‘A Cup of Possibility’: how trustworthy are Cognitive Aspects of Visual Memory; what factors impinge on the reconstruction of the child’s sense of place?
Aims of Investigation
To establish an understanding of how recalled imagined possibilities of childhood embed themselves in a sense-of-place. Of how visual codes and conventions in describing a sense of place, reveal a landscape as a repository of memory. To go to the heart of recent debates about ‘true’ and ‘false’ memories and investigate the psycho-geographical interpretations of the environment (in particular the liminal). The specific environment is that of the marginal edges, where rural meets urban, ‘deep mapping’ the hinterlands.
Initial line of enquiry: to visually pin down the recollected imaginary thoughts – specifically those with a sense of anticipation – from childhood, and the associated, geographical sense-of-place. To describe the connection between a displaced sense of self, with the landscape of childhood. In autobiographical terms, converging the loss of ‘home’, not only to development (the expansion into rural areas of the City of Milton Keynes), but of emotional displacement through social stigma.
Interests in place, landscape, memory; entanglements of nature-culture in places and landscapes; and the geographies of childhood.
Questions
To determine whether it was the liminal landscapes which created a sense of anticipation in my child-mind, pressing me to navigate social structures, make sense of them, and reinforce personal identity.
How visual codes and conventions influence visual memory structures and the narrative of personal identity.
Sub categories to be investigated:
To develop visual analyses of the semiological relationship between artworks, biography, social history, and place;
To explore, and engage with, the ‘emblem’ relating to narrative, semiotics, memory, interpretation and historical representation;
To explore the role of visual codes and conventions in defining ‘displacement’;
Further
Installation to extend existing work, incorporating analysis of representations of landscape.
‘A Cup of Possibility’ describes that formation in the landscape where the Visible and the Anticipated overlap/collide/conflict.
Theoretical and methodological, in terms of using various methods for interpreting the liminal and the fictional in an arts context.
Dialogues in relation to documentary making. In a broader context this work also promotes an exploration of the possibilities for a convergence of fictional/factual and authorship.
Booklist:
William Vaughan, Helmut Borsch-Supan, Hans Joachim Neidhardt, Caspar David Friedrich, 1774-1840; Romantic Landscape Painting in Dresden, Tate Gallery 1972
Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain, 1750-1850, Tate Gallery 1973
E.H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images, Studies in the Art of Renaissance, Phaidon 1975
Patrick Keiller, The Possibility of Life’s Survival on the Planet, Tate Publishing, 2012
Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All, The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape, Five Leaves, 2004
Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking, The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism, Harbour, 2010
Julian Baggini, Welcome to Everytown, Granta Books, 2008
Walter de la Mare, Early One Morning, in the Spring; Chapters on Children and on Childhood as it is revealed in particular in Early Memories and in Early Writings, Faber and Faber, 1935
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, Vintage Books, 2002