critical reflection

exploring art practice in contemporary embodied landscape

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Following Unit 1 I continued to develop my research into contemporary landscape and connection to place. I had an interest in methodology of approach and ways in which other artists and writers consider embodied landscape and an embodied practice of making art. I pursued this to consider my connection to the site of Kimmeridge in more depth, to understand what it was about the specific ‘place’ and ways in which I was responding to it.

keywords

Embodied landscape        Geophilia – love of stones       Experience of place

approaches to embodied practice

In finding my place in contemporary landscape I turned again to writers who considered landscape from the point of view of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment. I had felt a strong connection to Nan Shepherd’s work and writing in how she talked about her experience of being in and with the landscape. I was interested in exploring further the idea of walking - as a way of being in the landscape - and its relevance to my connection to making work – particularly as I first encountered my field study site, Kimmeridge Bay, while doing the southwest coast path.

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Wylie’s article (2005) had some interesting insights on this. His premise for the article was to write about a particularly significant days walking where he felt his ‘arguments regarding self-landscape relations seemed to crystallize’, (p234). One early observation he made about the walker’s position in space resonated with me, ‘A walker is poised between the country ahead and the country behind, between one step and the next…he or she is, in other words, spectral: between there and not-there, perpetually caught in an apparitional process of arriving/departing’ (p237).

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He continues this thought of where one might be positioned in moving through the landscape; ‘the pre-established boundary between self and landscape, subject and object, could become soluble, osmotic, in the engaged, involved practice of walking. So that landscape becomes an ‘inhabited and processed rather than beheld.’, (p239). He cites Ingold (1993) on the phenomenological understanding on landscape as being an ‘embodied, quotidian dwelling’, (p239) as a way of considering the ‘self in the body and embedding the body in landscape.’, (p240).

This made me think about what it is I am trying to capture in my work – whether it is about the ‘static’ moment of being in a place or my bodily movement around that space. I know when I am walking on the coast path the immersive act of walking in the landscape and almost becoming part of the landscape is a different feeling to the one where I might get inspiration for making work. However, I wonder if by making work I am trying to recreate that embodied feeling I get when walking – and this also becomes inspiration?

The idea of walking as art practice relate to artists work that I have looked at in the past including Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. Because I have felt a block in my approach to drawing and getting started in my work I have been looking at artists working in a similar context to me and researching their approaches.

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Aileen Harvey whose work considers human relationships to place, through attention to the materials, processes and phenomena of landscapes. She writes about walking as an embodied practice but she also likens the practice of drawing to this idea; ‘Thus, like walking, the act of drawing can be used by an artist to reinforce the embodied and temporal nature of human experiences of landscapes. Furthermore, the resulting artwork can include the index of a landscape, its direct marks or material remnants.’ Her work using natural earth pigments has a specific relation to my own use of pigments from rocks.

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Cat Horton’s work is also relevant in this area. She also relates to Ingold's ideas of ‘human agency on the land’ and she ‘responds to environments altered on an industrial scale, distilling them into handheld landscapes carved from solid blocks, capturing the materiality of place through this transformation.’ (https://catherinehorton.wixsite.com/chorton-art/about accessed 11.5.25)

Her ways of collaging an experience of a place are interesting to me in bring together many different elements of drawing, photography and text.

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Kathy Prendergast’s use of mapping, both body mapping and city mapping, explore a connection between the body and landscape to find ways of recording and relating to place and also has been relevant. Her piece Land, for example, is particularly interesting described as ‘a painted tent disguised as mountains, as if the sense of belonging should be portable and that a home can be set up anywhere.’ (Hancock, 2019). I find this interesting in the context of the search for a sense of belonging in my own work.

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There are similarities across each of these artists in how they reference their connection to place while their approach to making and of course their outcomes are quite different. Looking at their work does, however, help me to see my own methods more clearly. My own embodied approach to making – includes for example, taking rock rubbings and using rock/earth pigment in my work, making direct castings from myself/rocks and mapping place through use of film. In this way I connect to ideas speaking about time, geology and an interaction between the human and non-human and gradually this is developing into my own language of ‘making’.

In the context of capturing embodied experience through film I was interested to find Liz Bailey’s work and how she writes about it. In her article (2008) she references her film ‘In Arcadia and down the market’ in which she aimed to ‘explore the lived experience of a few farmers in a small corner of the Welsh marshes’ (p6).

In the piece she asks herself, ‘am I as a film-maker really being in the world? Does the camera that comes between filmmaker and the subjects create a barrier or veil to reality? …A certain detachment still inevitably exists which the audience may or may not sense.’ (p6).

I think being aware of how and what you are filming is critical to be able to address these questions and maybe in creating any art object from embodied experience by definition adds distance to the outcome. The action or process (as in land/earth art for example) becomes the closest we might be able to get to an embodied experience or 'practice'.

