The Truths Of Fictions: Post-Traumatic Landscapes, Civic Erasure And The Projects Of Artistic Resistance.

The text below comprises the full presentation script of my paper at the 2014 Unofficial Histories conference. Note: this paper has been developed from a piece I presented at the Occursus Post Traumatic Landscapes Symposium last year, which we think is the first time that the term ‘Post-Traumatic Landscapes’ was used.

Part 1. Monument, Memorial, Memory And Forgetting

‘tell me what you forget and I will tell you who you are’
Marc Augé, from Oblivion (2004)

In his 2004 essay Oblivion, Marc Augé explored the relationship between memory and forgetting, and proposed that ‘memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea’. He goes further than this, implying not just a relationship between the two, but a kind of complicity that suggests that we can shape our memories, and therefore our identities according to the self-mythology that we either consciously or unconsciously desire – or, to put it another way, that an active forgetting, an active erasure, is vital in maintaining the truths of the histories that we want to write – the histories that best serve our passions and our interests. I will examine the work of creative, resistant remembering, regarding traumatic and violent acts in terms of the materiality and emotion of physical place. We are all subject to official narratives of what can be remembered, what memories the civic body can bear; the most visible markers of what we might call ideologies of memory are monuments and memorials, and I would point to the textual emphasis on place in these official inscriptions. ‘Here lived, here lies, here fell, here died’.

Screen Shot 2014-12-18 at 17.08.39 — Memorial to Sergeant John Speed, Kirkgate, Leeds

Police officer Jon Speed was shot dead outside Leeds Parish Church in 1984 and a monument was erected on the pavement to mark the spot where he died. Every year a memorial service is held on the street. This is the Rector of Leeds speaking in 2005:

“Sgt John Speed was a brave man, willing to risk his life in the course of his duty. He was struck down by a fatal bullet and we pay tribute to his courage and devotion to duty and think of his family and loved ones whose lives were so cruelly changed by the tragic events we remember today”.

His words point out the obvious truths regarding the tragedy of lives lost to violence and the terrible effect on those left behind, but they also outline the criteria by which such events and such victims are allowed to be remembered, and materially marked. Brave, dutiful, courageous, incorporated into the civic body by virtue of profession, politics or belief, above all respectable, and, by extension, innocent. The plaque itself is made from the traditional materials that physically embody these strict conventions: metal and stone – a working into permanence, an inscribing into history.

2. Telling Tales: A House, A River And A Field

‘Nothing defines the specific rootedness of a location – the transformation of a place into a site – more than its being founded on a grave’. Francesco Pellizzi

Luke Bennett and Amanda Crawley-Jackson have outlined three categories of ‘Post-traumatic Landscape’, none of which are mutually exclusive, and which may include contested and non-contested sites, and be either physical, conceptual or fictional.

– a place where something traumatic has happened in or on the landscape

The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Roger Fenton (1835). Cannonballs left on a battlefield during the Crimean War � — The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Roger Fenton (1835). Cannonballs left on a battlefield during the Crimean War

– a place where something traumatic has happened to the landscape

Furnace Park, Sheffield. Photograph: Amanda Crawley-Jackson. No digging is allowed due to post industrial soil toxicity . Now the site of an Occursus/plastiCities project to make ‘a space for creative production’. � — Furnace Park, Sheffield. Photograph: Amanda Crawley-Jackson. No digging is allowed due to post industrial soil toxicity . Now the site of an Occursus/plastiCities project to make ‘a space for creative production’.

– a place where a subject performs or narrates trauma to and of themselves within a landscape

Between Hull and Spurn Point, a 65 mile 33 hour continuous walk by writer/artist Brian Lewis. 2013

The traumatised sites and the corresponding creative resistance that I examine here all relate to the first of Bennett and Crawley-Jackson’s categories. Sites where harm was done: sites that are contested, forgotten, and erased; and where, in different ways, the work of ‘fiction’ – a term which I use here to describe all areas of artistic and creative practice – ‘performs’ the sites back in to life.

Part 3. And Every Brick, And Every Piece Of Rubble…

‘’Matter’ feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.’ Karen Barad

25 Cromwell Street was the home of Fred and Rosemary West, the site where they tortured, murdered, dismembered and buried 9 of their 13 known victims, both in the house and in the garden. It is in the nature of buildings that they are part of the fabric of an urban landscape that can be bounded, delineated and specifically identified in the way that streets, or hills, cannot. They are material objects that occupy a distinct physical space: bricks, concrete, tiles, joists, enmeshed in a body as distinct as the ones of flesh and bone that we inhabit. This distinction is important, for to forget and disappear such a body requires a physical labour, an effort of erasure that matches the body’s construction. The effort made by Gloucester city council to erase the house went beyond such parity. An extended analysis of the complexities of civic shame and disquiet would require its own paper, but suffice it to say that so great was the city’s desire to eradicate the visible signifiers of the West’s atrocities that the consensus was not so much for demolition, as for obliteration, cleansing, and forgetting. The bricks and mortar of the house were taken away and crushed, pulverized to dust. Gordon Burn, in his 1998 account of the West’s atrocities Happy Like Murderers, describes the process thus:

‘The job of taking the house down was given to the local family firm of the Bishops whose lorries carry the slogan ‘We’ll bring it down to earth’. […] The Bishops had been commissioned not only to remove all the materials from the site but to destroy them. There was a crushing machine at the Gloucester tip in Hempstead by the docks. And every brick and every piece of rubble was dismantled and driven to Hempstead and crushed to dust. Timber and everything flammable was taken to RAF Innsworth and put in an incinerator and burned there and the ashes crushed. The cellar was backfilled with bricks off the walls and sealed with quick drying concrete.’ (p 464-5).

This was a process of demolition, of deconstruction that was detailed, obsessive and forensic in the attention it paid to the physical matter of place. Everything is gone; nothing remains: the meat and bones of the building dispersed into ashes, smoke and dust. For those of us seeking to remember – not a voyeuristic remembering that will elevate Fred and Rose into the pantheon of true crime serial killer stars, but a remembrance of the marginalised, socially and civically overlooked victims – only a fictional reconstruction is possible, a creative resurrection of place that attends to the materiality that has been erased. Happy Like Murderers is a book that transcends the ‘True Crime’ genre, and, in its forensic dissection of place and social history, contextualises the actions of the Wests through a cellular scrutiny that both locates the mutation and illuminates our vision of the whole.

