critical reflection

My continued pilgrimages to the coast seem to be a ritual searching for a part of myself or a feeling of becoming myself that I can’t find elsewhere. This led me to explore ideas and writing around landscape and the embodied experience.

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Nan Shepherds writing (2019 edition) is particularly relevant - she writes about her felt experience of walking in the Cairngorms as being more than just a ‘physiological adjustment. What more there is lies within the mountain. Something moves between me and it. Place and a mind may interpenetrate til the nature of both is altered.’ p8. She goes on, ‘I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walked out of the body and into the mountain.’ (p106)

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This felt experience of being, created by time spent in a place goes something towards what I feel at the coast. This relates clearly to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas around embodied experience. In The Materiality of Stone (2004), Tilley states that ‘we experience and perceive the world because we live in that world and are intertwined with it’, p2. He draws on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas stating that, ‘we order places and their significance through our bodies,’ p9. Rose (2006:548) talks about this; ‘It means exploring the landscape not as something that represents or reflects identity but, rather, as something that makes identity possible’ p94, quoted in Ryan (2012).

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Thinking in this way puts the body at the centre of our experiences and how we relate to place becomes critical to our physical presence. It makes me consider that maybe my work is a way of trying to understand my feelings of place and identity and to create work that documents the experience. This connects with Tracy Hills work and particularly in her interest in walking which has relation to my practice.

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The fact that the locations I go to are on the coast adds an additional dimension of place. Ryan (2012) writes ‘when sea meets land, a particular intensity of encounter is set up.’ .. there is… ‘a sense of unceasing mobility: dynamics of light, sound, presence, absence, surface, depth and texture are continually (re)worked and become apparent as alternating activities of construction, destruction and reconstruction.’ I feel this liminal uncertainty creates space for us to re-examine our place in the world and maybe it gives me a space to bring my own uncertainty which feels cathartic?

Also at the coast we really see the edges of the land, we see geological change happening, we see erosion and cliff falls and flooding, here we are confronted directly with the vulnerability of the land we live on. Environmental change and the impact of climate crisis is a key concern to me. I feel like I am still trying to work out how to reflect this in my work without it dominating or becoming ‘environmental art’ – Emma Stibbon is a key influence in this area.

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These lines of enquiry I have been discussing led me to finding Emma McNally’s drawing installation ‘The Earth is knot flat’ at the Drawing Room. Her works are ‘informed by geological processes, weather patterns, coral formations, planetary movements, atom bombs….in which each part is interconnected to the other.’, (McNally, 2024.) It is this interconnectedness of the ecology of place that is present in her work that particularly interests me and might inform my future work.