[This is the slightly amended text of a presentation given for a postgraduate conference organised by doctoral students at Cardiff University – Breaking Boundaries – given on May 11th, 2021.] I’ll start with an observation by Stephen Sterling, Emeritus Professor of Sustainable Learning at the University of Plymouth. He points out that our education system can’t address the […]
I have been re-reading William Least-Heat Moon’s PrairyErth: (A Deep Map). I’m doing this both for pleasure and, as it now happens, in preparation for a presentation I hope to be able to deliver in July next year, COVID-19 permitting. I have also been intellectually accompanying a PhD student, registered with the University of Groningen in […]
I have just received a copy of Walking Bodies: Papers, Provocations, Actions edited by Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind and Phil Smith and published by Triarchy Press. This contains a chapter based on a paper I gave at the Walking’s new Movements conference in Plymouth 2019 and is called: Walking Away? From deep mapping to mutual accompaniment. I also see […]
In 1969-70 the painter and bibliophile R B Kitaj made a series of screenprints that reproduced the covers of books he had collected. He also wrote: “Some books have pictures, and some pictures have books” and, in a related statement: “I’ve written some short stories or prose-poems for some of my pictures. They have no life […]
Introduction For some years now my practice has been gradually reconfigured, moved away from the conception of deep mapping that had evolved over the previous last twenty years. That conception was ultimately inseparable from walking as a way of engaging with the physicality of place, as a vital counterpoint to its multiplicity of invisible aspects. […]
I heard today from an Irish friend that Tim Robinson, the artist turned writer and cartographer who was best known for his two volume Stones of Aran and his books and maps of Connemara, has died as a result of CORVID-19. He passed away at St. Pancras hospital on 3 April 2020 at the age of 85, two weeks after […]
It’s hard to know how we are going to get through this pandemic – our household of three is now in self-isolation – without my going stir crazy. But various solutions are already starting to appear. One of the best appears to be to walk in memory, using ongoing conversations with friends as an aid. […]
This is a slightly modified version of the text of a presentation given at the Culture Climates: Fostering Art for Sustainability – Time for a new Cultural Policy? workshop held at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway, and organised by Dr Nessa Cronin, on May 14th, 2019. I’m very grateful to Nessa for the invitation to speak today, […]
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 […]
A small pink geranium (listening to the dead) As I’m sure I’ve said, all this writing was originally meant to be a way of listening to the dead, to the ancestors of my life, and was vaguely conceived as a missive to both yourself and Sarah as representatives of my own and the next generation. But […]