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- Development of drawings and
watercolours from dialogues with artist Sarah Cullen, 2008
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- Residency at NES, Iceland, August 2008
- Download a Report, placing this work in broader context of landscape representation, walking and dialogic art practice.
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- "During the residency at NES in Skagaströnd, Iceland (August
2008) I worked with artist Sarah Cullen on a series of
drawings and watercolours of mountain scenes encountered during moments
when dialogue was hindered (often instances of 'awkward silence' so
derided by Hazlitt) as we walked in the fells around Skagaströnd.
Having walked, we then entered a 'recall' mode, to jointly re-construct
the scenes through entering into dialogue. It became apparent, during a
period of reflection on this work, that the verbal descriptions of
scenes, in order to render them in a drawn form, were described in
terms of composition - and that the received conventions of composition
determined to some extent the ways in which the scenes where described."
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"As a consequence I have begun to look at Alexander Cozen's 'blot'
techniques, (which strongly resemble the technique that was used on the
Iceland residency) as well as John Ruskin and William Gilpin's
endeavours to codify or systematise techniques and related theories of
Beauty, the Picturesque and its relationship to the sublime. Ruskin's
combat with contemporary Alpinists, who employed draughtsmen to render
'painfully literal' (Schama, S. 1995. p509) the common-sense of the
mountain's topographic features chimes with today's return to the
heroic mode of engagement with mountains, (or an 'imperial vanity' as
Ruskin would have it.) Both Robert Macfarlane (2003) and Simon Schama
(1995) before him have thoroughly accounted for the ongoing antagonism
between the nodes of apprehension, terror, fascination and attractions;
Gilpin and Ruskin, along with the Cozenses, explicitly keep open the
possibility of a space for imagination within landscape representation
- there is a disdain for the prosaic, mundane transcription, though
line alone, in favour of forms which might acknowledge the intricacies
and nuances of our encounters with hills and mountains."
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"Where Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind speaks of the transformation
of our 'interior landscape' (Macfarlane, R. 2003. p.275) work
undertaken during and subsequent to this residency has attempted to
articulate the negotiation of a shared landscape - both the physical
landscape encountered whilst walking and that produced between us, as a
process of coming-to-an-understanding, both of which are formed though
a dialogic interaction and which demand an appropriate form of
representation."
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