Category Archives: News

Ken Kiff’s ‘The Sequence’ at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts

In what now seems almost like another life, I worked with the painter Ken Kiff to produce a small book on his TheSequence, a series of almost two hundred paintings. Since his untimely death in 2001, Ken Kiff’s extraordinary body of paintings, prints, and drawings has yet to receive the attention it deserves. There are any number of possible reasons for this. Not the least of which is, in my view, that his vision was fundamentally and profoundly that of a visual poetand, as such, largely antipathetic to the historical, conceptual and theoretical preoccupations of those who earn their living producing the ‘official’ discourse around reputation in the art world.

The work on show in the exhibition demonstrates the full range and qualities of the Sequence works in all their beauty, strangeness, and occasional provocation. But it also includes the last of his large triptychs, the Untitled National Gallery triptych painted between 1991-c.1997. Back in 1997 my wife and I spent a wonderful afternoon with Ken Kiff at the Royal Academy, looking at the exhibition of Braque’s late Studiopaintings and his last triptych is, for me, a summation of a similar kind to that found in those works. (Although in certain respects it also distantly echoes, in a softer, perhaps more English way that we might relate to the work William Blake or Samuel Palmer, there is also something here of Beckman’s great triptychs with their complex psycho-dramas). So, while it’s clear from the exhibition and its catalogue that Ken Kiff’s work is very far from being forgotten, it has yet to receive anything like its proper due.

Fortunately the current exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, beautifully curated by Emma Hill, has an excellent catalogue that, unusually, does justice both to the work itself and to the artist’s own thinking by liberally quoting from his letters. It also helpfully includes commentaries by a number of contemporary artists whose appreciation of his work adds to our understanding of its reception. The exhibition and catalogue will, I hope, be a first step towards bringing the work of this extraordinary artist to a wider (and, I trust, younger) audience.

Currently I feel in many respects too caught up in the circumstances surrounding my own relationship to the work in this exhibition to write about it coherently. (A number of Ken Kiff’s letters on display in the gallery and quoted in the catalogue were written to me during the course of our working together). This is in part be due to the fact that, having spent over fifteen years working on a variety of deep mapping projects that had, I thought, taken me away from the preoccupations that inform Ken Kiff’s paintings, I now find myself working in a studio again. While the relief paintings I have been making over that last two years are of an entirely different order to his work, his extraordinary achievements as an artist remain in the back of my mind.

There are, however, some thoughts arising from reading the catalogue in the light of my relationship with Ken Kiff’s work that seem worth sharing here. These relate to the notion of marginality and relevance, and are prompted by a remark quoted by the painter and critic Timothy Hyman that’s repeated in the catalogue. Hyman reports that the painter John Hoyland (1934-2011)claimed that: ‘… if you turn your back on all the understanding of what’s gone on in modern art, you’re going to end up doing some idiosyncratic little kind of painting that doesn’t belong to anything, like an escape … like Ken Kiff or somebody, painting your own nightmares’. Looking back at Ken Kiff’s work today, given the political and environmental causes of the present situation, Hoyland’s patronising and ill-informed put-down has acquired a bitter cultural irony. Today it is Hoyland’s late modernist gestural abstraction, and the macho assumption of ‘progressive’ historical relevance that accompanied it, that increasingly seems not to “belong to anything” culturally substantial; to be “an escape” into the dogmas of a self-mythologizing cultural elite largely blind to the deepening psychic, social and environmental nightmares induced by an increasingly toxic Modernity.

In the same article in which he quoted John Hoyland, Timothy Hyman went on to identify what he took to be Ken Kiff’s ambition for his work; namely to create: ‘conjunctions – of the Absolute with the humdrum, the Essential with the particular; but also Klee with Renoir, the most refined abstraction with the most warm, earthy depiction. How to show dimensions that might seem “other” – say of thought or of spirit or of Fantasy – as part and parcel of the Natural world’. It’s something of this quality in the work as a whole that gives the lie to Hoyland’s trite exercise in self-promotion, offering as it does a verbal approximation of the particular richness and enduring relevance of Ken Kiff’s work. However, today the aspect of that work that speaks more strongly than ever is touched on in a letter he wrote to me in 1988, which is quoted in the catalogue. Although he is referring to his work as a painter, I have come increasingly to hear his observations as relating equally to the work involved in our psychic, social and environmental realities. He writes:

The strangest thought, always, for me is how a work can be reached, and then left. For it to be reached, a process has to be undergone … which is both highly thought out, and ‘arbitrary’ to a point which feels kind of vertiginous. For the work to be left, a totally unintelligible new thing has to be sensed as complete, perhaps necessitating a determination to scrap all ideas of completeness. After all, all ideas of completeness will be useless anyway.

And, ironically perhaps, it was on re-reading this after a gap of twenty years that I finally recognised that my long preoccupation with deep mapping chimed precisely with this recognition. With the need to find a way of working that let go of ‘all ideas of completeness’ (in all its various senses and dimensions) so as to be open to whatever ‘totally unintelligible new thing’ that may emerge.

Post-script to “Eco-poetics and art as ‘wild’ conversation / ’wild’ conversation as art”?

Richard Kerridge’s journey by train to Bath via London on Saturday night was made impossible when his train from King’s Lynn was cancelled. So I drove him home Sunday morning, since I was coming south to Bristol anyway. It was good to have a chance to talk to him on his own because he’s very knowledgable and very well-connected in the nature writing world. He had some interesting things to say, for example about differences in approach between Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie. In the light of my deep mapping interests I was particularly taken by his account of Jamie’s discussion of Macfarlane’s work in the context of “the lone enraptured male”, which is set out in her review of Macfarlane’s The Wild Places.

This is very well worth reading.

Personally, it helped clarify for me why I’ve always been slightly irritated when people assume that, because I am interested in deep mapping, I am going to like Macfarlane’s books. (See also my earlier post on this). By and large I don’t particularly and, on the whole, for reasons close to Jamie’s reservations. Deep mapping is precisely not about “the lone enraptured male” but about re-discovering such things as lost or marginalised communities of memory, exposing and exploring contested histories and identities, working with the intra-wovenness of the supposedly mundane and the extraordinary, and much more that, it seems to me, is largely marginal to Macfarlane’s interests.

This speaks to something very much on my mind. I have recently been pondering work by Lindsey Colbourne and Merched Chwarel(in English The Quarry Women), a group made up of Colbourne, Lisa Hudson, Marged Pendrell, and Jwls Williams. Their collective work focuses on the quarries of North Wales – Bethesda, Dinorwig, Nantperis, Llanberis, Penmaenmawr and Blaenau Ffestiniog.