Tim Edensor, speaking at the 2014 Big Ruins conference, proposed that buildings, in a physical sense, are ‘collages of time’, and I would add to this proposal another layer, the proposal that buildings, places, sites, are emotional palimpsests. Gloucester city council desired not only to erase the fabric of the building, but also the emotions contained within it – the feelings, utterings, suffering, desires, yearnings and rememberings contained within the bricks and mortar. Burn’s writing returns again and again to the processes and substances of construction: from Fred’s obsession with DIY, and the details of his burying of the bodies, to the council’s comprehensive erasure, and in doing so he resurrects not just the house, but the memories of the murdered women. In the final passage of the book he flips the obliteration – turning absences into presences, making holes speak, creating memorials from the concrete that was poured into the holes where the bodies once were.

‘When the house had been levelled and the cellar filled in, block paving was brought and laid in a herring bone pattern, three small trees planted, edging cobbles set in thick grade concrete: ST4 concrete on 150-mm.-type figure-1 granular material. […] They laid a blue-brick on-edge soldier course channel and feature between the block-paved areas and the grass verge. They fixed close-boarded fencing stained chestnut brown. Tough spiked pyracantha bushes were planted to run the length of it and discourage graffiti-writers and vandals. A country lane introduced to the city. The bends and shadows in the narrow road. […] The intention is that it will be impossible to distinguish between parts that have been added and those that already exist. Underneath is the cellar void. And under the cellar five cores of concrete buried in Severn clay. The fact of something behind. Something that is inaccessible, unknown. Beyond a doubt there is something behind. It imposes itself and won’t go away. You look at the walls. You listen to the space.’

Part 4. Running Water: Remembering Oluwale

‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.’
Psalms: 137: 1&2 (KJV)

On the evening of January the 23^rd in 2013 I joined a group of people standing on the south bank of the river Aire. Rough ground, a building blinded by its bricked up windows, a lonely stone archway holding up an invisible wall.

Outdoor projection, part of the Remembering Oluwale event, January 23rd 2013

We were gathered to remember David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant. His is a long, complex and tragic story of mental illness, homelessness and police persecution, told at length by Kester Aspden in his book Nationality: Wog, The Hounding of David Oluwale (2007). The last reported sighting of David was of him running away from two police officers in the early hours of the 17th of April 1969. Two weeks later his body was found floating in the River Aire. His death was not deemed suspicious, and he was buried in a pauper’s grave. In 1971 charges were brought against the officers, and although the original charges of Manslaughter and GBH were reduced to ‘assault’, it is one of the few times in contemporary British history that police officers involved in such a case have been convicted, and received criminal sentences. At the time, the trial caused scandal and outrage, but dropped from public and civic consciousness with alarming alacrity. Oluwale was the City of Leeds’ secret shame.

The evening’s events had been organised by the David Oluwale Remembrance Association, and the ground upon which we stood has been identified as a site for a permanent memorial garden to be dedicated in his name, but there is no evidence that this is the spot where he fell. The exact whereabouts of his death will, in all probability, never be known. The site’s importance is symbolic, its materiality a testimony for the speculative and imagined place where David Oluwale met his fate. The materiality of the (paradoxically) imagined real space can never be reconstructed, but the emotions of it can be resurrected through an experiential witnessing upon a material and symbolic ground.

The Leeds Young Author’s Group lead a candlelit procession through the derelict arch and down to the river. — The Leeds Young Author’s Group lead a candlelit procession
through the derelict arch and down to the river.

The evening was multi-stranded, including performances from The Leeds Young Authors, The Baggage Handlers, poet Rommi Smith, Nigerian drummers and more; projections, speeches, silences, and food.

The Leeds Baggage Handlers, a mental health survivors’ writing group enacting scenes from David Oluwale’s life amongst the crowd. — The Leeds Baggage Handlers, a mental health survivors’ writing group
enacting scenes from David Oluwale’s life amongst the crowd.

Dramatisations of David’s life and death were enacted amongst us, and indeed most of the performances took place within the crowd, closing the gap between audience and actor, so that we experienced rather than observed.

Gathering by the river, Corinne Silva’s film Wandering Abroad projected onto an exterior wall. — Gathering by the river, Corinne Silva’s film
Wandering Abroad projected onto an exterior wall.

It was bitterly cold and utterly still, the absence of wind seeming to allow the freezing air to tighten its arms around us. We stayed for two hours in the numbing chill, never once wanting to leave – the act of witnessing mapping the ground and making it real. David Oluwale was there because we were there. For that night, we became his memorial. We were the language with which the ground spoke.

Part 5. Alone in the Chaotic Dark, Shitfaced on Spirits and Speed

‘At first I referred to the field as a space awaiting events; now I refer to it as an event in itself’. John Berger, from Field (1971)

Prince Phillip playing fields is the site where, in 1975, Wilma Mcann was murdered by Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Like the majority of the West’s victims, and like David Oluwale, Wilma McCann was deemed not just unimportant, but unrespectable, embarrassing, not able to be incorporated into the civic body without disturbing its sense of its own desired identity. When the city remembers Sutcliffe’s crimes today, it forgets its own treatment of most of his victims then. Her son Richard recalls the day that he was told that his mother was dead, and seeing the newspapers, and having to ask what the word prostitute meant, and realising that to the rest of the world she was something very different to ‘mum’. There is currently no memorial for Wilma.

Prince Phillip Playing Fields at Night. Photograph Tom Rodgers 2012

As with the graves at 25 Cromwell Street, the spot where Wilma fell can be pinpointed with great accuracy, but unlike Cromwell Street it requires no effort of erasure by the civic body. Its flatness, its municipal banality enables it to auto-erase. It disappears itself. Gordon Burn’s fictions reconstructed the emotions of Cromwell Street by using words as materials, rebuilding, textually performing the space in our hearts and our guts. The Remembering Oluwale event made a symbolic space real through an experiential witnessing performed through a symbiotic fiction of audience, act and place. Prince Phillip Playing Fields, a site that is the instrument of its own disappearance, requires a transformative fiction of ritual and conjuration. A spell to break a spell: a reveal.

David Peace’s novel Nineteen Eighty is a re-imagining of the hunt for Peter Sutcliffe and it uses, as does much of his work, sections of text that are repetitive and incantational, both in utterance and on the page:

Lit match, gone –
Dark Jack.
Lit match, gone –
Like dark Jack, out –
Seeing through my eyes:
Winter, collapse –
Like dark Jack, out –
Seeing through my eyes:
1980 –
Out, out, out.

