Mountains & Lacunæ

© Alec Finlay, 2009

Background—on walking in the High Mountains

(written in 2013)

My very first encounter with the high mountains was far from heroic, far from Romantic. In my grandparents' front room, faint 35mm slides of the Südtirol were thrown onto a small, pearly screen; often exceeding the frame, and over-spilling onto painted wallpaper, embossed with garden flowers. Alpine scenes appeared as incidental – intermingled with more personal, intimate photographs which were always the primary focus of the narration that accompanied them: images of my grandparents together, or with their new-found German and Austrian friends. (One slide entitled "Our German friends singing to us" depicts ten or more walking companions, seated outside a Tirolean mountain hut, snowy peaks and tree-lined valleys their backdrop.) Above all, I concluded, these were social occasions: journeys made, in the case of my Grandfather, to heal the wounds inflicted during WWII. These were not excursions to retrieve the picturesque from the mountains – composition, framing and the conventions of painting and drawing were furthest from their minds. Some other stronger attachment motivated the production of these images.

This binding of personal relationships and mountain landscape was a formative experience. As such, my early awareness and understanding of the various social modalities of the mountains and their representation has had increasing influence on my artwork and methodology that I have developed.

In establishing an art practice which involved hill-walking, I turned to this joint- rather than solo-negotiation of the environment. A walking together. This has taken the form of transporting the memory of a walk to a third-party and most recently, walking with others to later jointly recall aspects of the walk. In seeking this form of practice - shifting from isolation towards a togetherness – my work has been brought within closer, though antagonistic proximity, to the Romantics and to the influence of particular physical geographies and cultural practices.

Mountain & Lacunae (2009/10)—a collaboration with artist Sarah Cullen—takes the form of a small-scale participatory performance, (of between 10-20 people) within which mountain landscapes are described and re-imagined in dialogue. We are intrigued by how others convey landscapes with them in memory and how they can be recalled and articulated through interaction with others. We came to this practice through our love of walking together in hills and mountains in places such as the Canadian Rockies, the Scottish Highlands, Asturias in Northern Spain, the Südtirol on the Austrian/Italian borders, and in Iceland. We have noticed the prominence given to visual description of places seen and of the many modes that are used to richly describe them by people who spend time walking in these environments. We are interested in how these relate to historical landscape conventions, such as the picturesque, which was noted by Cosgrove (1998) as having continued influence on how landscape is popularly understood.