This has involved Merched Chwarel (now joined by the curator Jill Piercy) walking together, experimenting both individually and collaboratively through various media, and presenting the resulting work so as to instigate dialogue within a larger community.The questions they ask themselves include: Who are the quarry women of the past, present and future, and how their own aesthetics, identity and connection to place, culture and language are mediated by the quarries? By searching out traces of women’s presence in an environment generally viewed as the domain of heroic men, they are questioning the current relevance of: “the relationship between women (Welsh, English, incomer, indigenous, holiday maker) and the quarry legacy”, together with wider connections to “relationships to identity, language, place and nationhood”

Their work has been exhibited specifically to evoke debate; among those personally connected to quarries and quarrying, artists, archaeologists and individuals involved in women’s studies. However, as personal histories of members’ walking make clear, there is also a learning-through-walking involved here that reaches back into childhood is a key factor in the project. They notice, for example, that their collective walks differed from solitary walking in being more complicated. “We were not at all like the classic ‘walker’ (male – from Caspar David Friedrich’s image of the ‘Wanderer’ to the Situationalists to Richard Long), unfettered or separate from the world. It was quite the opposite, most conversations about life complexities, relationships, stories”. Initially uncertain as to whether this difference was problematic or illuminating, Lindsey Colbourne opted for the second. Firstly, because their life entanglements speak to ‘the political potential of a walking that mobilises social relationships’, and to a ‘relational politics of the spatial (without aspiring to an idealized notion of the free man, or free-footed nomad)’. (See link above)) Secondly, because it provides a way of ‘avoiding the prioritizing or opposing of distance and dislocation over locality and rootedness; focusing on (confusions of) scale rather than the freedom of the epic task’ (See link above).

All of which seems to me to closely echo Kathleen Jamie’s critique of the presuppositions on which so much of Robert Macfarlane’s writing seem to depend.

Eco-poetics and art as ‘wild’ conversation / ’wild’ conversation as art?

On Saturday Sept. 1^stI attended a day workshop – Conserve? Restore? Rewild? Art and Eco-Poetics Rise to the Challenge, organized by Veronica Sekules, director of the GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn. The speakers were the poet Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, the author, nature writer and ecocritic Richard Kerridge, the poet, editor and ecocritic Jonathan Skinner, Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker (poet and artist respectively, who co-organized the day and were showing work at the gallery, and the eminent environmental scientist Andrew Watkinson (who has just been made an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society).

The text of my talk is given below.

I’ll start with some background to what I want to share with you. Forgive me if some of this appears to be stating the obvious.

In 1989, Edward Sampson wrote: “there are no subjects who can be apart from the world; persons are constituted in and through their attachments, connections and relationships”. That’s to say, we exist only as entangled in multiple and dynamic ecologies. We are, in one sense, a conversationbetween those ecologies. So my starting point is this quotation from Monica Szewczyk:

‘… if, as an art, conversation is the creation of worlds, we could say that to choose to have a conversation with someone is to admit them into the field where worlds are constructed. And this ultimately runs the risk of redefining not only the ‘other’but us as well’.

Monica Szewczyk ‘Art of Conversation, Part 1’

Understanding conversationin this sense is helpful because, as Mary Watkins reminds us, thinking itself is ‘a mosaic of voices in conversation’. Really listening to our voices in conversations is an important aspect of how we are changed by experience. As in any real conversation, listening is primary – otherwise there’s just the din of competing monologues. Listening to that mosaic of voices is a key element in making art work because it makes a conversation possible with the attachments, connections and relationships that make up an artist’s world. It’s through such collaborative conversations– whether they’re internal or external – that artists are able to tap into the creative tensions that animate their work.

The types of conversation that animate art have been changing. We’re coming to realise that we need to listen betterand more widelyto the world at large. That we need to listen to voices marginalised or silenced by ways of thinking that set humans above and apart from the world. By a thinking that still assumes that the mind is a unified, rational system working according to logical laws or principles, where meaning is linguistic, and language exclusive to humans. This rook has language– both audible and embodied – we just haven’t learned it.

That’s the background. Now I want to link listening to wilderness, wildness, and, perhaps, re-wilding.

The Canadian eco-poet Don McKay writes that: “before it becomes a speaking … poetry is only a listening”. A listening, he suggests, directed to the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations. It’s the quality of wilderness in all things that makes this possible. It’s a sense of this wilderness that allows our listening-to-the-world to bypass our desire to organize everything into fixed categories and neat concepts – and then, all too often, to claim that they represent reality. Listening to the wilderness in things is vital. It keeps us open to the infinite ambiguity, paradox and complexityofthe world. That openness makes empathetic imagination possible because it reminds usthat we, and the world, are alwaysbothmore andless than the categories that name and divide us.

I’m now going to take up these thoughts in relation to two of my own works, which I see as conversations-through-making, which relate to deep mapping.

Arguably,deep mapping or wild cartography originated as an approach to writing based on the same concerns as eco-poetics. Named after William Least Heat-Moon’sPrairyErth (a deep map),it offers an extended, interwoven but open-ended, evocation of ongoing conversations in and with a particular place in all its fullness. That’s to say, it allows us to see a place as what the geographer Doreen Massey calls a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’, including its often unheard, ignored or suppressed eco-stories.

Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig: a borderline episodeis the first part of a slow deep mapping project made into a book. Based on fieldwork on the English Scottish border, it began as a conversation with two places. One was a late Bronze-age farm site called Tamshield Rig. As you can see on the slide, it’s still marked on the OS map, although it was ploughed up and overplanted by the Forestry Commission long ago. The other place, Carterhaugh, is a fictional site at the heart of the old Borders ballad Tam Lin. However, there happens to be a Carter Burn just north of Tamshiel Rig with low lying meadows, or haughs, along its banks. I spent some three years in conversation with these two place. This involved exploring the history of wolves in the UK, delving into archeological and parish archives, reading ethnographies that link roe deer to the ‘good neighbours’, finding spectral traces of a proto-feminist wisdom encoded in very old ballads, and a whole lot else besides. The resulting book entangles texts, documentary photographs, maps, and collaged images. Ultimately, it’s about finding McKay’s sense of wilderness hidden beneath the surface of the former parish of Southdean; about eluding the mentalities that govern the tourist industry, the Forestry Commission, family history enthusiasts and Regional planning authorities, and so on.

For various reasons,I can’t do this kind of deep mapping anymore.Instead I’ve been making a series of small works in a series called Notitia.They’re about noticing, listening, or paying close attention to a place as a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’. Each work has a framed section with at least three photographic images related to the place. The rest of the framed space is given over to my conversation with those images. Beyond the frame there’s a related, fragmentary field, with extensions suggesting paths, rivers, or lines of flight that could be followed elsewhere. Each piece tries to condense a mosaic of voices concerned with particular attachments, connections and relationships.

Staying with this idea of place as a simultaneity-of-stories-so-far,I want to share one such simultaneity from South Africa. This work – Raaswater – shares its Afrikaans name with what was once a farm. A farm where, in the 1940s and 1950s, the maternal grandmother of the painter and performer Hanien Conradie grew grapes for export. It’s where her mother grew up. The farm was named after the raging sound of the river that ran through it, the Hartebees River. As a child, Hanien was enthralled by her mother’s stories about Raaswater, imagining it as an earthy paradise. A few years back she returned with her mother to see the farm,which she herself had never visited. They found it unrecognizable – the river silent and all indigenous vegetation gone. European farming methods had so radically destabilized the water ecology that the river is now dry for much of the year.

