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.