geography

Isabella Bird – traveller, travel writer and photographer

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‘She was always looking forward’: Isabella Bird. Photograph: Royal Geographical Society/Getty Images

That reckless lady with “the up-to-anything and free-legged air,” as she herself described it, … went breezing about the remote parts of the Asian and American continents for thirty years and became one of the most popular, respected and celebrated travellers of the later nineteenth century. — Pat Barr, Preface.

“Isabella Bird (married name Bishop) was an English explorer, writer and photographer. She was the first women to be made a Fellow at the Royal Geographical Society. Bird was born near Leeds, in Boroughbridge in the Harrogate district of North Yorkshire, on 15th October 1831.

From a young age, Isabella Bird suffered with health problems. Her doctors recommended a sea voyage to help improve her condition and in 1854, aged 23, she set off to America on her first international journey. This was documented in her first of several books, The Englishwoman in America. Her books were written in an entertaining and accessible way and became very popular. This gave many people the chance to learn about the world beyond their home.

Isabella’s trip to America was just the beginning of her adventures. She explored countries all over the world including Australia, Hawaii, China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, India and Iran. She climbed mountains, trekked through jungles, and rode for thousands of miles on horseback. She even rode on elephants! Her final travels were to Morocco when she was in her 70s. Isabella Bird was 60 years old by the time she took up photography. She produced beautiful images on her travels, and her later writings were published with her photographs alongside.

‘The Cobbler’ by Isabella Bird

Difficulties Facing Women Explorers

Isabella Bird led a life full of adventure and excitement, exploring sometimes dangerous regions and often setting out on her travels alone. This meant that her life was very different from how women were expected to live in the nineteenth century. When she became a Fellow at the Geographical Society in 1892, it was regarded an exception by the council members. They did not see women in general as able to contribute to scientific and geographical knowledge, and it was argued that women were not well suited to being explorers. In 1873, she rode 800 miles throughout the Rocky Mountains in North America. She was angry when a Times review of her book that described this journey described her appearance as “masculine” because of her clothing.

Although she was not a part of the Suffragette movement, she has been regarded as an important role model for women, and her images was used on a Suffragette placard. Isabella Bird is a character in Top Girls, a 1982 play by Caryl Churchill that looks at women’s roles and success in society. Churchill took quotes from Isabella Bird’s books to make up much of the dialogue of Isabella’s character in the play.”

Quote reproduced from https://victorianweb.org/history/explorers/bird.html, text reproduced from https://mylearning.org/stories/leeds-explores-the-world/1169?, image reproduced from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/23/isabella-bird-explorer-history-heroine-tv-ruby-wax, the cobbler reproduced from https://mylearning.org/stories/leeds-explores-the-world/1169? (accessed 26/05/23)

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.

Micro Critique Paper No.4

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Introduction: Analysis of the following articles have revealed problems in defining the field of chorography as well as methods, theories and insights which warrant further examination. These summaries identify, illuminate and reflect on these issues and their implications in theory and practice.

Paper 4: Curry, M. (2005) “Toward A Geography of a World Without Maps: Lessons From Ptolemy And Postal Codes”. Annals of the Association of American Geographers [online] 95 (3), 680-691. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00481.x/abstract [5th October 2015]

Ptolemy’s world map. This map of the world is from an edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’, published in 1513 by German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller (c.1470-1520)

Curry’s paper is concerned with the conflation of place and space in contemporary discourse which commonly obfuscate and erase their differences. His primary aim is to elaborate upon the terms chorography, topography and geography and delineate their differences by examining their ‘technologies and practices’. He suggests chorography is limited to the geographer’s knowledge, clearly in the context of this research this is not the case and in his own words ‘it is alive and well.’ Curry argues these geographic ways of knowing each have their own objects of study; region, place and the earth’s surface.  He is critical of both their neglect in discussions of place or analyses which focus on scale in relation to these concepts as opposed to form and function. Curry employs a complex analogy of the invention of the US ZIP code to illuminate his argument.