Deeply distressed, Hanien salvaged some clay from the river – clay like her mother had played with as a child – and took it into her studio. She created an imaginal ritual that allowed the river’s water to re-sound, to run wild again, which helped her evoke a new story. That story – Spore – is about land ownership, about loss of indigenous habitat, and about the importance of mourning the intersections of personal history and environmental irresponsibility. Astory that reminds us of the importance of listening – to water as much as to people – of paying close attention to what lies beyond the human.

In his book, How Forests Think: Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human, Eduardo Kohn shows how the world of an Amazon tribe speaks. But we’ve largely lost the ability to listen to the stories a landscape and its people tell. Stories that acknowledge wilderness, that keep active the empathetic imagination necessary to articulate a truly ecological vision of ourattachments, connections, and relationships. We’re now suffering the psychic, social and ecological consequences of that loss. To redress that loss we need to acknowledge that listening to the larger conversation with the world is frightening. It brings with it all the uncertainties of wilderness, the need to accept the risk that this conversation with the world will redefine us in ways beyond our understanding.

In a recent interview, Seamus Heaney’s daughter Catherine suggested her father:“must have cut himself up in order to do his civic duty, his poetic duty, his family duty and everything else.” I think that’s mistaken. A poet is, in the first instance, a listener to a mosaic of voices and develops empathetic imagination by listening to the dissonances and discomforts that flow from, among other things, the tensions between what she calls: “different duties”. It’s that process that enables what Karen Barad calls our‘emerging through and as part of our entangled intra-relatedness within the universe’. From an intra-relatedness that’s always more complex, untidier, and more ambiguous than our analytical and conceptual frameworks will allow.

So, when we hear a pair of lapwings call in flight, do we attend to our mutual entanglement with them? One that includes creating an environment that’s steadily reduced their numbers since the mid-19^thcentury.

Recently, I’ve engaged more directly with the eco-poetic possibilities of deep mapping by working with Erin Kavanagh, who is also engaged in deep mapping. She works as a poet, photographer, artist, and on the edge of academia, an ensemble practice that’s focused around creating narratives that open productive spaces between science – including ecology – and myth. In addition to deep mapping we share an interest in corvids – particularly ravens, rooks and crows. Last year we put together a performance lecture – TheCrow Road– for an eco-poetics conference at Sheffield Hallam University, organized by Harriet and Judy. (We performed it again more recently at Bath Spa university). The Crow Roadis partly an extended meditation on the phrase kith and kinand partly, as Erin puts it, an attempt to “plough up outmoded ways of thinking”.

A sample of Erin Kavanagh’s drawings from The Crow Road

We use a hybrid approach – somewhere between an animated graphic novel, a poetry reading and an academic presentation – to conjure up and involve our audience in a certain sense of wilderness. One in which Erin’s crow-girl, a changeling second cousin to Ted Hughes’ Crow,goes wayfaringthrough a kaleidoscopic landscape. A landscape made up of traces of upland country, scholarship, folklore, song lyrics, theories, farming practices, and personal histories. The crow-girl’s wayfaring enables each topic the chance to resonate with possibilities in the others. We want to shift the relationship between our audience and crows closer to one of kith and kinand, in doing so, to shift more fundamental presuppositions about how we’re related to the world. That’s to say the work is, among other things, an attempt at educational re-wilding, something I believe we badly need in our current culture.

I’d like to end by say that I think this educational re-wilding – or reattending to wilderness in Don McKay’s sense – is vital if we want to expand our ecologically empathetic imagination. I’d also suggest that this should be our first priority. It’s more important than, for example, imposing our human ideas of what species of non-human being should – or should not – be allowed back to live with us in any particular landscape.

Indicative bibliography

Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway, Duke University Press

Erin Kavanagh ‘Re-thinking the Conversation: a geomythologicaldeep map’ in Mark Gillings, Pirate Hacıgüzellerand Gary Lock (eds.) (2019) Re-Mapping Archaeology: Critical Perspectives, Alternative MappingsRoutledge.

Eduardo Kohn How Forests think: Towards an Anthropology beyond the Human University of California Press

Doreen Massy For Space SAGE Publications.

Don McKay Vis-à-Vis: fieldnotes on poetry and wilderness Gaspereau Press

Edward Sampson quoted by James Hillman ‘”Man is by nature a political animal” or: patient as citizen’ in SanduShamdasaniand Michael Munchow(eds) Speculations after Freud: Psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultureRoutlege.

Mary Watkins ‘Pathways between the multiplicities of the psyche and culture: the development of dialogical capacities’ in John Rowan & Mick Cooper (eds) The Plural Self SAGE

Nicholas Wroe ‘Seamus Heaney’s family on life with the great poet: ‘He was always just Dad at home’ The Guardian Sat. 30thJune 2018

Marega Palser – guest post

One thing leads to another…

For this sharing of words, I’d like to talk about living and working in Newport – the South Walien one as opposed to the one with the softer edges of Pembrokeshire.

The Newport I live in is often referred to as ‘a Shit’ole’ , ‘Rough as Fuck’ , and seen as a place you pass through on the train or coach on your way to other places. It lies on the banks of the River Usk, once busy with boats and ships, dating from when the Romans were ‘resident’ at Caerleon to the Industrial Age of coal and steel.

Because of the huge tidal range of the Usk, it has the ability to totally transform the appearance of the city – from a watery reflective ( depending on weather ) state, to a thick mud bath ideal for wading birds. ( someone once described it like “looking down on a mini Atlas Mountains” ).

Years ago, if anyone had said to me – one day you’re gonna live in Newport, and what’s more, you’re gonna like it ! . . . I would not have believed them – No fecKin’ way !! I grew up very much with Cardiff and London in my blood, and as I just mentioned, Newport was a place you passed through.

My first encounters with the PorT – as it’s commonly referred to – was in the early “90’s, coming to rehearse with a band I was in at the time called The Terrorist Ballet Dancers from Hell. We would rock up at a house in York Place and spend hours in the Basement getting stoned and playing music. It was here I got to meet a handful of Newport’s creatives – fresh (ish) out of Art College who’s one of many creative outlets was putting on happenings known as UFO nights, usually at TJ’s night club. The club would be decked out in a plethora of materials and dead foliage which would then be projected on, to create a pretty trippy backdrop for the soundtrack of the evening.

It was through my adventures to the PorT and getting to know a wonderFuLL combination of people that would partly inform the next chapter of my life – meeting Paul Burwell who was one of the founder members of Bow Gamalan.

Paul Burwell was a true maverick – mouthy, stubborn, and a person who got truly excited by noise, and anarchic energy. There was no hierarchy involved in the Gamalan and the very experienced played alongside the less so… it felt like a right of passage, a place where you were allowed to try things out , a testing ground of finding who you might become…

When I started writing this sharing of words, I had no intention of writing about Paul Burwell ; in my minds eye I thought I would quickly skip to the Newport of the Now … but I guess this is a great example, and a way in to getting at the heArT of what I would like to write about – for it seems to be that when you are not looking for the direction in which you are going that you seem to find the direction,

PART 2.

Empty Shops.

