Critical Fragments

Deep Mapping and the spatial turn

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Archaeological plan of the sanctuary of Asklepios on Kos (Kiapokas 1999, 164) superimposed on a satellite image.

“There are ten things that I can say about these deep maps.

First. Deep maps will be big – the issue of resolution and detail is addressed by size.

Second. Deep maps will be slow – they will naturally move at a speed of landform or weather.

Third. Deep maps will be sumptuous – they will embrace a range of different media or registers in a sophisticated and multilayered orchestration.

Fourth. Deep maps will only be achieved by the articulation of a variety of media – they will be genuinely multimedia, not as an aesthetic gesture or affectation, but as a practical necessity.

Fifth. Deep maps will have at least three basic elements – a graphic work (large, horizontal or vertical), a time-based media component (film, video, performance), and a database or archival system that remains open and unfinished.

Sixth. Deep maps will require the engagement of both the insider and outsider.

Seventh. Deep maps will bring together the amateur and the professional, the artist and the scientist, the official and the unofficial, the national and the local.

Eighth. Deep maps might only be possible and perhaps imaginable now – the digital processes at the heart of most modern media practices are allowing, for the first time, the easy combination of different orders of material – a new creative space.

Ninth. Deep maps will not seek the authority and objectivity of conventional cartography. They will be politicized, passionate, and partisan. They will involve negotiation and contestation over who and what is represented and how. They will give rise to debate about the documentation and portrayal of people and places.

Tenth. Deep maps will be unstable, fragile and temporary. They will be a conversation and not a statement.”

Text reproduced from Clifford McLucas http://documents.stanford.edu/MichaelShanks/51 (accessed 04/05/23)

Image reproduced from http://deepmappingsanctuaries.org/deep-mapping/ (accessed 04/05/23)

Currently Reading

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“Since 1857, hardly a year has gone by without some sort of Brontë ‘biography’ appearing. These range from pious accounts in Victorian conduct books to Freudian pyschobiographies, from plays, films and ballets to tourist brochures and images on tea-towels, from sensation-seeking penny-a-liners to meticulous works of sober scholarship. Each generation has rewritten the Brontës to reflect changing attitudes – towards the role of the woman writer, towards sexuality, towards the very concept of personality. The BrontëMyth gives vigorous new life to our understanding of the novelists and their culture and Lucasta Miller reveals as much about the impossible art of biography as she does about the Brontës themselves.”

Text reproduced from https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bronte-Myth-Lucasta-Miller/dp/0099287145/ref=sr_1_1?crid=JRQVJMGQ82N&keywords=the+bronte+myth&qid=1682966752&sprefix=the+bronte+myth%2Caps%2C684&sr=8-1 (accessed 01/05/23)

Current PhD Research

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“Bringing together contributions by artists, writers and theorists, ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ addresses the role that art practice and art-based research plays in expanding notions of fieldwork. At once a handbook for research and practice and a philosophical speculation, this book offers the unique opportunity to explore ways of working within vastly diverse climates and terrains using image, sound, movement and other sensing technologies. It also offers more creative and speculative interventions into the idea and location of the ‘field’ itself.

Focusing on a range of projects from across different geographic locations and situations, the book highlights the crucial contribution that art can make to environmental and climate studies offering a valuable intervention into current discussions of artistic practice and research. ‘Fieldwork for Future Ecologies’ presents a series of propositions and speculations … radical practices for radical times.

Contributing authors: Angus Carlyle, Alliance of the Southern Triangle/AST (D Bauer, F Grodin, P M Hernandez, E Kedan), Bianca Hester, Bridget Crone, David Burns, Henriette Gunkel and Eline McGeorge, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Julie Gough, Kate Pickering, Kreider + O’Leary, Kristen Sharp, Melody Jue, Nicholas Mangan, Philip Samartzis, Polly Stanton, Ruth Maclennan, Sam Nightingale, Saskia Beudel, Simon O’Sullivan, Susan Schuppli, Therese Keogh.“

Text reproduced from https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/fieldwork-for-future-ecologies/ (accessed 24/04/23)

PhD Synopsis

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Brontë Country Map

The Chorography of Place: Mapping new ecologies of landscape, memory, history and visual culture.

This PhD by practice aims to explore chorography’s relevance as an organising principle in contemporary artistic practice and critically address the historic yet neglected role of chorography in the documentation of place. Chorography, or place writing, is the artistic representation of a regional map which originated in Classical Geography (c.149AD). This field-based approach and detailed descriptor of place takes region as it’s lens and qualitatively maps characteristics of the locale by examining the constituent parts of that place. If a sensory physical mapping of place occurs prior to representation where is the body in the process of chorography?

There is a need to distinguish this act from its documentation and re-presentation to provide new theories, forms and applications by addressing the political implications of the embodied in the act of representation. To provide a contemporaneous account the performative relations between the body, mapping and place; the mobile, embodied and situated are therefore central to a contemporary interpretation of chorography.

To enact these relations sites chosen for their historic, symbolic or mythological significance include Brontë Country which straddles West Yorkshire and the East Lancashire Pennines, the Devil’s Bridge in Wales and St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall. Applying chorographic methods in artistic practice I aim to realise a historically grounded exploration of place by performing and documenting embodied, visual, textual and symbolic mappings. These mappings will form the basis of artworks, critical and performance writing, book works, performance and installation which will translate chorographic methods and the physical act of mapping into artistic practice. Combining historic method with contemporaneous form will enable a renewed understanding of the chorography of place not just artistically but physically, contextually and historically.

The Gender of Place: Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

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“The faery solitude of the place…his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea…. evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day…at home neither on land or water, a mysterious amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves…That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!." The Blood Chamber, p.8-9

“The faery solitude of the place…his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea…. at home neither on land or water, a mysterious amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves…That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!.” The Bloody Chamber, p.8-9

This very brief analysis explores how we can approach gendered relations from the perspective of location to reveal the symbolic and metaphorical significance of Mont. Saint- Michel as it is employed in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. This analysis was given recently in a very short presentation. Examining Mont. Saint- Michel I explore its potential to represent feminine and masculine principles, nature and culture and how it is central to relations between the bride, her mother and the Marquis. Working through visual and sonic imagery highlights the relations between female anatomy, biology and the cyclical feminine flow ontology of the ‘sea-girt’. My interest lay specifically in the concept of the sea-girt, as a border or boundary surrounded or enclosed by the sea and how we might consider this in relation to the porous and the feminine. Continue reading →