From Unspoken Landscapes

Drawings and watercolours from walks & dialogues, with artist Sarah Cullen, 2008

Residency at NES, Iceland, August 2008

Download a Report, placing this work in broader context of landscape representation, walking and dialogic art practice.

"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."

"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."

"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."