If it had not been for the Ryder Cup being held in Newport back in 2010 I wonder if the Empty Shops Project would have come in to being as quickly as it did. This sounds cynical I know, but…

Around this time I think it is safe to say that there were as many dying and empty shops as there were shops ‘Open for business’ ( a term later coined by Newport City Council to remind Newport’s inhabitants that despite the outer appearance of the city looking semi-derelict , everything was … ‘Open for Business’ and indeed, ’Open for Pleasure’….

The time leading up to the Ryder Cup became active in the respect of making Newport more aesthetically pleasing to the eye and one of the solutions was to give the empty shop spaces over to artists ( local and beyond ).

The new residents not only gave the city a new breath of life and colour but most crucially became spaces where you could meet other artists and people both interested and curious about art. For many, it became a life line.

It was in one of these shops where I first worked in Newport ( along with my husband / partner, Gareth Clark ). As the performance duo Mr and Mrs Clark, we were asked to ‘activate’ a shop space to host a project called ASSEMBLY initiated by National Theatre Wales. The idea behind the Assembly projects was to gleen information from locals about themselves and where they lived and then to make an evening’s event in which stories and scenarios would be shared.

It was through this experience of very much making it up on the spot that we started to engage with the eclectic mix of people that live and pass through Newport city centre.

I remember the waves of trepidation and fear as ideas that had til that point resided in the head, were now going to be tried out – in the flesh. Our first day of StuFF involved offers of a 30 second portrait ( of which I did many ), a lunchtime installation which was housed in the shop window, in which Mr Clark was wrapped in bubble wrap, and E. ( entrepreneur and expert in experimenting with narcotic mixes ) sat in a deckchair, and someone else might have been wearing a rubber cows head…. ( if it wasn’t on this occasion, it certainly happened at a later date ). This window of visual stimulation offered a different experience to the usual consumer experience and was the first step in what would be the beginning of many creative acts in the Port.

We got to meet the many artists and people who are creatively minded through putting on events like this, often using a cabaret format where all art forms and creative endeavours were given full license to bang up next to each other.

If the term Outsider Artist/s applies to those outside of the ‘art establishment’, then Newport is rich in Outsider Artists. – This may also explain why it is so difficult to pin down what exactly the ‘art scene’ in Newport is, because it is many things to many people ; it is an independent, many headed animal that seems to fly under the radar, seeking out the gaps and spaces created by others.

The Empty Shop project provided the foothold into further collaborative adventures both in and out of empty shops, and it was through these experiences that I started to get a true understanding of how arts practise can start impacting on the everyday rhythm of a place. It’s when people start to stop you to ask what are you going to be doing tomorrow ? that you know you have caught their attention, and more importantly, their curiosity !

TOP TIPS for creating art in places that do not have a visible ArT space.

Think of everywhere as a play space.
Make it Accessible !
The word accessible is terribly over-used, and will usually be applied to target ‘minority groups’ for funding purposes. The use of the word in this case means :
Make work so it is visible
Let people stumble across it, get curious
Talk about it – answer questions and ask questions
If you are working inside, have the door open – even if it is cold outside
Look at what is there ( and not there ) and use it as a playground, a set, a canvass
Involve people in the making and direction of what it is you are doing
Be the Bridge between the passing punter and the art work.
If you can’t gain access to empty shops, use the front of them to display work or make a pop up space – the worse thing that can happen is someone will ask you to take it down !

DEEP MAPS – WALKING the INNER DOG

If I had a dog, I would walk it regularly. I don’t have a dog, so I walk my inner dog instead.

Walking through Newport, especially if you follow the river, it is not too difficult to spot its industrial past. Tracks and man made, mud worn docking areas still follow the river down stream, and walls still hold remnants of metal hooks and rings, evidence that the industrial age was very much part of the fabric and making of the then town – now City.

It is a place where things, people and events nudge and bang up to each other. There is a feeling of defiance about the place and an air of independence.

Today, the tide was on the out breath, revealing wave patterns, reed banks and seaweed patches – good fodder for waders. It goes without saying there was the token shopping trolley, a couple of bikes, off cuts of trees…

The breakfast bar ( slang for the riverside peeps who like an early morning tipple ) is in session … ( we are familiar faces to each other and wave a Hello )…

Stepping off the feeder road, the rhythmic banter of the car auctioneers voice weaves between passing lorries.

At the Transporter Bridge I meet an Irish man on a bike. He has time on his hands ; reason for being in thePorT is due to football – the beautiful game. He’s been here to interview the manager or spokes person at Newport County, who recently beat Leeds Utd. He has an hour before the train back to London and we end up following the River back into town. It is through his questions about the place that I realise what a gateway and Junction Newport is – There are entrances and exits to many geogrphical possibilities here…

Usk, Abergavenny, Brecon, the old canal routes, mountains…

Iggy Pop once said, ‘Always know where you Spiritual Exits are…’ , this has always resonated with me and might have an added explanation of my love of the Port… you are never too far from getting out of it…literally.

It is an interesting time to be living in a place like Newport. For so long it has been in the shadow of cities like Cardiff and Bristol, unable to compete with its Big consumer heavyweight neighbours. When the shopping centre was still in its paper form, we did suggest to the council that it may be better to think about creating an alternative centre, one that would house a public square in which veg could be grown, surrounded by smaller, independent traders. Alas, they did not go for it. . . Quel Surprise !

About Marega

Marega is a performance based artist living in Newport, South Wales. Originally trained at the London Contemporary Dance School , and later studying Fine Art at Howard gardens ( then UWIC ) in Cardiff, she has worked and played solidly in the grey area that lies in between disciplines since the mid-eighties.

She is one half of the performance duo Mr and Mrs ClarK.

www.mrandmrsclark.co.uk

Photo taken outside the old elysium gallery in Swansea.

Luci Gorell Barnes – guest post

I am passionate and curious about what the arts can bring to academic research, and I have worked for many years as an artist researcher mainly with women who are in the UK as refugees or seeking asylum. I love arts-led research processes but I find that striking a balance between hands-on practice and academic theory can be tricky. The truth is that although I am drawn to academia, I am cautious as well. My main concern is that – despite professing to be open to different forms of knowledge – some academics can disregard the embodied learning discovered through creative practice.

A second concern of mine is that the nuanced understandings we seek often require us to tolerate periods of time when we feel quite lost. It can be hard to hold your nerve in these wilderness phases, and trust that by following your nose you will find your way to the things you need to discover. Moreover, when this unknowing runs alongside a path in which the desire to know is very strong, subtleties can be overwhelmed and deep understandings lost.

My third concern (for now) is that insubstantial fragments of practice can be smothered when too much meaning is made from too slight an event. It is tempting to extrapolate from what seems to be a meaningful moment of practice, and in our enthusiasm we can reach conclusions that lack rigour. If you add to that all of our different agendas, the different knowledges we possess, and the many languages we speak, then our deductions can seem precarious at best.

In creative research practice, as in many other aspects of life, we need interpreters; hybrid practitioners who can translate across boundaries. We need to widen our gene pool and move away from the spindly, breathless features that are present when things become very specialized. We need robust, conversational ways of working; work that isn’t finished; work that is still in transit. Maybe, above all, we need to resist thinking that we know anything very much about anything.

