Further North conference, 4-5 September
Abstracts
Thurs 4. Sept.
10.30. Plenary, Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, ‘The North is Everywhere’, Lipman 031
11.30-12.50 . Strand 1. Questioning North – Lipman 032
Ursula Troche, Artist and Writer, Triptych Grids and Unconscious Beyonds: ‘Way Up North country’
The theme ‘Further North’ echoes a performance poetry, prose and photo project in progress I conceived in a ‘triptych grid’ , consisting of my journeys to Ireland, Northumberland and Finland, in which notions of ‘stretching’, ‘reaching out’ and the ‘edges’ are central threads. The work also builds on previous explorations of different parts of England’s North (and Scotland’s South), as well as around the North Sea, from a London location with an east-west-German experience.My threads point to borderlands’ off-centre and hidden margins, and from this standpoint (Mead, Lacan), I seek to explore dualities: bridges versus walls, i.e. Hadrian’s Wall; Empires versus ‘Open country’. These dualities are challenged with breaking silences, exploring the in-between (Ricoeur), and the unconscious (Freud, Bion), forming a ‘triptych grid’ concept.
‘Northern gloom’ is compared with industrialisation, and the implications this has for the centre-margin duality, thereby infusing an international, and intercontinental workers’ historical angle.
Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, ‘Gates of Heaven’
In this presentation, I examine the last landscapes of the pet cemetery. Liminal sites – or to use a regional vernacular, “thin places” – where we bury our dead companion animals, give a design to death, and a voice to loss. The audience will be transported to the Moray coast of northeast Scotland, paying a visit to the country’s most remarkable example, and meeting Stevie, its founder and animal undertaker. Having buried pets for twenty-five years, retired street-sweeper and beachcomber Stevie can justifiably claim to have seen it all. His northerly cemetery is pitched at the sea’s very edge, close enough to be encrusted with sand and encroached upon by storms. It is a menagerie of remembered cats, dogs, hamsters, tortoises, budgies, mice, ferrets, guinea pigs and goldfish. Akin to Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, the cemetery is an endlessly unfinished achievement, and all the more arresting for it. Faced with an intensely storied site, I’ll report on doing landscape discovery and exploration in miniature: touring the paths and plots; studying pet paraphernalia and commemorative gravestones; striking up conversation with pet-keepers past and present; listening to stories of afterlives and underworlds; and, revealing my family’s own tale of connection to the site. A powerful portrait of place, intimacy and attachment emerges, and a final argument: that it is animals that ultimately make us human.
David Martin Jones, University of Glasgow, ‘Where is Anywhere? Ideas of North, South, East and West’
This work in progress seeks to open a dialogue with conference delegates regarding how the idea of North functions, by placing it in relation to ideas such as the Global South, the Rhizomatic West and the Orientalist East.
11.30-12.50 Strand 2. Questioning North, Lip. 033
Craig Richardson, University of Northumbria, ‘Broken North’
This paper is concerned with wilderness and desolation. It asks ‘How does Northern ‘emptiness’ function as a resource in the arts?’ It considers the formative context of key works by post-war artists, writers and film-makers, in particular the journeys which led to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Joseph Beuys’ Loch Awe Piece , and Thomas Struth’s Edinburgh photographs from the series Unconscious Places; each informed by their author’s perceptions of the North as naturally barren, socially deprived or simply uninhabited. The suggestion is that the journey to an empty northern landscape always offers the opportunity of a further North. However the North is a place of personal pilgrimage and arrival which has no ‘beyond’, a place one need not go beyond. While a special function of the North is as a space of art and as a resource in the arts, offering silence and withdrawal, its continued representation by visitors prolongs and strengthens this idea. However what emerges can be collectively represented in many ways, including as a ‘Broken North’.
Andrew Sneddon, Sheffield Hallam University & University of Edinburgh, ‘There’s no Place like North’
However we think of north, the opposite is probably true. Kenneth White, in his geo-poetic trilogy of lectures (North Atlantic Investigations, A Highland Reconnaissance and A sense of High North) that later formed the book On TheAtlantic Edge (2006) offers us the exact latitudes of North; Near North 51°, Mid North 52°, Great North 58°-69°, Far North as 70°-79°. However, I believe a sense of North is best explored through a non-scientific fashion and more through an imaginative and creative register. This paper considers the ideaof north as a form of home and explores the imaginative power within a small piece of creative writing by Roderick Buchanan called, The History of the World according to my Father (2010). The paper also examines some similarities and differences between White and Buchanan around notions of origin, displacement, myth and regionalism, ‘northernism’ and the influence of home.
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, University of Cumbria, ‘ Ecologies of Uncertainty: the Indeterminate North’
From a position of safety and familiarity there is often a longing and attraction in us, towards that which is either unknown or simply beyond our control. The fear that prompts us to protect ourselves can be seen as being one of the drivers behind the acquisition of knowledge. But the need to bring everything into the realm of what is understood and ‘known’, has led us to cut ourselves adrift from exposure to things that whilst perceived as ‘problematic’ might also otherwise be enriching. Our insulation from environments beyond our urban or agrarian control has robbed us of the know-how of how to be, not only in the world, but also in ecological terms, with the world.
