Landscape

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.

Chapter X Mapping the Territory: Situated Cartographies of Method, Memory, and Material Trace

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So I’m really struggling with the writing since I have so many drafts, edits and supervisor comments, I’ve gone a bit word blind so I will periodically be posting the writing here so I can see how it scans in a publishing space. This is either the Introductory Chapter or it could possibly be a Literature Review or Methodology Chapter. I just thought I should write an introduction to give myself a framework and set the scope of the chapter.

Synopsis for Thesis

Chapter X establishes the conceptual and methodological foundations for the thesis, positioning chorography as a dynamic and speculative tool for contemporary artistic research. Tracing chorography’s genealogy from its classical origins through Renaissance and British Antiquarianism to its re-emergence in performance and archaeology, the chapter reframes it as a site-responsive, feminist, and performative practice. Organised around four thematic clusters, Cartography and Representation; Regional Histories, Literary and Experiential chorography; and Spatial Representation and Deep Mapping, it provides a framework for analysing how artists collect, narrate, re-present, and perform place. The chapter critically engages with figures such as William Camden, Daniel Defoe, John Macky, Walter Scott, and Emily Brontë, as well as previously marginalised women, to outline a literary and artistic lineage informing the thesis’s approach to landscape and cultural memory. It argues that chorography, when resituated within artistic practice, offers new ways to stage landscape, perform memory, and construct cultural identity. It introduces key methodological and theoretical terms such as performative archival practice (as a practice-led methodology), positionality (Alcoff 1988), and speculative feminist historiography, an emergent analytical lens that the practice research performs or gestures toward. These approaches will be enacted through a range of methods, including moving image, performance writing, script, installation and multimodal practice. The chapter also identifies gaps in the literature, notably the exclusion of female chorographers, and advances chorography as a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal, 2002) capable of crossing disciplinary and temporal boundaries, setting the stage for the practice-led explorations that follow in the thesis.

Chapter X Mapping the Territory: Situated Cartographies of Method, Memory, and Material Trace

“Reflecting eighteenth-century antiquarianapproaches to place which included history, folklore, natural history, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive, the sensual, the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might want to say about a place”

(Pearson & Shanks, 2001, pp.64-65).

This chapter establishes the contemporary relevance and methodological potential of chorography for artistic research, particularly in relation to the core themes of the PhD: landscape, cultural memory, history, performativity, and identity. This excavation is not merely historical; it is methodological and speculative. Rather than treating chorography as a purely historical practice, I reanimate it as a site-responsive, feminist, and performative mode of inquiry, one capable of excavating overlooked narratives, reanimating vernacular memory, and creating symbolic resonances. By tracing chorography’s layered genealogy from its classical origins (Ptolemy, 149 AD), through the Renaissance and British Antiquarianism (Camden, 1586), to its re-emergence in contemporary discourse, I highlight its renewed significance in the work of Pearson (2006) and Rohl (2011, 2012, 2014), who explicitly engage with chorography, as well as in the collaborative work of Theatre/Archaeology (Pearson & Shanks, 2001) and contemporary Archaeology (Shanks & Witmore, 2010), where chorography becomes a means of mapping memory, materiality, and narrative within landscapes While Pearson and Shanks (2001) do not always explicitly invoke chorography, their interdisciplinary practice, particularly through the development of deep mapping and the performative investigation of place, exemplifies many of its core principles and demonstrates its potential for mapping memory, materiality, and narrative within landscapes. I therefore position chorography as both a conceptual lens and a methodological framework. This approach enables a situated exploration of artistic, archival, and embodied engagements with landscape, mapping the entanglements of place, narrative, and cultural memory.

