Dammed (Damned) Landscapes
During the slow assembly of a new publication based on two landscape-residency projects, there has bubbled up the memory of an aerial photograph, from 1946, (shown above) of the farmhouse now ‘drowned’ beneath the Hawkridge reservoir near the Quantock Hills, Somerset. This was a topic I briefly explored - and put aside - during the Quantock Dreaming investigations. But it now returns, in a changed and charged way, as I become aware of the many drowned/dammed/damned landscapes that have featured in my creative projects and residencies. It seems now an inescapable thread - one that is destined to form the warp for my present audio-visual weavings. I am working on a film/sound piece as a stepping stone to a more complex installation. Some of the far-flung landscapes in question (or currently under investigation) are: The Colorado River at the Grand Canyon; The Alqueva Dam and the (former) Guadiana River Valley in Portugal; the aforementioned Quantock reservoir; and a nod also to the Colorado Delta, Mexico - not dammed (but possibly damned?), but affected by the 100 or so dams upriver on the Colorado.
more on this very soon...
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’.