The paper will draw from a series of art projects by Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson and our extensive art research activity in the north, (in Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard) in order to articulate relations and distances between polar north, imagined and metaphoric north and relative ‘UK north’ using interspecific tensions and the paradoxes of representation
Lunch 12.50-1.45
1.50-3.10 Artists, Ephemeral and Shifting North: Lip 031
John Wallace, Artist and filmmaker ‘‘Tweed-Sark Cinema’: An audio-visual study of place, ecosystems and the meaning of ‘the border’’
Tweed-Sark Cinema is a collaboration between documentary filmmaker and video
artist John Wallace and Pete Smith, Royal Society-Wolfson Professor of Soils &
Global Change at the University of Aberdeen and member of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Tweed-Sark Cinema explore the explores the living connections between people and the environment of the English-Scottish border along two stretches where rivers form partof its length: In the west,the Sark; in the east,the Tweed
Alec Finlay, Artist and Poet, A reading from the artist’s‘Out of books’
Sian Bowen, University of Northumbria, ‘Suspending the Ephemeral: Materiality and Transience Through Drawing Practice’
The Nova Zembla collection of prints at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, extraordinary for having lain frozen in the Arctic for three centuries, were used by Sian Bowen as a stimulus for the investigation of the relationship between the materiality of drawing and the ephemerality of museum objects on paper.
The prints were carried as merchandise on a 1596 failed Dutch expedition to the Far East via the Northeast Passage. An over-wintering refuge was built on Nova Zembla in which the prints lay in stacks until their discovery: the refuge had filled with ice, transforming the stacks into frozen papier-maché blocks. In 1977 methods were devised to separate the layers and reassemble the thousands of fragments. The physicality of the prints thus underwent metamorphic change: from two-dimensional paper sheets to three-dimensional hardened, blackened blocks and back again to paper.The Nova Zembla Prints played a pivotal role for the artist in addressing the following: As paradigms of ephemeral objects on paper, what models can the Nova Zembla prints provide for innovative modes of making drawings in respect of the:distortion and fragmentation of their imagery; material transformation of their paper supports; the impact of their conservation.In what ways can these modes of drawing be developed to capture the ephemeral nature of museum objects on paper?
This research project is being further developed through a number of visits Bowen has made to Arkhangelsk Museum, Northern Russia, which houses several thousand objects found at the site of Barents’ refuge. The paper will extend to consider the Northern (Arctic) Federal University’s cooperation with the Northern Branch of Russian Federation Agency for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (ROSHYDROMET) and the establishment of marine research and education expeditions aboard what has been called the “The Arctic Floating University.” The aims of these expeditions which carry researchers, professors and students to remote areas of the Arctic areto carry out complex interdisciplinary research of the Arctic environment and to train young specialists in Arctic region.“The Arctic Floating University” combines research and educational expeditions and opens a new sphere of international cooperation.
1.50-3.10 Artists and Islands, Lipman 032
Murdo Macdonald, University of Dundee, 'A hesitation of the tide'; notes on islandness and art’
My title comes from a poem by Gael Turnbull, 'An Irish Monk on Lindisfarne' in which he meditates on islands, mainlands and cultures. This paper is an effort to do likewise. I note here that island artists whether of our own day or earlier - like those who created the Book of Kells on Iona or the gospels on Lindisfarne, or indeed like the prehistoric builders of the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney or Calanais in Lewis - owe a signficant debt to their island environment. Their art can be thought of as deeply ecological, to some degree with respect to a bounded, sometimes literally cloistered sense of place, but just as importantly as key parts of a wider global network of island defined connections. And not just a network of islands, but of islands helping to define mainlands.
Tess Denman Cleaver, Newcastle University, Project R-hythm: Multiple centres of gravity in performance practice and practice-led research
Working with residents of a small island community in the UK, Tess Denman Cleaver is using performance making to interrogate notions of marginality in research practice and the conceptions of knowledge and exchange that pervade current thinking around ‘knowledge exchange’ and the study of the so called ‘collaborative turn’. Presentation of the performance making process will aim to initiate a dialogue around how we articulate situated knowing and the transience in this type of research when discussing the value of participatory performance or the dynamics of collaboration across sectors, communities and cultures. The purpose of presenting this research and project is to (re)claim and de-centre the language and territory of knowledge exchange and consider an identified need to acknowledge the agency of landscapes and people working in ‘marginal’ or ‘at edge’ spaces, in order to redefine those spaces as anchored in their own unique centres of gravity. The presentation will share aspects of the aforementioned island project, which is ongoing, as well as thoughts on how practice-based research embedded in the work, contributes to the development of new conceptions of knowledge and value, as emergent and embodied, that have the potential to expand the borders of the current, narrowly conceived language of knowledge exchange.
Fionagh Thomson, University of St Andrews, Starry Skies, Bengal Tigers & Saddam Hussein: everyday land as experienced by young citizens in the Outer Hebrides at the beginning of the 21st Century.