The history of chorography spans centuries and encompasses a range of definitions, practices, and disciplinary interpretations. Given the scale and complexity of the field, often reflected in encyclopaedic and multi-volume works, a comprehensive account is beyond the scope of this thesis. To navigate this density and complexity, I have identified four thematic clusters drawn from a close reading of the literature. This chapter is therefore organised around: Cartography and Representation; Regional Histories, Literary and Experiential chorography; and Spatial Representation and Deep Mapping (Heat-Moon, 1991; McLucas, 2015; Roberts, 2016; Biggs, 2014; Bodenhamer, 2015). Unlike conventional mapping, deep mapping engages with place through a process that is dynamic, iterative and performative. It treats the landscape not as a static backdrop but as a multilayered tapestry of stories, memories, and events, revealed and reimagined through the act of mapping. Deep mapping is the contemporary analogue of chorography (Pearson and Shanks 2001). These clusters elucidate chorography’s methodological richness and interdisciplinary flexibility, and offer a manageable, conceptually coherent framework for approaching chorography within contemporary artistic research. Structuring the conceptual field, they offer a basis for analysing how artists collect, narrate, re-present, and perform place. This research also draws on the chorographic approaches developed in the epistolary and tour writings of Daniel Defoe (1724) and John Macky (1714) (Connell, 2015), as well as on the contributions of marginalised women whose performative, epistolary, pseudonymous, and collaborative approaches have yet to be recognised within the field, but whose work this project argues has the potential to reshape chorographic practice. Emphasising practices of fieldwork, correspondence, first-person narration, and collaboration in their work, reframes chorography as a speculative, dialogic, and performative methodology for mapping landscape and memory. Critical engagement with figures such as Scottish novelist, poet, historian and ‘literary’ antiquarian Walter Scott, particularly his poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and English novelist and poet Emily Brontë, who was influenced by Scott, enables the tracing of a literary and artistic lineage that informs this thesis’s approach to place-making and narrative construction. While Scott’s historical novels, such as The Heart of Midlothian (1818), construct landscapes as mnemonic archives, spaces where fiction and history coalesce to produce a vernacular sense of place, his poetry exemplifies an early chorographic impulse: to map cultural memory through storytelling (Shanks & Witmore, 2010).

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), by contrast, presents a gothic landscape where the moor becomes a site of affective intensity, feminine resistance, and narrative fragmentation, using letters and nested narratives in ways that anticipate later feminist reimaginings of terrain and memory (Rose, 1993; Massey, 2005). Their works, along with those of later 20th-century writers such as W.G. Sebald, provide historical and speculative precedents for the methodologies developed in the practice-led research that follows. Clarifying the conceptual terrain this chapter introduces key methodological and theoretical terms such as performative archival practice (as a practice-led methodology), positionality (Alcoff 1988), and speculative feminist historiography, an emergent analytical lens that the practice research performs or gestures toward. These approaches will be enacted through a range of methods, including moving image, performance writing, script, installation and multimodal practice. It also identifies gaps in the literature, notably the exclusion of female chorographers, and advances chorography as a ‘travelling concept’ (Bal, 2002)capable of crossing disciplinary, temporal, and epistemological boundaries. This chapter proposes that, when resituated within contemporary artistic practice, chorography becomes a method to stage landscape, perform memory, and inscribe oneself into the terrain of cultural identity by drawing on Cosgrove’s (1984) exploration of landscape as a cultural and symbolic construct and Massey’s (2005) theorisation of space as gendered, dynamic, inherently social and key to the formation of identity. Chorography is positioned not just as a representational tool, as it was historically practised and understood, either as a pictorial map (Renaissance geography) or as a written text (British antiquarianism), but also as a performative and speculative methodology.Here, place is not just represented, but actively inhabited, enacted, and reimagined, setting the stage for the speculative, feminist, and practice-led explorations that follow. The thesis explores this through embodied fieldwork, archival gestures, and the creation of fictional personae who traverse the moorland landscapes of Brontë Country and beyond.