On reading the book for the first time, its visual and textual summoning of an almost bewitched broken-up-ness invoked for me not just a sense of the brutality and tragedy enacted, but a memory of my own history in Leeds in the immediate aftermath of said events, where, as a then heavy drinker and drug user I would stagger ‘alone in the chaotic dark, shit-faced on spirits and speed, a stumbling target (there but for the grace of God).’ (Bolland 2012). These lines were written for a poster publication for an on-going collaboration between myself, artist/photographer Tom Rodgers, and curator Judit Bodor: MilkyWayYouWillHearMeCall.

Our starting point was a collective reading of David’s novel followed by a series of site visits to the traumatised landscape named in the book. We walk in the manner of a drift; talking, looking, listening, enacting rituals of mourning and remembrance, photographing, writing, and collecting detritus & fragile ‘edgelands’ flora from these spaces.

Crown&Target, Emma wearing a crown of grasses, Lewisham Park 2012. Photograph, Tom Rodgers

Our roles are deliberately blurred, and the outcomes are open-ended, so far encompassing drawing, photography, writing, performance and sound. When the work is shown we do not individually identify which of us made this piece or that. These walks are profoundly emotional and we experience being plunged into dreamlike states. We become both the enchanters and the enchanted.

My hands, gilded. Photograph Tom Rodgers 2012.

The work of fictions, of creative practice, can attempt to uncover the multiplicity of ‘truths’ that constitute the material, conceptual and emotional narratives of individual and intertwined lives, and with which and of which we tell to and of our selves through the process of memory and forgetting. To return to Marc Augé and his essay on oblivion, he talks of life as being a narrative, and of how the story of an individual may fall over, and even topple in to death, because it is caught up in, obliterated by, the history of another. Fictions give us the chance to tell our own truths, to decide for ourselves what can be remembered.

I end with an extended reading from Nineteen Eighty:

‘this is the world e was driving through Leeds at night e had been having a couple of pints and e saw this woman thumbing a lift and e stopped and e stopped and asked her how far she was going and she said not far thanks for stopping and jumped in and e was in quite a good mood and then she said did e want business and e said what did she mean and she says bloody hell do e have to spell it out so we drove to the park in my green ford capri and before we started she said it cost a fiver and e was a bit surprised and e was expecting it to be a bit romantic and e am not the type that can have intercourse in a split second e have to be aroused but all of a sudden she said e am off it is going to take all fucking day em fucking useless you are and e felt myself seething with rage and e wanted to hit her and he said hang on do not go off like that and she said oh you can manage it now can you and she was taunting me e said can we do it on the grass and she stormed off up the field and e took the hammer from my tool box and followed her and spread my coat on the wet grass and she sat down and unfastened her trousers and said come on get it over with and e said do not worry e will and e hit her with the hammer and she made a lot of noise and so e hit her again and then e took out knife from my pocket and e stabbed her fifteen times e think and her arm kept jerking up and down and so e kept at her until she was very dead and then he shot off home this is the world now’

In memory of Wilma McCann 1947 – 1975

©Emma Bolland 2014

FIELDS OF KNOWLEDGE: Full paper from the ‘Thinking With John Berger’ conference, Cardiff, 4th & 5th September

FIELDS OF KNOWLEDGE: BERGER, THE OUTDOORS, AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF EXPERIENTIAL PRACTICE.

INTRODUCTION

This paper (with accompanying illustrations) was written for & presented at the ’Thinking With John Berger’ conference held at Cardiff Metropolitan University on the 4th & 5th of September 2014, organised by Jeff Wallace, Professor of English, Department of Humanities in the School of Education.

Video still from Spelunker, Deep Sea Diver, Astronaut #3 (2014 version of footage from 2003), Emma Bolland. To view film click here

‘At first I referred to the field as a space awaiting events; now I refer to it as an event in itself’. John Berger – ‘Field’ (1971)

As artists, in the widest sense of the word, how do we read, experience and learn from Berger? I’m going to start from the position that creative practitioners might be able to have a more fluid relationship with texts than is allowed the orthodox academic; that we can start from the position of not knowing, and then continue to embrace and even nurture this position.

There is a Hegelian maxim that says that ‘it is only in the hours of Darkness that the owl of Minerva takes flight’. This is perhaps an elegant way of saying that it is the territory that precedes the domain of understanding in which we think (Bolland 2014). Receptiveness to the potential of such territory, to the spaces that are the gaps in certainty and knowledge, is the cornerstone of what I would describe as ‘experiential practice’. Berger’s writing – often discursive, wondering, anti-didactic – produces such a space: the ‘space that is in itself productive’ (Lewis 2014, in conversation), the field ‘that is an event in itself’ (Berger 1971). Berger introduces his 1978 essay Uses of Photography: For Susan Sontag by saying:

‘The thoughts are sometimes my own, but all originate in the experience of reading her book.’

This is a brief example of the types of self-facing / explicatory phrases in which Berger allows himself, as reader, to respond to the spaces that can be sought out; that indicate agency, generosity, and reciprocity between the reader and the writer. In a 2002 conversation with Michael Silverblatt he says that:

‘…it is a question of the hospitality to the reader… hospitality has nothing to do with being polite, or being frightened of being offensive… hospitality is a question of allowing a space in the story for the reader to take her or his place, then that place has to be such that naturally there is the possibility of the reader participating, actually participating in the telling of the story, and that finally at its most extreme comes to that line which I will misquote, but it’s the end of one of the marvellous Borges poems in which he says “and the reader who has read this poem, he has written it”’. (My transcript).

I think that there is a link here between the act of reading and what I will call a ‘psychoanalytical situation’ (and I’m talking here of the broader processes of the psychoanalytical encounter, and not of any thematic or sectarian preoccupations) [1]. The creative reader and practitioner might be said to be in the position of both analyst and analysand. A sort of chimeric reader who is receptive to what Adam Phillips refers to as ‘Side Effects’ (Phillips 2006), those thoughts and responses which are unpredictable and surprising. To slip further into therapeutic language, one might say that the opportunity of analysis (reading) is the opportunity for a speculative therapy (interpretation) and for a collaborative and intuitive process of speaking and listening in a space of receptiveness and ‘not knowing’ – a ‘leap into a relative dark’ (ibid). The artist and writer Emma Cocker, in Tactics for Not knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected (2013), suggests that to persist in a productive state of not knowing, given that we are culturally conditioned away from such states, especially in academic and professional contexts, is a challenge. She insists, though, upon its worth, stating that:

‘Artistic practice recognises the practice of not knowing, less as the preliminary state (of ignorance) preceding knowledge, but as a field of desirable indeterminacy within which to work. Not knowing is an active space within practice, wherein an artist hopes for an encounter with something new or unfamiliar, unrecognisable or unknown’.

