Recently, I’ve read texts by two women who have used forms of deep mapping in order to engage more fully with particular places to which they’ve been drawn. The more extensive of the two texts, “Dying Water: An investigation into the uncommoning, attention, and poetic first-aid in the watery landscape of the River Leven” is by Genevieve Sawyer Males. It’s her dissertation for a Masters by Research in Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, part of the University of Dundee, where she’s been working there with Professor Mary Modeen, with whom I co-authored Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place: Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residency. The second text is a second draft of a chapter for a doctoral project, provisionally called “Every Contact Leaves a Trace: An investigation into the potential of ceramic and print process to extend understanding of the temporal, material and transient in landscape”. It’s by Sally Wetheral, a doctoral student at Bath Spa University, and part of a deep mapping of the landscape that enfolds the village in which she and her family live.

There’s a great deal that could be said about both the social and environmental values embodied by these projects and about the particular ways in which each employs a specific and distinctive form of deep mapping. However interesting and valuable as these are, they are not my concern here. Although it is related to the values these two texts embody, my focus here has been prompted by one aspect of an exchange I’ve been have with Siân Barlow about the reductive mentality created by over-reliance on the pervasive “short-hand” of taken-for-granted categories.

Siân and I know each other through the Utopias Bach collaborative and a shared interest in poetry. She lives in Wales, writes poems and makes visual art but, as she writes in a recent email, it is always: “dangerous to put people into categories of identity, for almost any reason I can think of”. (In a previous email I had used a series of categories: of gender, nationality, language, vocation and age to characterise my sense of myself in relation to a particular event). She adds that, in “bundling up identities” using those categories in the way that I had, I risk “obscuring within that a spectrum of differences, and maybe worse, obscuring a core commonality”.

The implications of the first danger are indicated by Geraldine Finn’s observation that “we are always both more and less than the categories that name and divide us”. (An observation I built on to articulated the situation of those whose creativity is not easily identified simple as that of “an artist” in the book chapter ‘Ensemble Practices’, published in the Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm). I am, in short, both more and less than is implied by naming my gender, nationality, language, vocation and age.

However, it’s the second danger that strikes me as particularly relevant to what we attempt when we get involved in deep mapping. While we may set out to indicate and evoke, in part through articulating the particularities and differences that go into making up our experience of place, what is nevertheless an underlying sense of what Siân refers to as “a core commonality”, too exclusive a focus on those particularities and differences may obscure a deeper commonality.

A commonality I see as the result of a shared sense of being enmeshed in and with a myriad of psycho-socio-environmental relationships. A dynamic that I understand as being grounded in and inseparable from what might be called an underlying “conversational weave”. (In Anglo-Saxon poetry “word-weaver” was a common metaphor for a narrator, and as such the image of waeving seems to me highly relevant to Paul Ricoeur’s notion of “narrative identity”). Conversation, then, is not simply an open exchange of the lements out of which narrative identities are “woven” between people, although that is obviously deeply important element of it. It’s also, and perhaps more profoundly, the unending flow of exchange that grounds us through our attending to the world. Attending here both in the sense of listening, as when a teacher says “please pay attention” to her class, but also in the sense of caring, as when a doctor asks a nurse to “attend to” a patient’s medical needs. 

As it happens, I have recently been fortunate enough to experience something of how the unfolding of an example of this broader understanding of conversation takes place in practice. A conversation that, in this case, was focused by collective attending to an area of land with the ultimate aim of restore it to something closer to its condition prior to enclosure, to the quarrying still evident near the road that runs through the lower, norther, end of the plot, and the post-quarrying planting of a plantation of sitka spruce.   

Clearing Sitka Spruce

I initially became caught up in this conversation back in May of this year when Charlotte, a former student on the art degree I was responsible for at UWE, Bristol, contacted me about her growing interest in deep mapping. Both in relation to the particular plot of land she and Will are concerned with and also with regard to its potential for inter- and trans- disciplinary approaches within school education. That initial contact led to an online meeting and to my discovering that she and her partner Will were working to convert their plot of land via what might best be described, not as “re-wilding” so much as a return to an earlier, less monocultural, state. A mixed state of affairs environmentally-speaking that, as far as Will and I can tell would, prior to enclosure, have constituted what Will describes as the “commons and wastes of the Manor”, and area without “field boundaries”, and “a mix of rough grazing, water courses” – the beck and a now-covered field drain run down from an old and still existent area of mire or bog – along with “lots of scrub, teeming with wild life”.

South end of the plot situated on the edge of a mire.

The plot, known as Farlands, is situated less than an hour’s drive from where my wife, our daughter and I spend our summers in Co. Durham so, following an invitation to visit both Charlotte’s studio and Farlands, I went over and spent the best part of a day with Charlotte, Will and three of their friends. One of whom works for the Woodland Trust and has been advising on how best not only to remove and replace the Sitka Spruce in Farlands’ wooded area, but also to extend its area of woodland into what is now a field. This, together with the “daylighting” and sequential partial damming of the field drain, should transform the plot back into a type of wooded mire that can still be found in isolated areas in the English / Scottish border region.

Wooded wetland