Companion Planting allotment project, connecting people through creative practice and organic gardening.

About Luci

My professional life began in the world of physical theatre but I gradually migrated to the realm of visual arts. My work revolves around themes of childhood, place and belonging, and I work with people who find themselves on the margins, developing flexible and responsive processes that allow us to think imaginatively with ourselves and each other. Issues of access, inclusion and engagement are integral to my work, and I see my practice contributing to a community of disciplines that embraces family support, health services, academic research, and education.

Convergences: Debatable Lands Vol. 3 – the conclusion of a deep mapping

A new year begins and I want to acknowledge that I have grown rather tired of my academic voice, it’s preoccupations and arguments. I respect it’s right to the views it has set out here, have even admired it for doing so on occasion. But it’s time for a change.

That change will manifest itself in two ways. Firstly, because I propose to allow another, less academic and more ‘writerly’, voice space here. This is the voice that has formed and informed Convergences: Debatable Lands Vol 3. Secondly, because I hope – as I’ve already indicated – to be putting up guest posts by people whose work I admire. A response to a growing need to ‘listen’ more, to make more space for other voices.

Convergences: Debatable Lands Vol 3 is the concluding work of my Debatable Lands deep mapping project, which goes back to 1999. I began this last part in 2013, when I was recovering from bowel cancer, and it takes the form of a text and image biography of Flora Buchan.

I will be putting some sections up here, but the complete work is now available on request as a pdf .

If you would like a copy, please contact me at: iain19biggs@gmail.com.

Convergences:

Debatable Lands Vol. 3

Flora Buchan

compiled and edited by

Iain Biggs

“Writing, when properly managed … is but a different name for conversation”.

Laurence Sterne[1]

[1] The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman Ware: Wordsworth Classics 1996, p. 75.

Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017)

There are four books on one of my shelves written or co-authored by Zygmunt Bauman, an internationally significant sociologist who died at the age of ninety-one on January 9^th. As his obituary in today’s Guardian makes very clear, Bauman was a man with a passionate concern to promote the ethics and values necessary to “a socially progressive Europe”. This was, no doubt, in part the fruit of his own experience as someone who, at different times, had been victimised by both the Nazis and the Communists. All these books continue to be valuable to me (if that was not the case, they wouldn’t have survived the rigorous culling of my books that’s necessary each time we move house). But it’s perhaps the Introduction to Intimations of Postmodernity (1992), and its first essay – ‘Legislators and Interpreters: Culture as the ideology of intellectuals” – that I’ve returned to most often. The other three texts Postmodern Ethics (1993), On Education, written with Riccardo Mazzeo (2012), and Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, written with Leonidas Donskis (2013), have all been valuable, but less central to forming my thinking.

There is a second, far less direct, reason why Zygmunt Bauman has been important to me. One of his three daughters, Lydia, is a landscape painter and, in 1997, the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock wrote: ‘The Poetic Image in the Field of the Uncanny’ about her work, the preface to an exhibition catalogue of Landscapes at the National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland. A version of this was later published in the catalogue to the first LAND2 exhibition and reproduced on the LAND2 web site. In addition to the valuable insights into aspects of landscape painting this essay offers, Pollock closes by citing a “revealing insight” from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, (1958/1964 p. 4):

The poetic image is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes, reverberates, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away.

The resonances of this essay’s conclusion stayed with me, and were later to encourage me to follow a line of thinking that would finally become clear only when I read the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney on ‘testimonial imagination’, which I now understand to be the central animating force for ‘open’ deep mapping. So, both directly and indirectly, I owe Zygmunt Bauman a profound debt of gratitude.

Dialogue in Place: Volume III / Shifting Perspectives

This publication, to coincide with the exhibition in Leeds, contains an essay I wrote about the work of Joyce Lyon and Andrea Thoma a while back, called The Conversational Weave (another place). (This can also be found on this web site in the section Texts, Talks, etc.).

Something Joyce wrote when she contacted me to tell me about the exhibition seems particularly pertinent at present, in that it demonstrates the value of a mutual, open engagement that’s not predicated on known positions. She writes:

“I need to tell you that in preparing and proofreading the book, I experienced a deeper intimacy with your essay that allowed me to see and appreciate it for and as itself, which I did not fully have before. I recognized that what I was then hoping for was a more fixed disciplinary appraisal! I see now that what you offered us, in all its “gappy”, thoughtful fluidity and movement towards home was so much richer and more significant. I am grateful to have been, with Andrea, catalysts in the development of your ideas”.

I would encourage anyone who is able to visit this exhibition.

Landscape Values: Place and Praxis – a personal response

[N.B. All the images are used with the permission of the person whose work is referred to].

Introduction

At the end of June I went to the west of Ireland to attend a conference – Landscape Values: Place and Praxis – organised by Tim Collins, Gesche Kindermann, Conor Newman and Nessa Cronin for the Centre for Landscape Studies at NUI, Galway. The conference was at NUI Galway because the university is a member of the UNISCAPE network, a Europe-wide group of universities concerned with landscape research, education, and the implementation of the European Landscape Convention. This gave the event its particular flavour and orientation. INSCAPE’s member institutions are drawn from across Europe, although universities in the UK and Germany are conspicuous by their absence. I’ll come back to the significance of all this later.

I have known Nessa for some time, originally through the Mapping Spectral Traces network and through a shared interest in deep mapping, and met Tim and Conor while I was working as a visiting researcher at NUI, Galway. Knowing them, I guessed this was likely to be an interesting and worthwhile event. Their thoughtfulness as individuals – and of Unescape as an organisation – was confirmed early on when all speakers were asked to submit written versions of their papers well ahead of the event itself. These appeared in a beautifully produced paperback book that was in our conference packs when we arrived. This enabling us to choose more productively which sessions we wanted to attend, without all the usual concern about missing altogether something vital by making the wrong choice on the basis of a short abstract.

What follows here is a personal reflection on the event as a whole although, I must admit, one filtered through my own interests in activities such as deep mapping. (Those unfamiliar with this cluster of practices might want to look at the Humanities Special Issue “Deep Mapping”, which can be downloaded for free and includes an article by Silvia Loeffler, whose work is referred to below).

Grounding empathetic imagination

I went to Galway two days early. I wanted to take the opportunity to catch up with my friend and former PhD student Dr Ciara Healy; also to meet with Nessa and Nuala Ni Fhlathuin – a doctoral student with whom we will be working (together with Deirdre O’Mahony). Arriving early also enabled me to unwind a bit before the event started.

Of the various presentations and events on the first day for myself the most memorable by far was the performance related to the Tim Robinson Archive: Artists in the Archive Project initiated by Nessa. This combined live music written by Tim Collins, choreography and dance by Ríonach Ní Néill, text, song, and a film by Deirdre O’Mahony. This performance provided a wonderful sensuously knowledgable counterpoint to the more general governance-oriented and other perspectives offered earlier in the day. As such it grounding my thinking back into the complexities of lived experience, lived traditions, and the tacit paradoxes that haunt the creation of the new Tim Robinson Archive, recently established in the James Hardiman Library at NUI, Galway, following his decision to return to London.