The Annotated Wuthering Heights

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Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has been called the most beautiful, most profoundly violent love story of all time. At its center are Catherine and Heathcliff, and the self-contained world of Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, and the wild Yorkshire moors that the characters inhabit. “I am Heathcliff”, Catherine declares. In her introduction Janet Gezari examines Catherine’s assertion and in her notes maps it to questions that flicker like stars in the novel s dark dreamscape. How do we determine who and what we are? What do the people closest to us contribute to our sense of identity? The Annotated Wuthering Heights provides those encountering the novel for the first time as well as those returning to it with a wide array of contexts in which to read Brontë’s romantic masterpiece. Gezari explores the philosophical, historical, economic, political, and religious contexts of the novel and its connections with Brontë’s other writing, particularly her poems. The annotations unpack Brontës allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and her other reading; elucidate her references to topics including folklore, educational theory, and slavery; translate the thick Yorkshire dialect of Joseph, the surly, bigoted manservant at the Heights; and help with other difficult or unfamiliar words and phrases. Handsomely illustrated with many color images that vividly recreate both Brontë’s world and the earlier Yorkshire setting of her novel, this newly edited and annotated text will delight and instruct the scholar and general reader alike.

Image and text reproduced from Amazon (accessed 18/12/25)

About Letters to the Landscape (2025)

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Letters to the Landscape brings together haunting, de-archiving, and displacement as interwoven strategies of resistance, contributing to ongoing conversations around feminist historiography, embodied research, and the politics of cultural memory. This work is a cinematic essay, practice-led investigation and situated methodology grounded in the archival practice of (re)collecting, framing vernacular archives as dynamic social agents and sites of affective transmission. Structured as episodic meditations across the moorlands of Brontë Country, the work interrogates how landscape, literature, and the female body intersect through archival gestures including letter writing, re-citing, reciting, remembering, walking, appropriation, and fictionalisation. Drawing on the epistolary form, found materials, and multimodal image-making the artist-researcher is positioned within both the physical terrain and the symbolic archive, enacting an embodied traversal that resists institutional fixity and foregrounds fragment, rupture, and affective resonance (Taylor, 2003; Schneider, 2011; Kämpfe, 2023). The project performs a recuperative act, (re)collecting postcards, letters, voices, and family photographs whilst acknowledging the impossibility of full recovery. Echoing Derrida’s (1996) notion of the archive as search and longing, the archive is conceived not as a fixed repository but as a haunted porous space: a séance, where Brontë, Gaskell, and the artist’s voice (in the guise of fictional personae Phyllis Dare) converge, interrupt, and overwrite each other. This polyphonic layering becomes a strategy of de-archiving, resisting singular authorship and re-situating memory as a shared unstable terrain.

Displacement emerges as both theme and method. The journey to Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (1847), is framed as reluctant encounter rather than literary pilgrimage, with the landscape enacting estrangement and resistance (Rosenberg, 2007; Sebald, 2013). Archival materials are (re)collected, redistributed, and misremembered, the gesture of collecting is transformed into a metaphor for unrequited desire. In this way, the archive migrates across bodies, media, and temporalities, a travelling entity whose meaning remains unstable and contested (Bal, 2002, Slaymaker, 2023; Carter et al., 2022). By foregrounding social performances of memory through walking, writing, (re)collecting, remembering, this project proposes a methodology of situated resistance: a way of inhabiting the archive without claiming it. Letters to the Landscape challenges dominant memorial frameworks by expanding how vernacular memory objects are read and activated across non-institutional sites. The project ultimately unfolds as a speculative feminist historiography re-situating memory as a living and embodied terrain. The work has been constructed through the interaction of several pseudonyms, operating under the fictional artist duo Vale & Howlette. By foregrounding these dramatis personae, the project interrogates authorship, authenticity, and the performance of identity within a speculative narrative framework. The use of performance, voice, and multi-modal forms foregrounds how vernacular archives carry social memory in ways that challenge existing interpretative structures, resisting containment through affective rupture. The work ultimately unfolds not to restore a lost narrative or reconstruct a singular past, but to re-situate memory within a living and embodied terrain where archival gestures become vehicles of resistance, resonance, and reimagination and landscapes, bodies and narratives converge.