Output details

Making a Place: Art, Writing, and a More-than-textual Approach

Making a place: art, writing, and a more-than-textual approach is a peer reviewed article that appeared in The Geographical Review, 103 (2), April 2013. The article draws on my interdisciplinary, practice-based doctoral research which focused on particular Northern Scottish forests, and was funded by the Forestry Commission, The University of the Highlands and Islands and Highlands and Islands Enterprise. This article developed from a paper presented at the Canadian Association of Geographer’s 2012 Annual Congress.

The research constitutes an innovative way of exploring place, engaging with anthropological and geographical enquiry as well as arts’ longstanding engagement with landscape and place. My work engages with recent writings that see place and landscape as multi-layered, dynamic, ‘activated’ by activity and often affectively experienced. Thus Tim Ingold’s perspective on landscape and Kathleen Stewart’s writing on ‘affect’ combine with explorations of Robert Smithson’s use of writing and his ideas of site and non-site, Richard Long and Hamish Fulton’s walking practices, and Johanna Drucker’s investigations into the artist’s book.

In the article, I also discuss one of the innovative aspects of my research, which was to incorporate a ‘walking ethnography’ as part of my research methodology, adapting this way of working to explore the intricacies of place through learning from the perspectives of foresters and ecologists. This article also links to another peer reviewed article, published in Performance Research 17 (4), August, 2012, where I discuss a particular body of work entitled ‘Dead Amongst the Living’.

These cross-disciplinary explorations result in multi-modal outputs. Together with other interlinked outputs that include papers at geographical, interdisciplinary drawing, printmaking and anthropological conferences and seminars, as well as exhibitions, this article expands the ways in which these artworks are seen, and how an arts practice can add can add another dimension to other disciplines’ investigations.