The second day of the conference extended that sense of grounding, with all conference attendees going out into the region on one of four carefully themed and structured field trips. Having an interest in bogs – practically through my friend Christine Baeumler and as archetypal psycho-geographical sites through James Hillman and others, I joined the trip to the turf bog at Lough Boora, which included a visit to Ballinsloe and the Shannon. Direct contact with several active members of the local community there, who are trying to work out a future in the face of the scaling-back of turf cutting, enabled us to get a clearer sense of the difficulties and opportunities that result from the implementation of environmental policy. In a small way it also gave us an opportunity to contribute ideas and information that might be of some use to the community.

The work that has been undertaken at Lough Boora is impressive and the dedication of those trying to construct an alternative future was as inspiring as it was humbling. The EU’s shift to restrict turf cutting on environmental grounds, still highly controversial in Ireland, has led to a great deal of innovative action by the community. My overall impression from our discussions was of their willingness to open themselves to new possibilities and of the pressing need for people in academia and the cultural sector (individuals with specialist knowledge) to listen, and try to try respond appropriately, to the needs of local communities hungry to find ways to save themselves from what is effectively social annihilation by decisions made elsewhere. Often with too little consideration as to how their impact ‘on the ground’ might be mediated and transformed into possibilities rather than what must often seem like a slow death sentence. That Conor Newman, who organised our trip, had clearly gone to some trouble to build a relationship with the group who met us was reflected in the warmth and appreciation they brought to our exchanges.

Following our visit three speakers presented in a small church in the afternoon. One was Patrick Devine-Wright (from Exeter University), whose presentation on Varieties of place attachments and community responses to energy infrastructures: a mixed method approach reinforced my earlier impressions and suggested ways in which the kind of alternative mappings that interest me might be deployed in such contexts. This set up interesting suppositions in relation to another of the presentation, by Sophia Meeres, on Infrastructural struggles: the making of modern Arklow, Ireland. This showed how architecture students working in a learning context can make use of deep mapping processes to plot a city as a changing taskscape, where the detailing of its infrastructure struggles over a two-hundred-year period become the basis of an analysis of the decisions that inform the space of a communal lifeworld.

Given the length of the conference and number of parallel sessions that I could (and could not) attend, it will be obvious that I can’t possibly comment even on those presentations I did attend. Consequently, I will concentrate on a few that particularly spoke to me in terms of my own interests – by Jacques Abelman, Aoife Kavanagh, Silvia Loeffler, Sophia Meeres (touched on above), and Eilis Ni Dhuill. (I deliberately did not go to sessions at which my friends Simon Read, Ciara Healy, Geared O hAllmhurrain, Harriet Taro and Judy Tucker and Karen Till and and Gerry Kearns presented, since I wanted to experience ideas from people I didn’t know. However their essays in the conference publication are well worth reading).

Jacques Abelman works as a landscape architect and is currently based in the Netherlands (but will move shortly to teach in the USA). His presentation – Cultivating the City: Infrastructureof Abundance in Urban Brazil – interested me both for its content and because it’s tenor seemed to me to reflect his broad education and experience. This took place in the USA, England and the Netherlands (his first degree is in environmental science with fine arts and philosophy), and he worked as an environmental artist, ecological builder, and garden designer before moving into sustainable design and landscape architecture. The presentation provided a succinct and intriguing introduction to his Urban L.A.C.E. / Renda da Mata project. (L.A.C.E. stands for Local Agroforestry, Collective Engagement, while Renda da Mata means “Forest Lace” in Portuguese), which I won’t try to outline or discuss here since it can be much better explored via his web site. However, what particularly impressed me was the way in which it built on sustained fieldwork on the ground – resulting in an impressive and well-grounded range and depth of knowledge. In a sense this project provides an exemplary model for the type of practically-oriented ‘deep’ approach to researching the basis for a socio-environmentally responsible landscape architecture of which I had a brief and tantalising taste when discussing deep mapping with landscape architect students and their teachers at Virginia Tech some years ago.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jacques’ presentation raised a number of issues around landscape democracy and questions of de-professionalism (as underwritten by disciplinarily) and given the claim that ‘citizens do not operate within disciplines’. However during the exchange after the presentation I was somewhat rebuked by one audience member for apparently suggesting a ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top-down’ model in relation to specialist/vernacular collaborations and issues of responsibility for the Commons. This led to a brief but fruitful exchange about the need to set aside supposedly ‘modernist’ and ‘authoritarian’ notions of the professional or specialist (which in my view are not restricted to the modern period but rather embedded in the culture of possessive individualism), towards notions of an ability to make authoritative specialist contributions to debate and action with regard to the Common Good. Here the example of Brexit might be seen as indicative of what happens when populist political views predicated on prejudice and outright lies gain the upper hand. Given Michael Gove’s now notorious execration of ‘experts’ this seemed a point well worth absorbing.

Aoife Kavanagh

Aoife Kavanagh is a professional musician (piano, violin, flute, and viola) and music teacher who is currently undertaking a PhD on music, place-making and artistic practice in the Geography Department at NUI, Maynooth. Her presentation – Making Music and Making Place: Mapping Musical Practice in Smaller Places – is based on the working premise that places, perhaps particularly in Ireland, may have a ‘musical ecology’ that extends well beyond performance by professional musicians and that understanding that ecology spatially, through ‘community deep mappings of of music and place’, can give a ‘voice to people in places to uncover and document that which might otherwise be overlooked’. In certain ways her approach seems to me to resonate quite closely with that employed by Luci Gorell Barns’ Cartographers of compassion: community mapping of human kindness project in Bristol, albeit in a different register. Interesting, she has built on Rebecca Krinke’s (2010) project Mapping of Joy and Pain, with it’s particular emotional focus, while adapting this approach as a way to collectively ‘map’ more nuanced and complicated ‘musical stories’. Of particular interest to me were Aoife’s comments on the challenges involved in this project, since these tend to reinforce my own views. Namely that a combination of positions – those of ‘insider’ (in her case the importance of being a musician/music teacher who understands the passions and limitations of the ‘lifeworld’ in which she is working) and ‘outsider’ (researcher/cartographically-oriented artist) – is a central aspect of this type of work. This first became clear to me in relation to Ffion Jones’ work in mid-Wales, which took her parents’ sheep farm – Cwmrhaiadr – as the focus of her PhD project. One in which this dual role was central to her concern with ‘woollying the boundaries’ between the world of upland sheep farming in Wales and academic understandings of rural life. This seems particularly important when the researcher is also embedded in the lifeworld of a particular community and so must act as a ‘bridge’ between worlds distinguished by emphasis on performativity on one hand and discourse on the other.

Silvia Loeffler

Silvia Loeffler is a post-doctoral researcher at NUI, Maynooth and currently holds an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project Glas Journal, A Deep Mapping of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, which was the subject of her conference paper. She has also published an illuminating article on the project – Glas Journal: Deep Mappings of a Harbour or the Charting of Fragments, Traces and Possibilities .which I would recommend to readers interested in this area of work.

