Iain Biggs Contested terms – rethinking ‘landscape’ and ‘nature’

This text goes right to the heart of my research and practice, I had no concept of place until I went to the locations where Ivon Hitchen's made his paintings with the idea of remaking paintings from the same location. As much as I found it interesting to see what Hitchen's might have seen (the same could be said of Reas work Constable Country) I had no connection or desire to draw or paint what I saw, I was cerebrally pleased, but emotionally dormant. I can only guess that it was because I had no sense of place this wasn't my place, I find my place more interesting, my place not be as aesthetic, but I feel connected and can interpret the landscape differently (that's interesting, this could be expanded)

Mapping/locating oneself through social media or through online profiles. Does my profile match the person I am? should I live in this house? in this place? am I who people think I am? am I who I want me to be? Does this existentialist thinking create more of a disconnect to the land/landscape/location? Am I real?  There is a theory called Block Theory, best explained by Wikipedia (sorry) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_block_universe but I will have a go at explaining, all time and space is present in one “block universe” this contains everything that has happened and will happen and all the space in which this happens. This overcomes some of the conceptual and theoretical issues associated with the start and end of the universe. It also corresponds (possibly) with the Buddhist view of existence...I need to read more about this.

Suggested Reading

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception 

Bachelard’s Poetics of Space 

Lippard’s The Lure of the Local 

Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society

Rogoff’s Terra In firma: Geography’s Visual Culture 

Casey’s Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place World 

Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape  

Schama’s Landscape and Memory

However, if we see the representation of ‘landscape’ as the means by which artists engage with issues of place, with questions about our location in the world – a location which is always, as Merleau-Ponty made clear, originally grounded in our immediate bodily location -its contemporary relevance is at once considerably clearer. Experiencing place, through walking, recording, drawing, painting, affects memory because of the physical senses which imprint on the brain/body. 

In his book Situatedness, or Why we Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From, David Simpson has made clear the extent to which ‘being placed ‘has now become an all-consuming obsession ¹‘. He explores in great detail the currently ubiquitous concern with situating ourselves, with mapping our personal ‘positions’ in terms of an ever-expanding matrix of reference points; references which now include anything from our place of birth, ethnicity, political loyalties, gender and spiritual orientation to the minutia of our particular ‘life-style choices’ – our holiday destinations, preferred sexual practices, diet regimes and, if we are academics, the particular theoretical sub-sects with which we identify ourselves within this or that ongoing discursive polemic. All of which, as he makes clear, suggests a profound anxiety as to our sense of our place in the world.

It is often this second, ‘overlooked’ sense of landscape as “mere place”, along with all that is lost, repressed or marginalized by that designation, that is of particular interest to contemporary artists. Suites my current research for practice, the path I am making work about would probably be considered a "mere place" but for those who used it, it was an important route into a managed wilderness an escape from the village. Reading Cheriton Now and Then the field the path runs through Lyes Field, was used for many years as a recreational site, but now thoroughbred horses are kept there (they used to be kept in the fields above Lyes Field, my speculation is that the horses are there to deter people from going into the field)