‘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?
Paintings made between 2008-2017 and accompanying texts explored visual conventions of the landscape to convey recalled anticipated events. Initially these had been autobiographical, but then I sought a wider cross-referencing. Recent projects have gone to the heart of debates about ‘true’ and ‘false’ memories and in the psycho-geographical interpretations of the environment (and in particular the Liminal). I built a body of exhibited work with texts, which began to extend my existing work into multi-media installations incorporating analysis of oral history, which constituted a critical reader to accompany exhibitions.
‘A Cup of Possibility’ describes that formation in the landscape where the Visible and the Anticipated overlap/collide/conflict. It might be seen in Gorky’s series of Sochi paintings, Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, or Great Western Holiday Posters.
Initial line of enquiry: I intended to visually pin down the recollected imaginary thoughts – specifically those with a sense of anticipation – from childhood, and the associated, geographical sense-of-place. I hoped to describe the connection between a displaced sense of self, with the landscape of childhood. In autobiographical terms, this combined 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.
Format:
Projects are presented as installations, of a self-schema produced to visualise narratives derived from indicative memories of displacement and anticipation.
The construction of each painted narrative is produced through a series of single images. Each series is made up of seven images, each batch of seven displayed in a row. The schema refers to the beliefs and ideas I have/had about myself. These beliefs are used to guide and organise information processing. The self-schema is important to my overall self-concept. The self-schema is intended to facilitate the processing of personally relevant information.
The production of printed material and artefacts (e.g. books and maps), are supplied as displayed evidence of repositories of memory. These include a fictionalised written account of a childhood spent in the liminal borderland between a rural and urban area. The written text is intended to be heard (as well as read). It is less ‘audio book’, more sound-scape.
Directions of Research:
Liminal
Childhood: Agricultural roots. Small-holders. Social stigma. Rural working class. Tenant farmers.
Liminal Landscape
Council houses on the edges of the village. Small-holdings. Edgelands. Plotlands. The edge of populated areas: Arcadia. The fringe area. Drainage, ditches, field boundaries.
Sense/Spirit of Place
The local history. The dramas (crime and passion). Birth and death. McCorquodale Printing Works. The dangers and rewards of trespass. ‘Three acres and a cow‘.
Ideas:
A childhood spent in the rural nooks and the crannies of suburban edges. The space between folklore and fairy-tale, between fact and fiction, between memory and invention… Borderline and fringes. The creeping edge. The shadow of the City (Milton Keynes). The demolition of familiar buildings. Of being an outcast. Displacement. The development of an alter-ego. The geographical and solitary adventures of a child needing to escape. The imagined escape ‘over the hills and far away’. The hours spent gazing into the distance with the imagined future just out of sight.
Sensory experiences conspire to create ‘time’ out of ‘place’. The season and the weather, the hour of the day, all combine to make each anticipated quest unique. Specific themes and preoccupations are woven through an exploration of visual codes and conventions. The result a rich audio/visual tapestry that moves from an exploration of a locality to the creation of imagined narratives.
Exploring the relationship between walking the fringe landscapes (betwixt urban/rural or edge of Settlement, locality or populated place), and a child’s sense of place and the creative imagination.
To tell the story of the landscape which has surrounded my home (past and present), or been discovered by accident via some emotional pull, through a mixture of memoir, or the recording/documenting of nature and audio/visual description of its social history, offering an account of a life lived on the edge lands, geographically and existentially.
An exploration of a ‘place’ on a map should go beyond simple landscape/history-based topographical documentary – to include and interweave autobiography, archaeology, stories, memories, folklore, traces, reportage, weather, interviews, natural history, science, and intuition. The resulting work arrives at multi-layered and ‘deep’ map of a small area of the earth.
Devising a memory of the past, which culminates in a sense of its continuation through tradition and the future. To include a fascination for assimilation and adaptation.
Notes:
I find my internal running commentary is best organised with self-imposed rules and restrictions. My problem-solving inner voice, habitually organises itself, settling itself in layers.
This is not Psychogeography; I’m not inspired by Situationism, or the intellectualism of an idea too complicated for me to explain. Pinning down the process of A Recollected Narration drives the work: describing a physical compulsion, pressed to record an emotional exercise, inspired by the natural world that grows amongst a man-made habitat. I feel liminal as a human. I feel comfortable and at home in the liminal spaces.
A childhood sense of not belonging, was spent wandering the edges, the shadows… I went round the bend to see what lay around the corner, I went over the brow, to see what was there. I could see the land on the near horizon being developed as Milton Keynes expanded. I had a sense of exploration, in the space just proud of my natural vicinity. So imagined what was beyond my edge. I stored a variety of senses and memories in those places with their views, detached the misery of the menacing silence at home, of maternal depression and discontent. And in those places, the fringes, I stored the anticipated future my child-self’s alter-ego imagined. I record these places, the elements that prompt the vision, the memory, of that just-beyond-the-edge place in image and sound. Tensions and releases in the liminal spaces. Example: A gap in the hedge on a horizon, when both sides rise above, recalls ‘a cup of possibility’ and depending on the time and place of this ‘vision’ I will recall any of a variety of emotionally taut memories.
Social stigma, especially experienced during the character-shaping years of childhood seems linked (in my head) to the liminal spaces beyond the recreation or school playing-field: did the peripheral landscape offer an escape, a sense of belonging to something greater/deeper than that (not) offered by the secure boundaries of an immediate family/domestic situation?
Place: As a starting point
Whaddon: This small village stands high on a ridge nearly 500 ft above sea level, overlooking Whaddon Chase with the new city of Milton Keynes in the distance. The name Whaddon is an old English word for ‘Wheat Hill’ and the village is mentioned in the Domesday Book. It is known as the original home of the Whaddon Chase Foxhounds, started by the Selby-Lowndes family back in the 1800s. This hunt no longer exists. There is still a lane in the village known as Kennel Lane where the hounds were once kept.
Whaddon Hall was the Manor House for many years and the home of the Lowndes family from 1783 when Mr W. Lowndes Selby took possession of the Hall. In 1813 his son took again the family name of Lowndes after that of Selby, and so the name of Selby-Lowndes became associated with the village and remains in the memory of many of the older villagers.
The present Whaddon Hall is at least the fourth to stand on the site. The Lowndes family left to live in Winslow at the beginning of the Second World War, when the Hall was taken over by the War Office, later to be replaced by the Foreign Office. In the 1960s it became a factory, and, in the 1970s was to be turned into a Country Club, but this venture ended with a fire, resulting in the building being gutted, after which it was sold and has now been converted into luxury apartments with the stable block and the two gate lodges also having been converted into houses.
Across the Parks, due east from the Hall, is the site of Sneshall Priory, a small house for Benedictine Monks dedicated to St Leonard in about 1218.
Whaddon has now got an approximate population of 500. Unlike a few years ago, when most of the village people worked at Wolverton, either at the British Rail Engineering Works or McCorquodale Printing Works, with many working in agriculture, now only a few are still employed in these industries. Whaddon has become a dormitory village to Milton Keynes, people now work in Milton Keynes and surrounding districts or commute to London.
Bibliography
Booklist: Landscape
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
Booklist: Liminal
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
Booklist: New Towns (Milton Keynes)
Julian Baggini, Welcome to Everytown, Granta Books, 2008
Booklist: Childhood
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
Booklist: Memory
W.G.Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, Vintage Books, 2002