Suze Adams is another artist whose practice resonates in relation to film as she discusses a time-based approach to considering an embodied practice. I was particularly interested in her work Daily (2003-2006). This series focuses on experiential time and issues of change and constancy as evidenced in the lived landscape.

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Her repeated photos of a single view are what she terms ‘both provocations and evocations. Via the adoption of regular, cyclical walks and repeated daily observance and documentation, these works aim to highlight the coexistence of an apparent dichotomy – the changing and the seemingly constant. ….Instead of fixity, a flow is suggested –an uneasy balance, an oscillation between movement and stasis, elemental forces and biological processes, set against the ‘constancy’ of regular acquaintance. Location, dislocation.’, (2012, p93).

This seems to relate strongly to what Wylie said about the practice of walking about capturing the moment of movement, the moments between movement and being there and not-there. These times or moments of attention and finding ways of capturing them seems very relevant to what I am attempting to do with my work.

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While I won’t discuss it again here the body landscape connection brings me back to thinking again about Ana Mendieta and asking myself where I am, my physical presence, in my making process. I am attempting to explore this through images of me wrapped in pigment cloths, in and out of the landscape (see documentation) and I will continue to do this through Unit 3.

emotional connection to place: stone and landscape

Going back to thinking about my work specifically with rocks made me consider what this might hold for me emotionally. I have written in my context piece about my connection to Tracey Emin and her love of one particular rock. In addition to this, the deep geologic fractures in rocks do draw me in – perhaps dark unknown and uncertain places where matter that has been held together for millions of years and starts breaking down and revealing fissures which can hold micro-climates in some locations; or as part of the process of erosion and breaking down under weathering in others.

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When I tried to think about the embodied experience of place and the rocks together I came back to an emotional connection or maybe an emotional response to the touch of the rocks, to the feel of them and of my feeling in the place itself.  My research into this led me to find an article by Fredricksen and Kuhn (2023) ‘Why is it hard to listen to a rock?’.

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This article reviews the experience of Martin Kuhn an artist who sculpts rocks – specifically Larkivite. It explores the relationship between the artist and his working material and asks questions about ‘power, agency and care’. The authors introduce the concept geophilia as a love of stone – first coined by Cohen J. (2015). It resonated with me immediately! Cohen references Nikolic (2017, p 267) saying each body is ‘differently emplaced within the folds of Spacetimemattering’ and ‘stones are times most tangible carriers’ (Cohen 2015).

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A key theme in their discussion is the idea of how we as artists work with materials. Donna Harraway’s ideas (2016, p34) about ‘thinking-with’ are referenced, which includes all possible players - human and non-human - in how we understand and think. They argue that thinking-with encourages a ‘process of give and take’ which extends into art-making. They quote Jones (2020, p457) ‘it is when one stops considering materials to be ‘neutral’ that one starts to notice how they inter-act, effect and affect the process of making’.

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This is something I have already considered as a printmaker - as we work with a matrix which has a response to what we do. This makes sense to me too in relation to considering rocks, in responding to the rocks rather than just imposing a way of working ie a sensitivity and care of approach how I work with them.

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At one point they consider Kuhn’s relationship with his working material – what is the rocks story? They write, ‘I can try to imagine what it would feel like to be a rock, but …it is still quite impossible’ (Fredricksen and Kuhn, p113) to know. Kuhn talks about how work being almost a co-operative effort between him and a piece of stone to sculpt saying ‘together we search for something that already is inside its rock body.’ (p114). They talk about Kuhn working this way as an embodied experience because of the way he relates to the stone and the mutuality in the process of making. I think this extends my earlier discussion of embodied landscape to include a way of working with and an element of listening to the environment that is important to me in my work.

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While issues around ecology, environment and how we relate to, exploit and treat the land are a core part of my interest I cannot cover all these areas in this MA research. When I think of the rocks at Kimmeridge Bay and what I am responding to, I do however, want to consider and be open to the non-human the materiality of the place and what it is communicating. I walk all over these rocks, I sit on them, I take rubbings from them, I make castings from them. I want to honour and listen to them too.

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This thinking influenced my approach to work on my trip to Kimmeridge in March. While it was a difficult trip in some ways it helped me to clarify ways of working with the landscape that I wanted to try. Touch was clearly important to me and so I tried out making imprints from the rock using clay it (which I have subsequently made castings from). Consideration of the rocks ‘perspective’  also gave me the idea taking film from the rocks point of view as discussed previously.

conclusion – going forwards

Towards the end of unit 2 and through this critical reflection I have become more certain about my own embodied approach to my work, some of my methodology and the focus of how to take it forward. I am interested in continuing my research into approaches to fieldwork and into fieldwork as practice having recently come across the book ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ (Crone et al, 2022). I plan to combine this research with my continued practice in place and embodied experience and bring ideas of sound and an audio work into Unit 3 and the research festival, see details in additional research.​

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