets – the Irish poet Paula Meehan and the Welsh poet Elinor Gwynn – along with paintings for some of the friends from a poetry reading group to which I belong. Why? Because poetry gives me the clearest sense of what remains valuable in these difficult times.

Currently I’m plowing my way through numerous books that have been densely written and argued in the required academic style because I’m beginning work on what Mary Modeen and I hope will be our second book. As a result I can’t help feeling that art education has suffered from the fact that students are expected to read too much academic theory and little or no poetry. The result, I strongly suspect, is that they internalise the values of what Le Guin, in her 1986 Bryn Mawr Commencement Address (you can find it online – it’s essential reading) calls ‘the father tongue’.

Not, as it often pretends, the language of reasoning but of ‘distancing’, the ‘language of power’, the ‘language in which “success” is a meaningful word’, the language that: ‘expresses the values of the split world, valuing the positive and devaluing the negative in each redivision: subject/object, self/other, mind/body, dominant/submissive, active/passive, Man/Nature, man/woman, and so on’. She adds: ‘The father tongue is spoken from above. It goes one way. No answer is expected, or heard’. And, as she also points out, it’s to learn that language that most people now go to college. To which she adds: ‘Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid discourse’.

I could go on, but better you read the Bryn Mawr Commencement Address for yourself.

Sometimes less really is more.

In her book Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A memoir of Food, Family and Longing, Anya Von Bremzen recounts a visit she and her mother made to an old White Russian countess ‘with a name too grand to even pronounce’. The old lady, who was cooking them a particular Russian dish, told them ‘how hard she cried, back in 1914, when she received a diamond necklace as a birthday gift from her father’ because ‘she had really wanted a puppy’. Poor child of entitled parents who simply expected her to share their desire for objects like a diamond necklace, it seems that what she really wanted was a living, more-than-human, companion. Perhaps one she hoped to have a loving relationship with and that she could take care of, who knows? What I do know is that this simple story had me on the verge of tears, because it speaks to an ongoing failure, both of values and care – not only for children but for their relationship to the more than human world.

That I should have found this story in a book about a family’s relationship to Russia through food may seem irrelevant to the concerns I’ve tried to articulate in the first two posts in this series. Why I don’t see it that way can be suggested by a quotation from the Choctaw historian and writer Devon Mihesuah, Cora Lee Beers Price Professor in the Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. In the context of colonialism and its entanglement with socio environmental degradation, she writes: “The recovery of the people is tied to the recovery of food, since food itself is medicine, not only for the body, but for the soul, and for the spiritual connection to history, ancestors and the land’. A quotation I learned yesterday during a wonderful talk by the Dakota writer and environmental activist Diane Wilson, who also introduced us to the mission of an organisation called Dream of Wild Health, which aims ‘to restore health and well-being in the Native community by recovering knowledge of and access to healthy Indigenous foods, medicines and lifeways’.

Introduction

As I understand it, the Scots Gaelic word dùthchas derives from “dú/dùth”, meaning “earth” or “land”. However, it has several related meanings. It can refer to hereditary right or claim, birthright, heritage, native or ancestral home, kindred affection, and innate quality, and it stresses the interconnectedness of people, land, culture, and an ecological balance among all entities, human and more than human. We have no equivalent in English, although there is a trace of its sense in a phrase like ‘hefted to the hill’.

I don’t believe we can “restore” dùthchas in its traditional sense, as a felt centre of gravity, in places where it has been lost. Rather, I see it as identifying a need and something to work towards by finding new variations, or reviving old understandings, to meet that need. That work is already under way in places where a living sense of dùthchas or a local equivalent is still present and where groups of like-minded people are working to build on those traces. Work that I see as related to “wild” forms of deep mapping and its offshoots, for example recent work by Dr Sally Wetherall in Somerset. If these forms of work can be connected with the desires articulated by novels like Zoe Gilbert’s Mischief Acts (2022) or Zakia Sewell’s travel in Finding Albion (2026), then maybe new equivalents to, or revivals of dùthchas and its equivalents will begin to emerge and cohere so as to feed into the urgent and fundamental changes we so badly need.   