Emma Cocker’s essay is all about the value of not knowing – and yet, paradoxically, not so very long ago, I would have been afraid to read it, paralysed by a state of not knowing that I had no way of valuing. Far from feeling fruitful, it felt shameful. I’m going to use an analogy now that I think is from Alain Badiou (and I’m purposefully using something here that I may be attributing wrongly, and that I do not have the breadth of knowledge or the resources to verify or disprove), and this is an analogy that talks of the weight of the water. A fish does not feel the weight of the water – it is the ‘natural’ environment through which it moves instinctively. So a person who is comfortable in the environment of the academy, the gallery, the institution, whether by class, education or the fact that such institutions represent their culture and their interests, does not feel the weight of these waters. I used to really feel the weight of the water; now – not so much. Berger’s habits of ‘local’ and attentive looking and working, whilst indisputably informed, value the intuitive and the ‘not knowing’, and provided me with a framework for valuing my own thinking, for meeting texts such as Emma Cocker’s on equal terms.

PAYING ATTENTION: THE OUTDOORS AND THE ENCOUNTER

‘Seker Ahmet, on the other hand, faced the forest as a thing taking place in itself, as a presence that was so pressing that he could not, as he had learned to do in Paris, maintain his distance from it’. John Berger – Seker Ahmet And The Forest (1979)

spelunker2 still 6 — Video still from Spelunker, Deep Sea Diver, Astronaut #3 (2014 version of footage from 2003), Emma Bolland. To view film click here

In 2003 I recorded some audio-video footage whilst walking in woods near the house where I grew up, woods that had been a childhood refuge. That day was the first time I had entered them for twenty years. A quarter mile away my mother was slowly losing her grip on life, the woods visible from her bedroom window. I had no outcome in mind; the activity was initiated by the coming together of a need for an hours respite from the day’s events, having a camera to hand, and the proximity and familiarity of the woods – but in retrospect it was the beginning of what John Newling evocatively calls ‘a backward cartography involving place and memory’. The footage was first used two years later, almost unedited, in a full room projection, and has since undergone many transformations.

The walk that day was not the detached, often apolitical ‘dèrive’ or ‘drift’ of the psychogeographer, but an immersed experience of place that positioned the walker not as flotsam, not as neutral observer, not as touristic seeker of sights, nor as conquering explorer, but as attentive and receptive, as a brain and a body. More importantly, as a corporeal and active body – not the passive, dissected, examined & observed post-modern body, nor the male body to whom the privileged status of anonymous flaneur is more readily available (Solnit 2001) – but as a body that is part of, and subject and vulnerable to the narratives of the landscape; an experience having much in common with what the artist and writer Helen Scalway (2002) describes as a kind of ‘counter-flaneurie’. It was a walk in which thoughts and visions of the past, present and future, were collapsed into an experience of time as spatial. An encounter with landmarks and sight-lines as inseparable from memory, prophesy, physical sensation and emotion: a sensory and symbiotic extension of the Wordsworthian concept of ‘moving with thought’. The landscape told its own history, and told and continues to tell me mine.

In 2012 I began collaborating with curator Judit Bodor and artist Tom Rodgers on a project called MilkyWayYouWillHearMeCall, for which the process of ‘experiential site visits and walks’ was adopted as a deliberate research methodology. Our starting point was the novel Nineteen Eighty by David Peace (2002), which is a fictional retelling of an actual historical series of events – the murders committed by Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, and the subsequent hunt for and capture of him in the city of Leeds in 1980. We went to sites in the city based only on the directions or descriptions given in the novel and began the processes of attentive and intuitive exploration. What marked these sites out was their anonymity, their lack of dramatic play. There was no obvious story to be extracted from the topography itself – a narrative was waited for and listened to, through a process of experience of and even meditation on the site.

These walks differed from the walk around the woods, in that that we had gone there with an agenda ‘to make art’, or at least to enact a process of ‘creative research’. However, there were similarities in that we had no agenda in terms of the outcomes of this research – we had made the decision that the research itself would suggest or even be its own outcome. In Bento’s Sketchbook (2011) Berger makes the point that whilst traditionally the term ‘outcome’ refers to how a story ends, ‘it can also refer to how the listener or reader or spectator leaves the story to continue their ongoing lives’, and goes on to say that:

‘… in following a story, we follow a storyteller, or, more precisely, we follow the trajectory of a storyteller’s attention… ‘ and that ‘we become accustomed to the storyteller’s particular procedure of bestowing attention… we begin to acquire his storytelling habits…’

The narrative we started with was David’s writing, and our own relationships (all very different), with the sites and with the histories enacted upon them. We attempted to allow the sites themselves to take over the narrative of both the history and the author (David), and for the interactions and relationships of and between the sites and ourselves to shape our actions and outcomes, to tell the story of our collaboration.

We realised that we had begun to enact informal rituals and acts of remembrance. On the morning of a visit to the Soldiers Field I impulsively put a vial of real gold dust in my pocket, and at the site had used it to obliterate a swastika that had been sprayed on a wall near to where one of the murdered women was found. [2] The dust got everywhere, and Judit drew attention to my metalled hands. As I stretched them out towards her, Tom took the photograph that captures them: weathered, burnished and speaking of work and loss. The encounter between the space, our actions and our interactions invoked the image and the story of the present and the past.

Crown and Target also captures a moment when place, intuition, encounter, movement and collaboration came together. We were preparing to leave Lewisham Park. Tom was at the car, his camera packed away. I had paused, and on an impulse pulled a clump of wet grasses from the earth and twisted them into a circlet, placing them on my head; and, as I did so, turned back to call to Judit who was still in the field. Tom heard my call, looked up, lifted the camera and captured the image with the last of his film. A sightline that joins us to the space and to each other.

