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.