identity

Re-citing the Archive: Fieldwork, Fiction and the Politics of Memory

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Fieldwork as Fiction: Phyllis Dare, explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer

This paper proposes a speculative feminist historiography that re-cites the archive through embodied fieldwork, fictional personae, and the politics of memory. Drawing on site-specific research, situated within Brontë Country, West Yorkshire I explore how sensory gestures—walking, touching, re-enacting—activate archival fragments and reframe landscape as a mnemonic field. The archive here is not a static repository but a haunted space—one that migrates across media, bodies, and temporalities. By foregrounding the performative dimensions of archival practice — writing, walking, re-collecting, recollecting, reciting, re-citing and remembering, the archive, in this context, is a multisensory terrain and a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.

Central to this inquiry is the figure of Phyliss Dare, a fictional persona who enables a methodological slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. Dare operates as both structuring device and speculative method, enabling a mode of citation that foregrounds absence, polyphony, and narrative slippage. Her presence as explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer allows for a reframing of fieldwork as fictional encounter, one that destabilises linear historiography and opens space for embodied speculation. Through Dare the archive becomes a stage for performance, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded.

Rather than reconstructing a lost narrative or a singular past, the work proposes a historiography in which archival gestures become vehicles of resonance, resistance and reanimation. By triangulating fieldwork, fiction, and citation, I argue for a historiographic practice that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. This method foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures are preserved, and insists on the archive as a live site of encounter. In doing so, it offers a framework for engaging with historical material not only recovered as evidence, but re-situated within a living, shifting terrain where bodies landscapes and narratives converge.

Episode 2: To Have and to Hold

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I found a lock of hair in a glass case. The label said ‘Believed to be Emily’s’. Not Emily Brontë’s hair. Not a lock of hair. But hair, possibly Emily’s. The uncertainty is the most honest part. I think about the word believed, as if belief could bind the strands of hair to her scalp, as if glass could hold the heat of her breath. I hold it in my mind like a relic, a relic of a relic. Does the history of myself become parallel with the history of the object kept? What is this hinge or bridge that one builds to become the self that is now? I read Charlotte’s letters. I read Gaskell’s biography. I read the footnotes. I wonder how many women have been footnoted out of their own stories?

[Emily writes] She writes: “I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.” I wonder if the same is true of objects. If they pass through us, staining the mind, altering the hue of memory. I wonder what Emily would have thought of her life behind glass. I wonder if Wuthering Heights was her own collection — of storms, of silences, of things too wild to hold. She never wanted to be seen, she wanted to vanish into the moor. And yet here she is, pinned like a butterfly. This is the trap: an anterior document, a document created to sustain an image, an image contained in a scene, a scene without a referent. What is occurring in this falling in together, apart, away?

There is a desire to recuperate the forgotten, the abandoned, the fragmentary, the lost but it is a fool’s errand. I am both wild goose and chase. I wonder if collecting is a form of violence or is it a form of love? The human heart has hidden treasures, in silence sealed, in secret kept. Surely to collect is to love without reciprocity, to name without being known, to hold without being held. But the collection is not a sanctuary, it is a séance, a summoning of what refuses to stay buried. The photograph is torn, the letter is foxed, the lock of hair curls like a question mark. Even the archive has a body and it is failing. I hold a stone from the path to Top Withens, it feels like a breath caught in the throat. It fits in my palm like a secret. Or a wound. Or a promise I can’t keep. I don’t know if it’s hers. I don’t know if it’s mine. But I keep it. To have. To hold. To lose. And still, it slips through.

Letters to the Landscape 2025 – About

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Letters to the Landscape 2025: Title Image

Letters to the Landscape is an epistolary dialogue and travelogue exploring the relations between Brontë Country and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). The artist uses various strategies of production including polyphony, narrative, autobiography, fact and fiction and the intimate to interrogate authorship, authenticity, and the role of narrative and collections in shaping cultural memory. This cinematic essay incorporates postcards, letters, pinhole photography, digital photography, found images, found texts and Super 8. The script is non-linear and hangs together as a series of episodes or meditations and incorporates other writers and voices including J.G Ballard, René Daumal, actress Merle Oberon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte’s biographer and Emily Brontë to name a few. The work has been constructed and fabricated through the interaction of several pseudonyms who constitute the research team and the film crew, operating under the fictional artist duo Vale & Howlette. Adopting these dramatis personae in a broader narrative framework, Vale & Howlette become primary characters in a narrative that explores the performance of identity through ideas of place, history, travel, time and memory. This body of work is entitled The Chronicles of Vale & Howlette (2021 to date). The fictional artist duo Vale & Howlette interrogate authorship and authenticity, the work explores how identity, place, and memory are performed and constructed through a multi-media approach incorporating narrative, image, collections and the archive.

The work is initiated through a fictional conceit as the response to a ‘found’ collection of old photographic equipment (utilised in the film), personal letters and photographs and over 300 postcards of Brontë Country which are used both for the fieldwork and to punctuate the films episodic narrative. This series of episodes or meditations include episode 1: Epistles, a meditation on the epistolary and the act of letter writing, Episode 2: To Have and to Hold is a meditation on the collection and the act of collecting, Episode 3: A Reluctant Pilgrim is a meditation on the journey to Top Withins (reputed inspiration for Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 1847). Episode 4: A Lovers Spat re-imagines and re-writes the relationship between the two main protagonists in Wuthering Heights, Cathy & Heathciff and Episode 5 is a personal meditation on the act of dying which also symbolically represents the death of the female protagonist, Cathy in Wuthering Heights and the death of Emily Brontë. By foregrounding the fictional personas of Vale & Howlette, the work invites audiences to question the boundaries between fact and fiction, artist and character, author and place. It invites reflection on how artistic practice can be used to question historical narratives and reimagine place-based storytelling through the act of collecting.

Still Image from film Introduction
Film still Postcard Fieldnote from Phyliss Dare, the pseudonymous fieldworker and scriptwriter to George Howlette, the pseudonymous Director