TRESPASSING KNOWLEDGE: WALKING TOWARDS PEDAGOGY

‘… the idea for Ways of Seeing began with going round museums… and seeing so much insufferably, intolerably boring stuff which was called art! – and so we thought, well maybe we should just accept this and admit it and try and explain why it is so boring …’ John Berger in conversation with Michael Govan (2002)

Wrapped in luminous cloud, pushed by the wind, we walk up out of Hayfield in the steps of the glorious trespass, April 1932. The cloud is not a metaphor, the art is terrestrial. Eventually our heads will clear it. Stamping the ground, stamping mystery and privilege into the soil, we walk up into our work, hauled on our breath. The foundation of the state is not violence but education. Thought is free on the wind-steps. Rills under grass arches. It can only be a completely open field.
Peter Riley – The Ascent of Kinder Scout (2014)

Place and Memory: underpass in Seacroft, Leeds. Photograph Tom Rodgers 2013.

We decided that we wanted to try to use ‘walking as research’ as a tool for teaching and learning with people in settings outside of formal education. [3] In the Place and Memory project, which ran from June 2013 to May 2014, we worked with eight adults with mental health difficulties who wanted to develop their creative practice. With varying states of confidence, recovery and previous education, it’s fair to say that they really, really felt the weight of the water. We needed to enable them to take ownership of ‘research’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘expertise’, and remove this conceptual territory from the hands of the institution, the academy and what they perceived as the elite other. Tom, Judit and I all had our own overlapping and complimentary frameworks for facilitating this. Judit, for instance, brought the ideas of the French artist Robert Filliou and his 1970 document Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts to bear, perhaps summed up in this quote:

Research is not the privilege of people who know – on the contrary it is the domain of people who do not know. Every time we are turning our attention to something we don’t know we are doing research. Fillou (1970)

What all three of us emphasised was the importance of the participants each developing and valuing their own ways of looking, moving and paying attention. In his introduction to Understanding a Photograph (2013) Geoff Dyer states, with reference to research and criticism, that ‘Berger’s method was always too personal, the habits of the autodidact too ingrained, to succumb to the kind of discourse… that seized cultural studies in the 70’s and 80’s.’ And Berger himself states, in his conversation with Michael Govan, that all of his writing as an art critic came first and foremost, not from reading biographies or art historical documents, but from looking at the work. We also accepted that they could challenge the orthodoxies that we would inevitably bring to our ‘teaching’. As project mentors, we had to accept the criticisms levelled at us about the ways in which we presented our versions of culture and practice, and about the ways in which we used, and I quote, ‘arty bollocks wank speak’. It pleases me greatly that the author of that phrase was recently accepted onto an MA in Creative Practice, where she promises that she will continue to challenge and unpick such language.

Filming underneath the Dark Arches, Leeds. Photograph Tom Rodgers 2013.

The eight participants were each given the task of choosing a place or places in the city that held, or could potentially create, memory or meaning for them. Over the summer we went as a group on long ‘research walks’, [4] talking, drawing, collecting, photographing, recording sound and moving image, asking ourselves questions about these places, sharing stories so that new stories might be told back to us, but most of all paying attention, listening to the space. The sites we explored included woodlands, wastelands, housing estates, disused graveyards and the place where a river flows underneath the city. One of the participants took us to a hospital’s Accident and Emergency unit where she had spent a traumatic night, and we retraced her journey around its corridors in covert ones and twos, meeting on corners to exchange whispers. Filming and audio-recording on hidden devices.

The Place and Memory participants started from the position of an un-valued not-knowing, and worked and walked over the space of a year to a position of valued not knowing – to an ownership of knowledge and research, to an ownership of their own learning, and to an ownership of a creative practice. They developed (to varying degrees) the muscle to resist the weight of the water and created works that have an authoritative voice, but that still leave both their audience and themselves a productive space of uncertainty.

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The Place and Memory project outcomes included two exhibitions, film screenings, performances and readings, a ‘creative documentary’ using footage and texts from the site visits (to view the film see below) and a book that wove their visual work, photographic documentation and writings into a text / image psychogeographical poem that explores the emotions of ‘place’ across the city of Leeds during the summer of 2013. The book costs £5 plus post and package and is published by Gordian Projects: you can find out more and buy the book here.

FOOTNOTES

[1] It might seem odd to talk of psychoanalysis where Berger is concerned, given that he is often (though not always) dismissive of its theory, at least where Freud is concerned. (See John Berger with Michael Silverblatt, Conversation 1, link below).

[2] The tiny vial of gold dust had been bought in 2002 on a trip to Venice with my mother (then aged 82) a year after my father died and a year before she died. She walked my legs off, fearlessly hopping on and off the Vaporetti, and, somewhat suspiciously all the bar owners – with whom she flirted outrageously – greeted her by name and pulled bottles of homemade extra-strong Fragolino from under the counter to pour her a measure without her having to ask. Born into poverty on a working coal barge in 1919 – a fact we only discovered after her death – she had reinvented herself in a spectacular fashion. A capricious, cold and bewildering disaster as a mother, as a woman she was to be admired.

[3] In February 2014 I used some of the teaching and learning tactics developed in Place and Memory with students on the MA in Art, Society and Publics at DJCAD, University of Dundee. For visual and textual documentation of the workshops and their outcomes, and an annotated suggested reading list click here.

[4] A note here about walking. Walking is free, useful, democratic, and often political in terms of environmental impact and issues of private and public space. Above all it is ordinary. Although walking and the concept of walking are rich areas for creative thought and exploration, walking is not the property of psychogeographers, urban explorers, or anyone who seeks to mystify and intellectualise the everyday. It belongs to all of us and we should glory in that.

BIBLIOGRAPHY / SOURCES

Berger, J. Field (1971), in About Looking (2009) Bloomsbury.

Berger, J. Uses of Photography: For Susan Sontag (1978), in Understanding a Photograph (2013) ed. Dyer, G. Penguin Classics, London.

Berger, J. Seker Ahmet and the Forest (1979), in About Looking (2009) Bloomsbury.

Berger, J. Bento’s Sketchbook (2011)

John Berger with Michael Govan, Conversation 3, Episode 6, October 2002 http://podcast.lannan.org/2010/03/30/john-berger-with-michael-govan-conversation/

John Berger with Michael Silverblatt, Conversation 2, Episode 5, October 2002 –http://podcast.lannan.org/2010/03/29/john-berger-with-michael-silverblatt-conversation-2/

Bolland, E. Tides, Texts and Transformations (2014) https://emmabolland.com/2014/05/16/tides-texts-and-transformations-unpacking-my-library/

Cocker, E. Tactics for Not knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected (2013), in On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (2013) ed. Fisher, E. & Fortnum, R. Black Dog Publishing, London.

