Landscape

Episode 4: A Lovers Spat

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Archival Image, Wuthering Heights, 1920

Silent gravel in the driveway, deafening clock in the hall, everything whispers anxiously. A back is turned to hide its increasing anxiety, compulsive shrugs walk away. Her shoulders wet with thunder settle like a paper cut on her soul. Confused by the bearing of the question successfully she feigns interest. Her nose wrinkles, he shifts on his feet, she, modest and unadorned. Somehow he knows her even before she knows herself. Somehow she knows him even before she knows herself. He thinks what does she want? ‘I can’t really say.’. She; silent except for exclamations of gibberish, he can tell by her pulse. Lips pursed in disgust betraying the economy of her face.

I don’t spend too much time around people, treachery, hypocrisy, the promise of love, look into the mouth of a person and you’ll find nothing but lies wriggling there…and you cling…there is no vocabulary to hush this conflict…detached poems speak voices of the dead. ….and you cling…and her fury renders her speechless…and it clings…a stain on the tip of her tongue…a ghost building, silhouettes of words where a certain set of gestures are housed.

Like any clandestine affair my glasses aren’t rose tinted, they are cracked, splintered, broken, smothered in the dirt of you, black excretions of filth exuding through the cracks, the grime of you inhabits […] the stench of you burns […] in my nostrils, rolls around like grit in my eyes, feels like ash in my mouth; I roll your name around lovingly on my tongue, caressing you...and it clings. I roll you around in my mouth and you grate, setting my teeth on the edge. The grime of you inhabits every pore, dirty, filthy little memories secreted away, skin seething like ants. No amount of washing can erase your sweet aroma, your putrid stench, your incessant demands, your impenetrability, your indifference, your excess, I sold my soul for you. I have holes in my soul for you. Still you beckoned me with your availability, your parlour games, your desire to cater to every whim, the promise to fulfil any fantasy. Your body gorged my vision. Replete with the extent of you, I could never see the end of you, never see beyond you, never get outside you, never get inside you…yet…always the feeling of you moving inside me. And it clings, and it rings and the falling begins…

“You know, you spat at me,” she said. “You had a drop of spittle come flying across in your goddamned passion. You spat, and it hit me.”

AAH Annual Conference, University of Cambridge

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I am pleased to announce I will be presenting at the above conference in April, responding to the panel Art History: Facts and Fiction? My paper is entitled: Excavating the Ephemeral through Performative Archival Practice: Fact, Fiction and Fieldwork.

This panel explores a neglected tradition in art history: the strategic use of fictional elements in scholarly writing. We seek to examine the scope of this underexplored practice and consider the benefits, challenges and legacies of such creative strategies. The use of such elements in art history is long-standing. Vasari, for example, drew on Italian novelistic traditions in The Lives of the Artists to craft compelling historical narratives, an aspect of art historical writing that is often overlooked.

Yet, as Hayden White observed, the writing of history is ‘at once poetic, scientific and philosophical.’ Fictional perspectives have been employed in the humanities more widely to challenge prevailing conceptions and to address archival gaps. Examples include Clifford Geertz’s ‘faction,’ which addresses the fiction of the neutral anthropological observer and Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, which blends historical research with critical theory and fictional narrative to amplify suppressed voices, particularly those of enslaved people. Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation also needs to be mentioned here, which combines fact and fiction to explore complex issues and imagine possible futures, while Gerald Vizenor’s ‘Native American slipstream’ employs time travel and alternate realities to explore ‘Indigenous’ worldviews, perspectives on history and conception of futurity.

We welcome papers that explore fictional elements in art history, visual culture, and material culture studies, examining specific applications and/or their relationship to broader interdisciplinary trends in the humanities. We invite presentations on both personal experiences with employing such strategies as well as critical analysis of such work in the field.

Our Annual Conference brings together international research and critical debate about art, art history and visual cultures. This key annual event is an opportunity to keep up to date with new research, hear leading keynotes, broaden networks and exchange ideas.

Episode 3 The Reluctant Pilgrim

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Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (Brontë, 1847), photograph by Samuel Vale, Executive Producer and Director of Photography

The ice on the path snapped, crackled and splintered underneath the soles of their walking boots. The ground was frozen solid. She felt as though she were walking with two blocks of ice strapped to her feet. She could feel the ground in her knees. The sound of her boots walking on frozen ground was like the crunching of bones. The chill of the wind sweeping across the moors caused her teeth to chatter in her head like a pair of castanets. Emily writes, she writes: “I lingered under that benign sky watched the moths fluttering among the heather and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass”. I remembered there is a spot mid barren hills where winter howls still, bringing a chill to the marrow.