Taken together, these two texts provide a valuable record of the project and make a useful contribution to on-going discussions about this type of chronotopic mapping work. Although her title for the conference paper – Place Values – Glas Journal: A Deep Mapping of Dun Laoghaire Harbour (2014-2016) – uses the term ‘deep mapping’, she spoke of her work primarily in terms of both ‘liquid’ and ‘tender’ mappings (with the inevitable resonance of Giuliana Bruno’s discussion of Madaleine de Scullery’s Carte du pays de Tendre in her Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film).

This seems entirely appropriate for a ‘collaborative, multidisciplinary cartography project that explores the layered emotional geographies of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, Dublin, that focuses on ‘performatively mapping the intimate rituals and everyday performances of those individuals who live and work in the harbour’. In the abstract to the Humanities article, Silvia refers to the work as ‘a hybrid ethnographic project’ concerned with ‘the cultural mapping of spaces we intimately inhabit’. She adds that by developed the project with the participation of local inhabitants of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, the project is able to explore the maritime environment as a liminal space, one in which the character of buildings and the area’s economic implications ‘determine our relationship to space as much as our daily spatial rhythms and feelings of safety’.

The project is as ambitious as it is complex. Currently Silvia is working with fourteen individuals who live and work in the harbour to produce handmade books that will constitute a record of ‘what the harbour space means to the residents based in the old coastguard station along with individuals involved with a host of other harbour related organisations and clubs. What seems to me particularly valuable about this project is summed up in relation to the richness and complexity of reference and evocation in Glas Journal Border Map (Sept. 2014) and other work illustrated above. She summarises ‘the interactions between human beings and their habitat’ as existing as: ‘a constant flux of appearance, disappearance and reappearance that may be compared to a tidal system regulating liquid states of times and places’. Given the preoccupation throughout the conference with issues of heritage this statement seems to me to evoke a powerful lesson that, in our often over-literal haste to preserve the past, we are still reluctant to take on board.

Sophia Meeres

Sophia Meeres has taught in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Planning at University College, Dublin since 2004. As mentioned above, she gave a presentation entitled Infrastructural struggles: the making of modern Arklow, Ireland. This described a long-term collaborative project with her Masters students that relates directly to her teaching at UCD, which places an emphasis on ‘resilience, sustainable design and development’ and is taught within a multi-disciplinary context and a an ‘understanding of site-specific processes’ with a focus on research and analysis ‘seen as a creative act’. The overarching concern is ‘to help uncover local opportunities and potential for future directions’, something that spoke directly to the experience of speaking with the various individuals working to create a new understanding of Lough Boora and the communities linked to it. It is indicative that an earlier paper – A Biographical Approach to Understanding the Landscape (a contribution to the Landscape and Imagination. Towards a new baseline for education in a changing world ) – proposes a biographical approach to landscape that: ‘seeks to better understand local cultural conditions, issues and circumstances, disclosed through stake-holder participation and by other means, by linking present conditions to the past physical, social and economic “life” of a place and its people.’

The aim of such an approach is to better understand a place in ways I would see as aligning to both deep mapping and to Kenneth Frampton’s notion of Critical Regionalism in that it’s focus is on gaining: ‘greater and more detailed understanding of a settlement in its milieu’ with a view to articulating ‘development proposals that respond better to place’ Sophia believes – rightly in my view – that this “biographical approach” ‘has potential in terms of practice, research and landscape architectural education’, a belief that clearly animates the work she and her students have undertaken in relation to Arklow.

Eilís Ní Dhúill

Eilís Ní Dhúill is a polymath whose research interests include storytelling, folklore and film. She has a particular interest in the use of film to present Irish-language literature, drama and culture and has published in this area. She gave a presentation entitled: Sounds of the past in west Kerry: Creating, recalling and transmitting cultural values through place-names and associated narratives. I find it hard to give a clear account of this presentation because I became fascinated by resonances in what Eilís was saying as these might relate to my interest in the English/Scottish Borders region. Her focus on the way in which Irish place-names catalyse story-telling in west Kerry led me to ask her whether these stories were in any sense gendered – that is whether men and women told different stories about the same places. It appears that they do, a point I would link to the implications of different categories of Border ballads. That said, the nature of our conversation is probably too particular to my rather idiosyncratic interests in folk lore to be of general concern.

Afterthoughts

Although at one level I found the bulk of the conference very enjoyable and rewarding, I also have a strange feeling that the conference I experienced it was probably not that experienced by the majority of attendees. This may be due to the fact that we tended to fall into rather different categories with interests that, while they undoubtedly overlapped, may have had less in common in terms of framing and orientation than UNISCAPE may assume. My experience may also have be influenced by the fact that I live in a country utterly divided socially and politically, and not just over Europe. A country whose government’s austerity measures and social security reforms have, for example, just been the subject of a United Nation’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights report that confirms these are in breach of their obligations to human rights. This gives me continual pause for thought in relation to those whose power and authority is linked to forms of cultural and intellectual capital sanctioned by the status quo – including those who represent their institutions as part of bodies like UNISCAPE.

It is significant that just before the conference opened UNISCAPE held its General Assembly (the institutional equivalent to a business AGM), an fact that no doubt ensured that many attendees were senior academics representing member institutions. In short, UNISCAPE is deeply enmeshed in the realpolitik of a resilient neo-liberal status quo and these senior academics are members of an elite that can expect to engage directly with effecting issues of planning and governance. They also appeared to be for the most part from Social Science disciplines and landscape architecture practices. They and their proteges were also the keynote conference speakers. A second, more diverse contingency was made up of people with a background in the visual arts or music and an interest in ecological and landscape issues, including those related to environmental and heritage governance. A third group crossed between these two categories, many of them landscape architects with a practical interest in the uses of creative fieldwork.

It seems to me that what the first group have in common is a professional interest in landscape research, education, and the implementation of the European Landscape Convention through reform and governance relating to landscape planning and heritage. However, my underlying sense of this interest is that it is heavily framed by a detached/’objective’ thinking about landscape (including place as heritage), rather than direct emersion in specific places as an active constituent of their own particular lifeworld. As such their interests often seemed to lack either the psycho-cultural dimensions of what James Hillman calls the ‘thought of the heart’ or the empathetic imagination that, as Paul Ricoeur reminds us, is necessary to any effective political mediation. (And this at a time when the authority and ‘objectivity’ of science – for example as practiced in the medical field in the UK – has been shown to be utterly degraded, simply a debased ‘post-factual’ science in thrall to our debased ‘post-factual’ politics).

So I sometimes had the sense that individuals in these two different groups were, often without realising it, quite simply talking past each other. There was very little transformative conversation as I understand it. This may, of course, be largely a reflection of my own prejudgements and bias. That said I sensed that, for the first group, the second were in the last analysis an irrelevance, except in so far as they enabled reflection on some aspect of ‘heritage’ as traditionally defined. The engaged arts as a living, socio-political energy is simply not something they can acknowledge. This may be to put the case too strongly but it relates directly to a conversation I had with Teresa Pinto Coreia, from ICAAM – Instituto de Ciências Agrárias e Ambientais Mediterrânicas, Universidade de Évora, after she had given a very interesting presentation called: Landscape values under pressure: tensions in the management of extensive silvo-pastoral systems in Southern Iberia.