Dyer, G. Introduction to Understanding a Photograph (2013), Berger, J. ed. Dyer, G. Penguin Classics, London.

Filliou, R. Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts (1970). Translated facsimile published 2014 by Occasional Papers.

Lewis, B. (2014) In conversation.

Newling, J. Writings by John Newling 1995 – 2005 (2005) ed. Newling, A., SWPA.

Phillips, A. Side Effects (2006) Hamish Hamilton, London.

Riley, P. The Ascent of Kinder Scout (2014) Longbarrow Press, Sheffield

Scalway, H. The Contemporary Flaneuse: Exploring Strategies for the Drifter in a Feminine Mode (2002).

Solnit, R. Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001) Verso, London.

Unsettled by & Open To: writing, making and being for ‘Shady Dealings London’.

Last month, at the invitation of curator / writers David Berridge of Very Small Kitchen and Claire Potter I took part in the London stage of Shady Dealings With Language, a series of four events curated around the intersection of art, writing and performance in Leeds, London, Manchester and Edinburgh; the London event generously hosted by X Marks The Bøkship at Matt’s Gallery. The curators framed their invitation with the following statement:

‘In Pure Means, Yve Lomax considers the moment an action is somehow interrupted and the possibility of experiencing pure means arises – the very gesture of gesture. To illustrate, Lomax invites the reader to imagine an actor whose acting is doing everything to show the means of acting, and moreover, to show it is the means that are being shown. Pure Means demonstrates and explores the philosophical potentials of such a moment through a poetry of terminology, ideas of subjectification and forms of government, and the figure of the author. We too want our effect and affect tight together. We seek a writing that affirms the affective, the somatic, while accounting for the analytic; a writing that moves toward a true politic.’

Rewriting Lispector - Book, notebook & looped video projection. Emma Bolland, 2014 — Rewriting Lispector – Book, notebook & looped video projection. Emma Bolland, 2014

My contribution was conceived in three related and interdependent ‘acts’ – both continuous and sequential. They are all works in draft form, made together in a couple of weeks, rough and raw. They left me unsure of myself but sure of them, of their generative nature. I am not done with the ideas they grasp at.

‘Unwriting Lispector’ comprised a copy of Clarice Lispector’s 1973 text Água Viva and a blank opened notebook placed at the back of a bookshelf. Onto these object was projected footing of myself copying out Lispector’s text into an identical notebook, the footage reversed, her words disappearing as my hand ascended the pages, until the filmed notebook was as blank as the one that lay below its veil of light. This tiny, discreet installation ran throughout the course of the event. Then I performed a text and screened a film. A Fiction Of A Fiction (The Woodpecker’s Heart), is a ‘writing towards’ or a ‘writing with’ the narrative of the film, which is titled The Is Of The Thing, a phrase taken from Água Viva – ‘I want to grab hold of the is of the thing…’ These pieces are about reading and writing and making, and fear. I ask you to read the text first, and only then view the film, which can be found at the foot of this post.
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A Fiction Of A Fiction: a speculative draft of a script for a film that is a place where a book might be, or

THE WOODPECKER’S HEART

Opening titles: a red / orange ground – the text a knocked back pale gamboge – a series of fading stills. Typeface to be decided… Lucida? Palatino? Perpetua?

In ‘An Essay on Typography’ by Eric Gill, first published in 1931, Gill makes much of the ‘natural’, functional and symbiotic evolution of the Roman hand and typeface, giving examples of clear and pleasing lettering, and utilising an oddly impassioned and indeed venomous vocabulary to describe those shapes of which he disapproved. A ‘Y’ is ‘mutated, monstrous, perverted’, as if he were talking of a repellent, brutal and evil character, a Mr Hyde of a letter: low, base, and twisted. Gill, known mainly as a sculptor, was also a designer and typographer. His most enduring typeface, fittingly named Perpetua, is a pleasing, balanced and elegant form which ranks amongst my favourites, at least of those fonts made freely available on my laptop. Gill was also subject to rumours of incest, and I use the word advisedly, concerning the relations between himself and his two young daughters. Whilst never announcing or admitting to such behaviour for and by himself, he is nonetheless on record as considering incest between father and daughter – a father such as himself: educated and capable of finer feelings, a sensitive soul who could appreciate and understand beauty – to be a natural, pleasing and beautiful thing. He saw such societal and familial freedoms as part of the shift from the Victorian values into which he was born, to the new bohemian and intellectual sensibilities to which he supposed himself entitled. Identifying as radical, he was at heart conservative, rather like the elegant type that he so favoured. There is no record of his daughters’ views on the matter. They are blank pages.

Possible title/s:

‘The is of the thing?’

‘What is the language?’

Others? I don’t know…

Fade to white. If the first frame is the cover, then fade to white is the page between the title and the texts. The exquisitely blank page.

Scene 1:

Is this even how you write a screenplay? I have no idea. Do the fucking research.

Scene 1:

It is at this point that I lose my grip on this film, this book, this idea of the book, this space where a book might be.

In 1970 the colours of the wallpaper were red, orange, a knocked back pale gamboge. Children’s books were not available and so I read such texts as I could find.

The Dictionary

The Bible

Fear of Flying

Flashman

The Devil Rides Out

Beyond Belief

Playboy / <stroke> Knave / < stroke> Razzle

I was once allowed to visit a library from which I selected an illustrated copy of The Little Humpbacked Horse, a fairy tale in long poem form by Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov, edited by his close friend Alexander Pushkin. From its initial publication in 1834, up until 1856, it was available only in extract form. Deemed by the authorities to be anti-tsarist propaganda, it was published with dots representing omitted verses and songs: a text of voids and vacuums, floating with starry ellipses. I do not remember the form of the illustrations for The Little Hunchbacked Horse, but I do remember their tone. They mirrored the text in advocating and illuminating the value of the common stock over the refined and flighty elegance of the thoroughbred. The humble beast was honest, intelligent and courageous, despite the affliction of an ugly hump, much mocked by its indolent, self-regarding stable companions. One night the hump erupted: and revealed two feathered wings that sent the beast soaring above the jewelled domes of the Kremlin. A Payne’s Grey sky flooded with an Indigo ocean. A Via Lactaea of delicate Zinc White spray.