I was initially tempted to use this essay to enlarge on the tensions Julian Cooper identifies in relation to one of his paintings, tensions around the differing values, ‘the complexities and contradictions’, of a landscape he knows well. One in which there’s an increasingly uneasy coexistence between the Romanticism that underpins the National Park, the workaday world of ‘ordinary farm life’ and the ‘industrial activity along the coast’ of Cumbria. But that would have required a long a discussion of, for example, the various manifestations of Romanticism, the fragmentation of the (British) Isles, the long historical denigration of the rural population and its relationship to the land and more. I have neither the knowledge nor time to attempt that. Instead, I’ve written this piece with some of the activities of Syndikat Gefährliche Liebschaften, Dyffryn Dyfodol, Carreg Creative , and Utopias Bach in mind, which follows on from my attending a recent meeting at which each of these groupings was represented.

To begin to think about how we might work towards more contemporary understandings of dùthchas, or of the Welsh terms cymreig/cymraeg, we need to need to understand what, historically speaking, has undermined or marginalised them as living cultural experience specific to regions or other defined localities. That knowledge is, of course, already available to those who wish to engage with it.

The socio-environmental cost of elite entitlement

In the March 2026 edition of the London Review of Books, a review by Andrew O’Hagan offers a chilling insight into the amorality, greed and squalid activity of the recently disgraced member of the royal family, a man clearly incapable of registering anything other than his own sense of entitlement. The review, which also touches on Virginia Giuffre’s Nobody’s Girl, concludes with his sharing an exchange with Lady Victoria Hervey, daughter of the 6^th Marquess of Bristol, half-sister to the 7th Marquess of Bristol and Lord Nicolas Hervey, a former model and socialite who has had relationships with both the former Prince Andrew and Boyzone member Shane Lynch, and who has referred to Virginia Giuffre as “a complete whore”. O’Hagan’s review nicely captures not only the small-minded contempt on which Hervey’s world view is predicated, but something of the mentality of entitlement shared by Jacob Epstein, Peter Mandelson, Lady Hervey, Donald Trump and his acolytes, and Ghislaine Maxwell. It also suggests that this mentality is not just that of “a few bad apples” but is indicative of a sense of entitlement bound up with extreme wealth and the ownership of land and other property as a sign of status. 

A sense of entitlement with very real negative consequences for a whole range of very different life-worlds. One example of this appears in Madeleine Bunting’s Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey. This provides a sobering account of the devastating historical impact of just that sense of entitlement by referring to those whose who made their money exploiting the extractive possibilities of Empire. Exploitation justified by the Victorian Lord Leverhulme by claiming that:  

‘the “universal law of self interest of the individual”, the “persistent, consistent and uninterrupted effort of every right-thinking man to better his condition … a principle as unvarying as the law of gravitation”’. 

Much to Leverhulme’s anger, however, the inhabitants of the Isle of Lewis rejected his “progressive” views, refusing to go along with his plans to industrialise and physically re-shape their world in ways that would have entirely severed them from their culture, based as it was on dùthchas. Leverhulme believed he was entitled to impose his version of “progress” on the island simply because he had purchased in from the Matheson family, who had previously bought it with the proceeds of selling opium to the Chinese. 

The underlying tenor of the values of that C19th Lewis community was, I suggest, in essence not dissimilar to that of the eco-social psychologist James Hillman who argues, in “Man is by nature a political animal” or: patient as citizen (1994), that Self is the interiorization of community, and so is constituted of communal contingencies. A viewpoint I see reflected in the orientation of Carreg Creative and Utopias Bach towards the communities and groupings from which they’ve spring and with which they work. The C19th Lewis community’s understanding of contingency required addressing a collective need for the crofting land on which they had always depended, using methods that allowed them to support themselves in relation to the demands of the island’s ecology. Madeleine Bunting’s account highlights the fundamental historical dishonesty of a book like Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain (2019), written in a clumsy attempt to justify his own unjustifiable sense of entitlement. 

Bunting’s is just one of a wide range of books that lays bare the sorry history of land enclosure, clearance and marginalisation of rural Britain that has left us with the socio-environmental crisis and growing risk of food poverty we face today. These range from John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances (1973), through Steve Humphries and Beverley Hopwood’s Green and Pleasant Land: The Untold Story of Country Life in Twentieth Century Britain (1999),  to Corinne Fowler’s Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (2020) and Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (2020). Some books on related topics include Bella Bathurst’s Field Work: What Land Does to People & What People Do to Land (2021) and Colin Trudge’s Six Steps Back to the Land: Why we need small mixed farms and millions more farmers (2016), Aune Head Arts with Beaford Arts’ Focus on Farmers: Art and Hill Farming (2007) – not least for Lucy R. Lippard’s essay ‘A Frame for Farming’ – and Rurality Re-Imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanders, Wild Things (2018), edited by Ben Stringer, whose essay ‘Race, Nationalism, and Landscape Belonging’ anticipates something of the argument of Zakia Sewell’s Finding Albion. Sewell’s book might, in turn, be seen as a fascinating extension, from the perspective of someone deeply involved in music, of Caroline Lucas’ Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (2024).   