Curry compares and contrasts these terms by tracing and re-interpreting their origins to distinguish them from contemporary understandings. He locates chorography and topography within foundational concepts of place and memory. Chorography was a qualitative way of interpreting the world, both celestial and terrestrial, and this knowledge was located in ‘signs or symbols’ which aimed to perceive relations ‘between events, places and the times of their occurrence’.  He relocates topography’s association with mapping by placing it in the oral tradition and the ‘art of memory’. In this context places are created, narrated, performed and re-formed through symbolic associations. Place and experience are coextensive with each other and this element of the mnemonic has already been established independently in prior research.

For Curry the importance of this argument is not simply a matter of different scales of apprehension, but more significantly is intrinsically linked to repositories of knowledge, dissemination and retrieval. He argues space was ‘invented’ against the backdrop of place, due to emergent technologies necessitated by an increase in information, leading to an erasure of the chorographic and topographic by the geographic. Chorography and topography represent human patterns of knowing and belonging in contrast to the panoptic vision of geography. The implications of this observation equate to an erasure of memory practices and a movement from an embodied and emplaced performance of knowledge to its commodification. Places are increasingly mediated by technology and this also applies to the digital records of archaeological fieldwork. For instance when I was introduced to archaeological fieldwork at Erddig, Wales the corresponding planar database managed by the Historic Buildings, Sites and Monuments Record comprises 24 topographic views of each location in the field; a complex palimpsest inconceivable in a single view. This centralization of information which allows for the preservation of heritage data becomes an abstracted space of typology and categorization devoid of the people that inhabited them or the places that created them.

Curry’s analogy of the standardisation of the ZIP code can, in the context of this paper, be equated with geography reaching its empirical, scientific, mathematical and spatial exactitude in the art of cartography. This organisation of geographical knowledge, in the case of the ZIP code, privileges spatial points and co-ordinates whereby the particularities of place, regions, difference, the local and thus topography and chorography are subsumed and erased by spatial systematisation, the realm of demographics and the global organisation of information.

Image reproduced from https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/428654/view/ptolemy-s-world-map-16th-century (accessed 03/11/22)

Extract from In What Geography Differs From Chorography, Claudius Ptolemy

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1584 — An illustration of Ptolemy holding a cross-staff, published in Les vrais portraits et vies des hommes illustres (1584). — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

“Geography is a representation in picture of the whole known world together with the phenomena contained therein, it differs from Chorography in that Chorography, selecting certain places from the whole, treats more fully the particulars of each by themselves – even dealing with the smallest conceivable localities, such as harbors, farms, villages, river courses, and such like. It is the prerogative of Geography to show the known habitable earth as a unit in itself, how it is situated and what is its nature, and it deals with those features likely to be mentioned in a general description of the earth, such as the larger towns and great cities, mountain ranges and principle rivers […]

The end of Chorography is to deal separately with a part of the whole, as if one were to paint the eye or ear by itself. The task of Geography is to survey the whole in its just proportions, as one would the entire head, and afterwards those detailed features which portraits and pictures may require, giving them proportion in relation to one another so that their correct measurement apart can be seen by examining them, to note whether they form the whole or a part of the picture. Accordingly therefore it is not unworthy of Chorography, our out of its province, to describe the smallest details of places, while Geography only deals with regions and their general features. […] Chorography is most concerned with what kind of places those are which it describes, not how large they are in extent. Its concern is to paint a true likeness, and not merely to give exact position and size. Geography looks at the position rather than the quality […] Chorography needs an artist, and no one presents it rightly unless he is an artist…”

Claudius Ptolemy quoted in Volume II, Visual Culture: Histories, Archaeologies and Genealogies of Visual Culture. Eds. Morra, J, Smith. M, (Oxon, Routledge: 2006), p.17‐18.