The book demanded an intervention, and I set about its transformation with materials stolen from a box concealed in my sister’s wardrobe. (Aged eight I was a shameless, expert and recidivist thief, with a particular taste for expensive papers and pens). When my work was discovered I was beaten, and never taken to the library again.

I am in a library now, writing this, and my back is stiff and my eyes screen-sore.

Fade to white.

Scene 2:

A gallery. Zinc White with French Grey shadows. A woman stands in front of a photograph. The photograph is titled Untitled and is part of the series Coeur de Pic, created by Claude Cahun to illustrate the book of the same name, a book of poems for children written by Lise Deharme, and published in 1937. The woman wishes the words ‘Coeur de Pic’ to mean woodpecker’s heart. They do not.

The photograph is the size of a mirror that might contain my face – a silvery flat. A black twig stands upright on a hill of feathers. The dull-metalled nibs of dipping pens are clipped along its branches, their forked legs gripping tightly like persistent inverse leaves. I lean closer and see that the feathers are not feathers at all. The little twig tree stands on a drift of ink strokes. The wind has blown the writing from the branches. I have been thinking of the wrong kind of quills.

I’m typing this out now, and I suddenly stop to change the font from Perpetua to Palatino. I fucking hate Perpetua.

Please verify this text – it is very likely mis-mnemestic.
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Casting Spells (and Bone)

‘You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,
And dug your grave in my breast.’
Dylan Thomas ( from How Shall My Animal )

Screening of Spells and Bone, a film by Emma Bolland at Laugharne Castle, Wales, 7th of June 2014 (photograph by Paul Evans)

Spells and Bone is a Dylan Thomas centenary film commission for Laugharne Castle Poetry Film Festival, curated by Paul Evans and Longbarrow Press. The starting point for the film was to be a Thomas poem. I wanted to avoid the more familiar prophetic elegies, and could not settle on an alternative. The poem ‘How Shall My Animal’ was suggested to me by Professor John Goodby at Swansea University, a poet and Dylan scholar and editor. It immediately read as something witchy, shape-shifting and primeval: pagan in the sense of being disruptive of ritual norms. The title is a phrase taken from the poem that seemed to suggest a raw and unstable power. I felt that my film should be something quite abstract, and that it should struggle between chaotic and ordered forms: a struggle towards something that is never quite attained, and whose near-attainment is inevitably wounding or wounded – a problematically sacrificial and melancholy resolution. The moving footage was filmed through the windows of the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, down onto the weir that marks a corner point of the river Calder. I was thinking of cauldrons, boiling, alchemy. It was after I had begun working with this that John told me that he thought that the poem is partly based on, or at least one of its possible starting points was the Welsh legend of Gwion, Ceridwen and Taliesin. Ceridwen is an enchantress who possesses the cauldron of Poetic Inspiration. The sound is taken from two sources. The first is the ambient sounds of the gallery, recorded as I was filming at the Hepworth – voices, footsteps and echoes reversed, slowed down, stretched and played around with, layered until they suggested a sort of sentient ocean intoning a dangerous magic. The second is a piece of ‘Shape Note’ or Sacred Harp singing from the Southern Baptist tradition – treated and overlaid. The time between the invitation and the screening was very short, and the film was from the outset an intuitive undertaking, with no time for me to withdraw or refine my actions. I was inhabited by, rather than directing of the process of its making. The last two lines of the poem bring the piece to a close: a striving, a release and an ambivalent end. The full film is embedded below. I have also embedded two of the other commissions. Brian Lewis’ East Wind – wonderfully spare; and Jean & Brian McEwan’s Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines – a flickering, uneasy nostalgia.

Walking As Pedagogy: Two Days In Dundee

‘The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates the odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.’
Rebecca Solnit, from Wanderlust: A History Of Walking (2005)

MFA studios, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, 2014. Photograph: Emma Bolland

On the 11th and 12th of February I spent two days working with a group of students from the MFA ASP at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (part of the University of Dundee). The course encourages a diverse range of practices and places emphasis on ‘[challenging and extending] its students’ work and relationship to the visual world by providing the creative and intellectual framework for the exploration of current attitudes and phenomena in the context of contemporary art, culture and society.’ It has a high student/staff ratio, and includes periods of professional placements, and theoretical and practical grounding in teaching and learning practice in Higher Education, with students also exploring curatorial strategies. I proposed a two day programme that started with an orthodox lecture / presentation, and went on to include one-to-one tutorials and a hands-on lo-tech group ‘play’ activity around disruptive mapping, and finished with a walk. For the teaching / activity outline click Teaching Outline Emma Bolland DJCAD. For notes on the reading list click here. For a transcript of the lecture with illustrations and links to moving image material click Trespassing Knowledge presentation Emma Bolland 2014. At the core of the two day programme were the ownership and definitions of research, knowledge, expertise and the ‘academy’, and the creative fertility of the states of ‘not knowing’ and ‘getting lost’.

In the studio maps were torn, worked over, reconstructed in an afternoon of play. A photocopier was filled with toner and given over to us for an hour – three flights of stairs up and back again to enlarge and shrink and copy. Theory was usurped by tomfoolery, and finesse replaced by slapstick crafting.

The next day we walked abroad. Myself, Duncan, Laura and Dominique set out into the grey rain. Emil and Jane led the others as subversive sat-navs, the whole of us communicating through a specially created Twitter account: WalkeeTalkeeDundee:

“where are you out there?”
“we are here out there?”
“has anyone seen Duncan?”
“we can’t find the airport!”

We walked to the airport, navigating the anti-ambulant environments of dual carriage and ring-roads that do so much to split the activity of walking into that of the city and the country, the everyday and the leisured. The airport was small, and gloriously blue; the world of our walking wonderfully large. We ate chocolate, and walked back again. Three hours of drizzle. Perfect.

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Thank you to Professor Tracy Mackenna for extending the invitation to visit the course, and to the students who joined me over the two days:

Ingrid Bell
Dominique Cameron
Duncan Campbell
Kate Clayton
Laura Donkers
Joanna Foster (PhD researcher)
Jane Murray
Emil Thompson
Drew Walker
Lada Wilson

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A ‘walking as pedagogy’ tactic has been used in the project Place and Memory, of which I am a mentor. Eight emerging artists and writers who all have experience of mental health problems worked together to produce a group exhibition, texts and films that explored their relationship with the city of Leeds. They are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to be supported in producing a publication and exhibition to complete the project. They have until March 12th to reach their target, and would greatly appreciate your support. To find out about the project click here.