This paper presents a methodological piece of work that developed an artist-in-residence project with young citizens, framed within a wider ethnographic study, in the Outer Hebrides. The young artists-in-residents began with the words ‘everyday land’ and were invited to develop their own concept over five weekly workshops, mediated through photography, walking the land, poetry, music and soundscapes. Most importantly the series of workshops were framed by theories of critical and creative thinking (Lipman 1995 and Bruner, 2001), with participants producing a final work of art in a medium of their choice. Participants’ work moved across time and space, merging land, sea and sky (Ingold, Massey, 2001), incorporating war monuments and more contemporary aspects of culture and politics. As one participant mused in the final workshop, elbow-deep in paint: ‘you know when I started I thought it would be trees and stuff, but it’s much, much … more…”
3.10-3.30 Tea
3.30 – 4.50 Liminal Practices. Lip. 031
Daniel Lee & Antonia Thomas, Orkney College, University of the Highlands and Islands, ‘A journey through time and space on Papa Westray: experimental mapping and place-marking at the northern edge of Orkney’
Over the past two years, we have been archaeologists-in-residence at Papay Gyro Nights, an international contemporary arts festival held annually on the island of Papa Westray, Orkney. Our fieldwork has focussed upon walking and journeying to explore the dynamic between past and present in the landscape and our own role in creating place and space. This has involved an interactive GPS mapping and walkover project, and collaborative work with artist Tonje Boe Birkeland. We have also been investigating the movement of materials which make up art installation pieces and considering the more ephemeral and intangible residues of the island’s heritage.By linking contemporary archaeology and contemporary art through an experimental geography, our project subverts the usual methods and processes of archaeological survey. Through our mapping practices, different timescales become entangled,blurring the boundary between archaeologist and artist, real and imaginary, and past and present. The project has questioned the nature of a residency for archaeologists and highlighted the expectations and tensions inherent within such an engagement. This has caused us to challenge our own preconceptions of archaeological field practice and develop new ways of ‘doing’ contemporary landscape archaeology. This paper discusses our activities during the residency and reflects upon some of the emerging themes from this work-in-progress.
Robert Jefferson and Ian Cottage, University of Northumbria, ‘Filming the liminal, uncanny atmosphere on screen’
Two filmmakers whose recent work has explored the notion of haunted film and uncanny auras through the explicit foregrounding of location as a liminal space into which narrative merges with atmosphere here present and articulate the ideas underpinning their work.Ian Cottage’s films KEEL and THE FERNS are ‘ghost’ stories in that nature itself is haunting us as a sea of ferns or the sea itself.Robert Jefferson’s animation THE DEVIL’S NIGHT GLASS indicated the return of the repressed through the James Hogg folktale THE LONG PACK, and his new work derives its power from relics of the industrial past; the Blue Streak site at Spadeadam and the inside of the Tyne Bridge, investigating the temenos with in-screen cameras and a laser mapper. Here, architecture becomes the site of the threshold.
As colleagues in film production, the pair have collaborated on soundtracks that explore similar aural themes.
Gina Wall, University of Highlands and Islands, ‘Spectral traces: Photography, futurity and landscape’
My recent publication ‘Ghost writing: photographing (the) spectral north’ (2013) is a practice-led enquiry into specific wartime sites in Scotland (Hoxa Head in Orkney and Lossie Forest in Moray), unregulated northern spaces in which the past irrupts the present, challenging our experience of the present as cohesive. It is my contention that photography is a kind of ghost writing which, following Derrida, is essentially spectral. This writing figured as a disruption of self-identity and self-presence is a hauntologypar excellence. Fieldwork and reading has led me to think quite differently about photographic practice. Accounting for photography as a kind of ghost writing has required consideration of the possible futures of the images that I make, and, ultimately, to regard photography as an anticipatory practice. Here photography is a practice in search of futures which hover in the landscape around us, only to be inscribed as images of the past which come back and come back again to freely haunt the present. Questions for this paper include: Does photography’s peculiar relation to time make it a particularly appropriate medium to capture the spectrality of particular landscapes? Does photography give landscape a mechanism through which to declare its layered self? How might we begin to theorise the way in which latencies of the future are articulated by photographic images?
3.30-4.50 Climate, atmosphere and affect, Lipman 032
Oliver Moss, University of Northumbria, "Meteorological Imaginations: Towards geographies of affective practices of weather, atmospherics and landscapes"
Mostly unaccounted for in philosophical treatises on the natural environment - largely on account of its enmity to the notion of life as grounded and emergent upon a pre formed static surface - weather exerts a nevertheless profound influence on the way we perceive and understand the world; affecting our bodies, our moods, our behaviours – even the structure of our environments. This paper, drawing on fieldwork carried out with more than fifty landscape artists living and operating in the North East of England and the Scottish Borders, aims to highlight weather’s particular profile within the field of arts practice. First, it considers the ways in which weather is anticipated and sensed by landscape artists – visually, haptically and intersensorally. Second, it explores the ways in which weather is leveraged and harnessed for artistic ends. And third, it sets out to trace weather’s suffusion through and between materials, bodies and spaces.
Judy Spark,Robert Gordon University, ‘Seeing without Light: Considering Darkness’