Ravel, Unravel and Poetic Hauntings in the Terrains Vagues

Some further ponderings from the Here Commons Everybody creative programme - soon to enter a second phase - What Commons Next? 

Participants from new ecological projects throughout Europe created 'site maps with objects' at a workshop in Cambridge in June, 2022, led by Antony Lyons and hosted by the Endangered Landscapes Programme. Images here from the co-created collective exhibition.

In relation to two connected artist residencies in Côa Valley, Portugal and Elan Valley, Wales) my strands of creative exploration seem to be circling around a vortex;

Re-directions, solidarity and support

or... Re: Directions, Solidarity and Support - at the turning of the year

I posted a variant of these words on a water forum, but am inclined now to repost here - as a prompt (mainly to self) to reflect on the topic of the myriad of water-related conflicts and rumblings-of-conflicts emerging around this globe.

The link below is now old, but is given a new lease of life by a very current, acute situation,

Canyon Correspondences Revisited

Due to a technical (hosting) meltdown elsewhere, I'm attempting to retrieve and piece together some remnants of a 'creative diary' - a rescue mission. These writings were originally assembled during, and soon after, a period as artist-in-residence at the Grand Canyon (Arizona) in 2011.
(Below is a combination of all the entries into a single blog-post; parts of the entries are currently missing. Perhaps the time has come to pick up some of these old threads?)

Evidence plus Inspiration (in the field)

Professor Poole - wild man of the marshes

"Concern over climate change and rising sea level, coupled with recent extensive flooding across Europe, reminds us that wetlands, ranging from extensive coastal marshes to inland river floodplains, still dominate the landscape of many regions. In an era of intensive settlement and agriculture we often see water in such landscapes as a problem and complex drainage and flood defence systems have been constructed to control their watertables. In the past, however, water was perceived more as a resource..." 

Occupy the Intertide? part2

Tide + Time, NOVA (Lyons), 2006

My presentation (of a project proposal) at the recent interdisciplinary Emotional Geographies conference in the Netherlands was titled:

Dreaming of Sabrina
Geopoetic Possibilities In The Estuary  - A deep-mapping almanac

The 'estuary' in this case is the Severn (aka Sabrina, or Hafren). The inclusion of 'almanac' - a word derived from Arabic/Greek sources meaning 'of the moon, or month' helps express the dominant lunar-tidal process in this water-body, with the second-largest tidal-range in the world. The map below shows the main settlements adjoining the estuary...

Submerged (Drowned Lands)

Chew Valley Lake, July 2013

Submerged (Drowned and Dammed Lands)

[aka The Almanac of the Submerged]

Environmental artist Antony Lyons is working with others, including Professor Steve Poole (UWE-Bristol/Regional History Centre, Bristol) on an Arts Council England funded initiative, involving creative fieldwork, community conversations/voices and research at a number of locations. The first phase of the project runs from Spring 2013 to late 2014.

The approach involves a creative and poetic response to a variety of landscape and cultural settings that are affected by changing water-levels. The unifying theme is that the waters come, the waters inexorably rise. Then everything is changed (and the waters recede...)

Obfuscation and Illusion

Colorado Conjectures (continued)
The Grand Canyon is extreme in many ways - the magnitude, the space - but also extreme in the domination of a packaged pictorial 'view'; the 'picture postcard'. For most visitors, the iconic images are familiar before their arrival; and the main focus of the on-site encounter is the photo-op. For some, no doubt, the on-site visual experience is a disappointment when compared to the pre-packaged representations. The sense of the 'sublime' has already, and in a piecemeal way, been undermined by  thousands of published photographic images.

Slowly Encountering Place

For the inaugural journal posting on this new platform, I am pasting in a draft version of an essay to be included in a forthcoming publication.

Slowly Encountering Place

The process of assembling this volume has brought into focus an awareness of an evolving ‘meta-project’ - emerging over the space of five years, via a sequence of extended landscape-based residency projects. For me, the journey began in earnest in 2008 in England's ‘West Country’ with Quantock Dreaming, followed by the Lovely Weather project in Donegal in 2010, a residency at the Grand Canyon in 2011, and returning to the West Country for the art+environment residency, ‘Confluence’ Project in the North Devon Biosphere Reserve. Early indications of a composite approach - encompassing sculpture, ecology, memory - can be seen within the strands of the 2006 urban trail installations in Bristol, called ‘Eleven Minutes’.

Whilst sifting through the vast amount of moving-image and sound recordings assembled during the Grand Canyon project, I found myself re-considering the themes and ideas underpinning this journey, especially in dialogue with the wider fields of Deep Mapping and Land-Art. The ongoing support of the PLaCE Research Centre has been important in this respect. Iain Biggs (Director of PLaCE) has long pursued the aim of trans-disciplinary creative land-based work. Possessing a hybrid environmental science and art background - I have sought to carve out a personal approach, grounded in fieldwork, ecological knowledge, dialogues with archival material, geopoetic imagination and the co-creation of future-visions - all within landscapes that contain tensions and polarised perspectives.

“Pasts and futures, even if they are no longer; even if they are not yet, still haunt the present, and are, in a supplemental relationship to it, always coming back.” John Wylie, 2007

With the Colorado River now featuring strongly in my delvings, I have found myself attracted to the idea (and the ideal?) of ‘unmapping’.