Notes On A Reading List: Trespassing Knowledge (for DJCAD February 2014)

Research is not the privilege of people who know – on the contrary, it is the domain of people who do not know. Every time we are turning our attention to something we don’t know we are doing research. Robert Filliou (1926 – 1987)

And the meaning of Earth completely changes: with the legal model, one is constantly reterritorializing around a point of view, on a domain, according to a set of constant relations, but with the ambulant model, the process of deterritorialization constitutes and extends the territory itself. Deleuze and Guattari – Nomadology (1986)

On the 11th and 12th of February I will be spending two days working with students on the MFA Art, Society and Publics at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (University of Dundee). I will be be giving an orthodox presentation / lecture, facilitating a workshop around subversive mapping and ‘not knowing’, and leading a long (and hopefully challenging) walk within and around the city, with participants both walking with me, and connecting / participating remotely through text & image sharing, online mapping, and acting as ‘subversive satnavs’.

We will be working with ideas such as: – the ownership of knowledge and research: who determines what research is; as artists, how do we (and why should we) challenge and disrupt these orthodoxies? – Research as practice, research as being and doing. – How can we (and why should / would we challenge the boundaries of the ‘academy’ and the hegemonies of ‘expertise’? – What are the possibilities of collaborative and interdisciplinary research and practice between the orthodox and the unruly, the academic and the emotional, the empirical / validated and the wondering / intuitive? – The value of ‘not-knowing’ and its enrichment of ‘knowing’. – The physical and metaphorical exploration of site: walking / wandering / wondering as research and practice.

Below is a suggested reading list of texts / blogs / films that deliberately includes few specialist contemporary art texts, followed by my thoughts on a selection of these in terms of their relation to each other, and their relevance to aspects of our work. These notes are primarily for the students at DJCAD, but I hope they will be of interest to wider readers.

Dickens, Charles. Night Walks (1861). For full text click here.
Bolland, Emma. Every Place A Palimpsest Part Two (2013). For full audio click here.
Bolland, Emma. What Is A Book If It Will Not Be A Book (2013). For full text, illustrations and audio click here.
Cousins, Mark. What Is This Film Called Love? (2012). For the official trailer click here.
Fisher, E. and Fortnum, R. On Not Knowing: how artists think (2013)
Lewis, Brian. The Meridian (2013). For full text click here.
Lewis, Brian. Eastings (2013). For full text click here.
Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces (1974). For full text click here.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide To Getting Lost (2005)
Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust (2000)
Woolf, Virginia. Street Haunting (1930). For full text click here.

The essays by Dickens and Woolf, Night Walks and Street Haunting, could both be described as a narration of and by the detached eye, and are perhaps precursors of what the Situationists would call the dérive (drift). Both Dickens and Woolf wander the city without a predetermined route (or ignoring a predetermined route), observing and noting events, particularities of place and people, and even their own sensory and emotional states from the position of spectator. A drift is not a means of getting from A to B, and therefore is an experience of the spatial. Cities are the ideal places for such endeavours. Their crowds offer the opportunity for lonely anonymity, and the contemporary (and near modern) city as both literally and metaphorically textual positions the wanderer as reader. In a city, one is never truly lost. Contrast these accounts with the two-part essay sequence The Meridian (presented at the Occursus 2013 Post-Traumatic Landscapes Symposium) and Eastings by Brian Lewis. The essays contextualise and narrate a particularly gruelling example of Lewis’ endurance walks, a continuous 65 mile 33 hour trek from Hull to Spurn Point and back again, walking almost continuously from 11 am in the morning on New Years Eve 2012 to 8 pm at night on New Years Day 2013. Unlike the drifts of Dickens and Woolf, this walk was linear, and planned. The physical effort, the weather, and the hours of darkness replaced detachment with immersion, a focussing (a retreat) into the body, the physical. The almost complete absence of the textual, of human presence and of light for much of the walk meant that getting lost was almost inevitable, and when towards the end of the walk the textual and the human reappeared an almost hallucinatory state of exhaustion made such signifiers unreadable.

Solnit’s Wanderlust is a wonderful (‘wanderfull’) book. It is also very long. A terrific (to my mind) chapter sequence that works as a discrete narrative is, in order: Citizens of the Streets, Walking After Midnight, and Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanised Psyche. Each chapter deals with the politics of space in different ways: revolution and protest from the French revolution to Occupy; gender, and the positioning / oppression of the female body in the context of the urban outdoors; the dislocation of the human body from its environment and the commodification and commercialisation of exercise and fitness. Solnit famously stated that ‘the treadmill (of the modern gym) is a device for going nowhere in places where there is no longer anywhere to go’. The chapter following these, The Shape of A Walk, talks specifically about artists who have explicitly used walking as part of their practice, although the selection tends toward the ‘heroic’).

My two short papers Every Place A Palimpsest Part Two and What Is A Book If It Will Not Be A Book both deal, in different ways, with the narration of landscape, ‘knowing’ and the inevitability and fruitfulness of ‘not knowing’. Palimpsest looks at a particular site in terms of traumatic history and the civic project of erasure versus the creative effort of exploring meaning (and creating work). What Is A Book looks at the materiality of an artwork, and the spatial unruliness of creativity in the context of MilkyWayYouWillHearMeCall, a project with site, wandering, collaboration and not knowing at its core.

On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (2013) (ed. Fisher and Fortnum) contains many essays of note. On The Value Of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again And Letting Be by Dr Rachel Jones offers a philosophical and psychoanalytical argument for the necessity of ‘not knowing’ in relation to creativity and the aesthetic sublime.

Studio Visit. Left to right Emma Bolland, Judit Bodor, Roddy Hunter, Penny Whitwoth. Photo Tom Rodgers 2012.

The photograph above is of a visit to my studio in 2012 to discuss the work being made for MilkyWayYouWillHearMeCall, an ongoing collaborative project by myself, curator Judit Bodor and artist Tom Rodgers, which has at its core a relationship with site, walking, and not knowing. We were joined in the studio that day by artists Roddy Hunter and Penelope Whitworth. We look, we think, we talk. We know, and we do not know. We begin again.