Carreg Creative identifies its new project – Iaith y Pridd – as aiming to bring together ‘people from two communities, Utopias Bach collective and the cymuned Fferm Henbant – staff, trainees, visitors, volunteers, neighbours, customers – over a year (April 2026 – March 2027) at Fferm Henbant, Clynnog Fawr.  I see this initiative, like Utopias Bach’s involvement with the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference, as a practical engagement with the need to reanimate the spirit of dùthchas in a form appropriate to the time and place in which those involved find themselves.    

An afterthought

In 2016 I attended a conference put on under the banner of UNISCAPE at the Centre for Landscape Studies at what was then NUI Galway called Landscape Values: Place and Praxis. I presented an illustrated paper – Between Creative Praxis and Place Governance: Four Examples – in which I spoke briefly about the work of four artist environmentalists, Cathy Fitzgerald, Simon Read, Christine Baeumler and Ffion Jones, who I identified as “creative translators”. My argument was that, while those responsible for landscape governance at grass-roots level were becoming increasingly aware of the value of the work of such artist environmentalists, they ‘often lack support from those who control budgets and generate policy’. We now know that the number of billionaires – those whose cultivation of a highly damaging sense of entitlement is most obvious – globally rose from 2,565 in 2023 to 2,769 in 2024, continuing to rise to over 3,000 by 2025.

Until those with this kind of money are either required to pay a far greater level of tax so as to fund activities in the common good, and/or stop spending it on activities like buying environmentally highly damaging superyachts, funding space technology we really don’t need, and funding anti-democratic media organisations and Right-wing politicians and, instead, begin the necessary task of funding tackling the socio-environmental crisis seriously, including those relating to farming, nothing will change.

Last year the painter Julian Cooper alerted me to the fact that he had a monograph coming out – The Art of Julian Cooper – now published by Unicorn Press. Although I’d lost touch with Julian, whose work I’d written about for magazines like Artscribe back in the 1980s, I was interested to see how his work had developed and so ordered a copy. We met when I was living in London, when my time was spent painting, teaching part-time to earn a living, raising a young family, and occasionally writing articles about, or reviewing, the work of painters who were committed to image-making; from Anselm Kiefer to Ken Kiff, Carol Robb, Andrzej Jackowski and Julian. 

I still remember a fascinating conversation in Julian’s studio about the way in which he depicted both natural and artificial light in the same painting. If I remember rightly, we were thinking at the time about his paintings Bella Vista Hotel (1982), Opera Square, Cairo (1983), The Farolito (1984) and Yvonne (1984).  In the late 1980s and early 1990s the focus of Julian’s work began to shift away from such figure-oriented images towards his present concerns, and he has gone on to be a highly successful painter of mountains and mountainous landscapes. I, by contrast, got a full-time teaching job, stopped writing art journalism and left London to run Fine Art at the University of the West of England. The trajectories of our working lives would appear, then, to have diverged to the point where it might seem presumptuous of me, having developed an “ensemble practice” in which making visual art now plays a minor if vital role, to reflect on Julian’s work. 

There are several reasons why I don’t think that’s the case, not least our shared interest in what, broadly speaking, might be described as “landscape”. However, the one I want to pursue here is bound up with my long-term interest in the archetypal psychology of James Hillman (1926-2011), for whom an image is not what you see but the way in which you see (and make) it.  In the Introduction to this series of essays I referenced Hillman’s view that Self is ‘constituted of communal contingencies … of the actual ecological field’ where each of us is placed, with what all the elements of life there are doing. So that to find our Selves we must turn to those elements, both visible and invisible. It’s in the context of turning to the conjunction of elements both visible and invisible that I’m writing here.

While my various activities may seem to belong to an entirely different order of creative work to Julian’s paintings, that this is not the case is suggested by his observation, in the 2015-2023 section of the book, that he has started to see the Cumbrian fells with which he is so familiar in ways that are ‘freed from well-worn imagery’; that they have become ‘a receptacle of time and habitation, interweaving natural and human systems that are connected in hight and breadth’ (p. 226). This suggests that we have in common a commitment to, and engagement with, the imaginative facility Hillman refers to as notitia, the form of attention common to the creative practices of art, education, ethics and any meaningful conversation. To what Mary Watkins, in her essay: “Breaking the Vessels”: Archetypal Psychology and the Restoration of Culture, Community and Ecology’ calls a ‘careful attention that is sustained, patient, subtly stature presentations’ (in Stanton Marlan ed. Archetypal Psychologies: Reflections in Honor of James Hillman, 2008,p. 419). Neither a technique nor a methodology, this is, as she writes in Hillman and Freire: Intellectual Accompaniment by Two Fathers, a quality of ‘seeing through’ that is ‘never accomplished once and for all’, is ‘slow, observant, and participatory’. 