I recognised many of the difficult issues she spoke of from my own interest in conflicted rural areas. Whether in terms of the difficulties facing farmers in upland regions in the UK, in rural Ireland in relation to small-scale family turf-cutting, or from what I know of the history of local resistance to the formation the Wadden Sea National Parks in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and that, in Germany and Denmark, constitute the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Wadden Sea. Put simply, it is the problem of a clash between small-scale largely rural communities in which authority still largely based on specific forms of performativity in a given taskscape, and the worlds of academic research and governance which take as given an understanding of authority predicated on their own methodological and discursive sophistication as underwritten by a logocratic realpolitik. Two radically different ways of understanding and so acting in the world. Her response to my making something of the points outlined above was polite incomprehension and the view that, by working with students in the university, they would find a way forward.

The whole point of people like myself, Simon Read, Ciara Healy and others with an imaginal arts aspect to their compound practice attending the conference might be said, as I tried to explain to Teresa Pinto Coreia, to show that certain types of art practice are ideally placed to mediate between these two radically different ways of understanding and acting in the world. However, if that brief conversation was anything to go by, I certainly failed to do so. Not I believe for any lack of trying on either of our parts but because, as a professional group, those in the arts remain mentally marginalised by academic thinking, located as we are off to one side of the logocratic hierarchy that underwrites its realpolitik. (As a fairly distinct group we presented no keynote to the assembled attendees that could have facilitated such an exchange at the level of intellectual debate). Because of this institutional marginalisation the arts as an informed way of knowing the world – other perhaps than landscape architecture seen as an art – has no real role in UNISCAPE as an alliance of European institutions other than as ‘passive heritage’. This in turn reflects, of course, the marginal place of arts and music education as an alternative mode of understanding in the education system as a whole. The consequences of this fundamental lack in a culture of possessive individualism are now horribly clear in the political and socio-environmental situation of the UK.

It’s not for me to suggest how, as an international organisation, UNISCAPE might address this situation. However, if an initiative to address this were to be launched, it might perhaps be done from Ireland. There ‘cultural heritage’ in the sense of place or landscape may be somewhat less isolated from living forms of imaginative culture and thinking than in many other countries. So, while in some senses I was deeply disappointed by the situation I’ve tried to indicate (perhaps too clumsily) above, I still see Ireland as a site of promise and a source of guarded optimism, particularly now that the UK has turned it’s back on the EU project rather than trying to reform it. I also see UNISCAPE as an important international organisation with an annual conference I was more than glad to attend, if only because it enabled me to see the issues outlined above more clearly.

Good people in dark times

I have been working away at two texts – a book chapter entitled Re-visioning “North” as an ecosophical context for an education in creative practices – and a presentation for a panel at the Royal Geographical Conference in London in September: The realpolitik of the art/geography nexus as ‘generative encounter’. Both, in very different ways, relate to what I increasingly see as the abject failure of the university system to provide an education appropriate to the situation in which we, as Northern Europeans, now find ourselves both socially and environmentally.

My usual difficulty with writing has been further exacerbated in the case of these two pieces by a couple of additional problems. Firstly, I’ve needed to keep the very real anger about what is happening to good people we know due to the rank abuse of power and privilege by members of the psychiatric and medical establishment out of my writing, since it’s inappropriate in that context. That’s proved very difficult and I’ve had to do a lot of editing and rewriting to achieve it. Secondly, I’ve been struggling to reconcile my sense of that abject failure “in general” with a couple of encounters I’ve had recently with ex-students from arts courses for which I once had responsibility.

Both women have typically compound interests. One now works as a librarian and a volunteer at the Royal West of England Academy. She talked at length about its exhibitions policy and the positive public perception of the current exhibition Gemma Brace and I co-curated there. The other is involved in socially engaged arts practice and facilitation, works part-time in a local gardening center, and is considering applying for a Masters degree in curation. Both recognised me and were clearly pleased to talk to me again. Both are people who, although I had long ago forgotten them, I am pleased to have discovered are still living and working in the city we all share as home. I also feel – perhaps inappropriately – rather proud to have been a part of their education, something that seems somewhat at odds with my current sense of the deepening failure of the academic enterprise. I am starting to wonder, however, whether this is a wholesale institutional failure affecting the outlook and actions of all its members or, alternatively, something more like a virus that infects some members of the institution to varying degrees but not others not at all. While it is tempting to assume the first, the second is almost certainly the case.

Some time in the late 1990s I read Arran E Gare’s Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis. Of the many observations it contains, few are more chilling than those that occur when he is writing on the class he refers to as ‘the new international bourgeoisie’. This class – which certainly includes many senior academics and academic managers – is, he insists, a class contributing nothing to human welfare; a class whose attitude he believes is “summed up in the words of an economist writing in Business and Society Review: ‘Suppose that, as a result of using up all the world’s resources, human life came to an end. So what?”’ (p.12).

When I first read that I assumed that he was over-reacting to the glib bravado of some aberrant junior economist who, given a chance to make his voice heard, was desperate to impress his equally glib peers in some junior office backroom in an international counting-house. I even imagined the speaker in the image of the type of immature, arrogant, pampered late adolescent who, as a drunk first year Bristol University student, thinks it is daring to shout obscenities at the top of his voice at 2.00 am on a Sunday morning in Clifton (where I used to live). In short, someone unthinking and irresponsible as they are profoundly irritating is, beyond that, hardly a cause for concern.

I now realise I could not have been more wrong.

The attitude Gare identifies is not that of an aberrant individual who, with a bit of luck, will quickly grow up a bit but, exactly as he claims, one that defines the essential orientation of a whole class of people – including many of the political elite running the country. Taken in conjunction with Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s recent article Big Science is Broken , the ongoing deconstruction of what is starting to look like blatant scientific fraud in conjunction with the Pace medical trail , which is also featured in George Falkner’s report In The Expectation of Recovery: Misleading Medical Research and Welfare Reform , Gare’s characterization is a stark reminder of the depths to which a substantial proportion of the professional classes have descended in a world now wholly given over to the culture of possessive individualism. What I find particularly distressing, given my own personal employment history, is the extent to which the academic world is implicated in the worst forms of deception and self-serving opportunism that Gorbry and Falkner document.

Going back to my two former students, I’m still left pondering the tension between my sense of their worth and persistence and the increasing degradation of the system through which they passed. Part of that tension is, of course, down to the difference between academic teaching as a vocation – the face-to-face business of a conversational exchange – and the world of academic research that, at least outside the arts and humanities, has now very largely been co-opted by the new ‘entrepreneurial’ orientation of academic senior management – epitomised by the self- identification in financial terms of Vice-chancellors as CEOs.

In the end, however, I’m left with a sense of pride in the achievements of those in whose education I’ve played some small part. Not because of their “achievements” in the sense used by Deans and Vice-chancellors to impress anxious parents on public occasions – although I’m also proud of the extraordinary work my PhD students, for example, do manage to do – but because they have survived into early middle age with their curiosity and spirit intact, have in some indefinable yet very real way found ways in which to be – to borrow from Hannah Arendt’s book title – good people in dark times.