By this time her toes were numb and every step was agony, her boots were rather too small, she made a reluctant pilgrim. She had lost track of time by stopping to take photographs on the way but photographs of what exactly? A seemingly vast, empty and undifferentiated landscape that she experienced as a rupture or a disjunction. The landscape was not easy to assimilate. it remained resolute and other. She was in the middle of it but couldn’t get into it, so she remained steadfastly on it for the duration of the walk. Time and space expanded in multiple directions on the Moors like the ripples on a pond. Three hours of walking felt like three years of living. The closer they got to Top Withens the further away it seemed to. Be. For an age it remained a tiny speck on the horizon.

He disappeared over a mound and briefly she found herself alone with naught but a wuthering wind whistling around her eardrums and flapping against her face. How exactly was she to report any of this back to George? She was famished.

On the 18th of May 1893, Top Withens was struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. Holes were made in the wall, the roof was partially torn off, flags were cracked, and around 30 windows were almost completely removed. A portion of slate was thrown far from the house by the wind, and in the kitchen the blade of a knife had been fused by the heat.

Mapping Cultures

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Mapping Cultures is a collection of essays exploring the diverse practices and cultures of mapping on the one hand, and the mapping of different forms of cultural practice on the other. The book draws on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including critical cartography, social anthropology, film and cultural studies, literary studies, art and visual culture, marketing, architecture, and popular music studies. Underpinning the theoretical and methodological approaches of all the contributions is a close engagement with mapping both as a mode of cultural and spatial analysis, and as a point of critical intersection in which ideas and practices of cartography are challenged, re-envisioned and brought into play with a broad range of theoretical perspectives. The collection is loosely organized around three main thematic sections: the cartographic textualities of space, landscape and place; mappings of performance and urban memoryscapes; and the practical, aesthetic and performative cartographies of critical spatial enquiry.

Research Context & Background

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This PhD by practice explores chorography’s significance as a methodological tool in contemporary artistic practice, critically re-examining its historic yet neglected role in the documentation of place. Originating in Classical Geography (Ptolemy, c.149AD), chorography, or “place writing”, is historically understood as the detailed description and mapping of regions. This field-based approach qualitatively maps characteristics of the locale by examining its constituent parts. Historically, it has functioned as both a field-based method of qualitatively mapping and as an artistic or literary mode, linking events to landscape through pictorial and textual representation. Chorography was rediscovered in Renaissance Geography and British Antiquarianism in the 16th-17th centuries. Historically William Camden’s Brittania (1586) is an encyclopaedic approach to a geographic, “topographical-historical” (Mendyk, 1986, p.459) survey of the British Isles, which has been identified as a classic exemplar of the renaissance of a chorographic work “connecting past and present through the medium of space, land, region or country” (Rohl,2011, p.6). Britannia was part of an epic attempt to map the nation and give people a sense of cultural identity and belonging. British Antiquarianism retrieved chorography and recreated it in an expanded field of writing, reinterpreting its legacy, ensuring its survival, restoration, and continued communication.

While chorography has traditionally been seen as a representational tool, recent scholarship in cultural studies, archaeology, and performance has renewed interest in its methodological richness and interdisciplinary potential (Pearson, 2006; Shanks & Witmore, 2010; Rohl 2011, 2012, 2014). Yet there remains an absence of synthesis between these fields, and a lack of attention to gendered, embodied, and performative approaches, which this research addresses. Although chorography is pre-disciplinary, Shanks & Witmore (2010) claim that a genetic link underlies contemporary disciplinary approaches across heritage management, tourism, archaeology, historical geography, and contemporary art practice. They argue for a genealogical understanding of interdisciplinary practices concerned with relations of land, place, memory, and identity to understand present practical and academic positions. It is this link I am trying to follow and establish in contemporary artistic practice and research.

Central to this project is a critical re-examination of chorography in contemporary artistic practice, moving from documentation and representation to performance and embodiment. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (Butler, 1999), the research investigates how the body, particularly the gendered and mobile body, serves as a site of historical crossing, memory, and meaning-making. This shift has profound implications for who and what is remembered or forgotten, and for how places are re-collected and re-presented. Brontë Country, straddling West Yorkshire and the East Lancashire Pennines, has been chosen as the primary site for this investigation. Valued for its literary, historic, and symbolic significance, this landscape is both an active shaping presence (as in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, 1847) and a locus for contemporary artistic engagement. The region’s legacy of travel, narrative, fiction, gendered relations (a feature of their writing which is also lacking in chorographic history) and the literary imagination, compounded by the Brontës’ own use of pseudonyms, a strategy adopted in the practice research, renders it an exemplary terrain for rethinking chorography through a feminist, performative, and practice-led lens. This project approaches chorography not as a static or descriptive tradition, but as a speculative, embodied, and interdisciplinary methodology. Artistic practice, including moving image, performance writing, installation, and critical-creative text, serves both to enact and to interrogate chorographic methods: mapping not just physical terrain but also the complex intersections of place, history, narrative, cultural memory, gender, and the performative construction of identity. By combining historical method with contemporary form, the research aims to renew chorography’s relevance, to understand place not only artistically, but physically, contextually, and historically, and to open new possibilities for artistic research in and through place.