While it’s good to have the many excellent reproductions of Julian’s paintings – the visible products of his work – what really interests me about The Art of Julian Cooper is that it allows me to reflect on these in the light of their otherwise invisible background; Julian’s reflections that make up the bulk of the text, divided into a series of time periods. Those from 1979-1989 remind me, for example, that what we had in common was a sense that the orthodoxies of Modernism were exhausted, that become ‘institutionalised and fragmented, with a rather contrived “avant-garde”’ (p. 52). His text also reminds me of what I admired in the way in which he assembled the imagery that constituted the topic of his paintings; for example, the way in which the quiet introspection of the woman with the circular mirror in Opera Square, Cairo (1983) counterpoints the grandiosity of equestrian public statute. In the context of an art education too often dominated by the dogmas of Late Modernism, it became all-too easy to simply run an eye over a painting like Looking West, Scarfell (1988) and take it in “organisationally”, as a set of formal contrasts without engaging, as it deserves, with the richness and complexity of its topic. That is without engaging with its various elements slowly and with a sense of empathetic questioning. Consequently, it’s helpful to have Julian remind me that what I’m seeing is a landscape painting that, in addition to the figure, encompasses ‘Sellafield nuclear processing plant on the coast and that flat farmland’ between that coast and Scarfell Pike. Julian’s text links this view with the contrasting values, ‘the complexities and contradictions’ of a landscape that is imbued with the Romanticism that underpins the National Park, the workaday world of ‘ordinary farm life’ and the ‘industrial activity along the coast’; a complex image inflected with a degree of unease for those of us aware of Winston Churchill’s notorious reference to his ‘black dog’.  

In this way Julian’s text constantly brings to the surface the “invisible” elements that a too-rapid reading of the paintings might well skate over too quickly or simply miss. By providing some background and reflection on the circumstances that led him to make the series of paintings that respond to the murder of the Brazilian trade union leader and environmentalist Chico Mendes – who famously said that he first thought he was fighting to save rubber trees, then to save the Amazon rainforest, and finally for humanity – Julian deepens my sense of the paintings engagement with the inter-woven-ness of these issues. This comes over with particular poignancy in his references to Mendes’ wife Ilzamar.

Perhaps because I am no longer engaged in “painting as such”, and because my long involvement in deep mapping has made the idea that any sense of a particular place is inseparable from a sense of its temporality, I’m not particularly drawn to the works predicated on Julian’s exploration of the ‘shared identity between the surface of a mountain and that of a painting’ (p. 101).

However, my interest and attention are very much reengaged by his discussion of the work made between 2015-2023. These reflect a sense of place that’s very familiar to me from years during which my family has spent summers in the North Pennines. I am at once engaged by Julian’s concern to attend closely to ‘an apparently uninteresting bit of fellside’ in what I take to be the spirit of Hillman’s notitia; becoming ‘aware of how much activity was actually contained there’ (p. 226), both “natural” and “man-made”. The paintings that result from this attention, which might all to simply be glossed as “quiet landscapes’ are, as Julian suggests, anything but. He rightly sees them as a tacit reflection of, and on, ‘the question of how the same land can accommodate the demands of farming, water management and nature conservation, and how human and natural systems can co-exist at all’ (p. 268). 

This is much the same vital question that ultimately animates, albeit in a more overtly political context, Madeline Bunting’s extraordinarily perceptive Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey (2016) and that George Monbiot so singularly failed to do justice to in Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life (2013). It’s a question that might not immediately come to mind standing in front of one of Julian Cooper’s recent paintings. So the particular value of The Art of Julian Cooper lies, for me, in the way the painter has allowed us to attend to what lies within the immediately visible surface of his paintings.    

Why would any individual continue to write a blog like this in the world as it is today? 

What is arguably the most powerful nation on earth is currently led by a malignant narcissist showing increasing signs of dementia. A man with a clear preference for cosying up to absolute dictators, responsible for actively enabling the State of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and, in the face of all the evidence, currently denying that the airstrike that killed 168 civilians in southern Iran, most of them schoolgirls, was carried out by the US military. A convicted criminal who has been subject to ten federal criminal investigations, eight state and local investigations, and twelve congressional investigations. A man who has appointed as his Secretary of State for War someone who believes that the current attack on Iran is ‘part of God’s divine plan’, that his President was anointed by Jesus, and who insists that: ‘The only side that targets civilians is Iran.’ 

The only answer I can come up with to my own question is that it helps to share my concern for all those things that are of no interest or value to a malignant narcissist. Trying to articulate something of the warp and weft of interest, concern, relationship and connection helps sustain me in this bleak era and, I have to assume, is of some valued to the one thousand two hundred plus “users” who are signed up to this blog.  

The series of short essays, all sharing the common title ‘Re-collecting/ Re-connecting’ that follow this Introduction have been prompted in part by the tortuous process of writing a paper for a special edition of the journal Cultural Sociology called Revisiting Janet Wolff: Affinities between Art History and Sociology. Back in October 2025 I was received an invitation out of the blue to submit an abstract for a contribution and, to my surprise, was subsequently asked to submit a full paper for review. That paper is called Internalising the Thinking of Janet Wolff: an Example. Its abstract reads:

‘This auto-ethnographic paper begins by identifying the impact on its author, then working in tertiary art education, of Janet Wolff’s Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (1995), particularly the chapter Eddie Cochran, Donna Anna and the Dark Sister: Personal Experience and Cultural History. This informed the author’s ongoing approach to deep mapping – an arts-based approach to the socio-environmental complexities of place – by catalysing two creative works. A brief description of two texts reflecting on Wolff’s influence then introduce a turning-point in the author’s relationship to her thinking. Her questioning of disciplinary boundaries in Resident Alien also informed the author’s critique of the limitations imposed on creative arts-led research in his Art as Research: Creative Practice and Academic Authority (2009). Having indicated something of that critique, the paper turns to the internalisation of Wolff’s thinking, an internalisation then re-externalised through a “conversational” approach predicated on ‘mutual accompaniment’ (Watkins 2018). The paper then reconsiders the concept of influence in its larger context, drawing on a distinction between ‘orientation’ and ‘discipline’ (Zitzewitz 2022). Taking up Miroslav Holub’s distinction between the presuppositions of the arts and sciences, the paper then discusses Wolff’s ‘oblique memoir’, Austerity Baby (2017), using the poet Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin as a counterpoint to Wolff’s work. The paper concludes by proposing a degree of convergence between the author’s concerns and Wolff’s “conclusion” to Austerity baby. A position taken as indicative of a move from influence, as construed within the academic production of texts predicated on the authority of citation, to mutual accompaniment based on internalised orientations that are holistic ways of being and knowing and fundamentally open, inclusive and relational’.    

The auto-ethnographic approach to my own past work indicates why this series of essays has ‘re-collecting’ in its title. It’s required me to return to, and offer an account of, significant aspects of my professional life just prior to, and during, the first two decades following the turn of the current century. The ‘re-connecting’ element is, however, probably the most significant indicator of what I’m concerned with. What Paul Ricoeur refers to as our ‘narrative identity’ is made up of both the stories we tell about ourselves and, equally importantly, those that others tell about us. That’s to say, it is made up of the connections between the two. Consequently, “my” sense of self can only be relational, the ongoing construction of a shifting narrative animated by the innumerable connections, tacit and explicit, that place me in the multiverse. Or, to put this in the psychological terms set out by James Hilman in his essay “Man is by nature a political animal” or: patient as citizen:

‘If Self and its draw towards reflective interiority refers not to an immanent soul-spark of a transcendent God, or to a germ, seed, truth, centre or core of will-power, but rather is constituted of communal contingencies, then the draw must at the same time be a draw toward exteriority, towards the contingencies of the actual ecological field – where I am placed, with whom I am, what is happening with my animals, my food, my furniture, what the toaster and newspaper and refrigerator purr do in the field I am in. To find myself I must turn to them, visibles and invisibles’. 

So, the essays that follow are an attempt to articulate that turning to the ‘visibles and invisibles’, to the particular shared ‘communal contingencies’ regarding the thinking and making that have shaped how I find myself placed in the world.   

I have two friends in Minneapolis I’m regularly in touch with who, like so many others, are struggling to maintain the best traditions of the USA in the face of what amounts to the State-directed terror instigated by Donald Trump’s goons. I’m not qualified to comment further on what’s happening from the safety of my English home, so I’ll just repost the following piece.