A Walk, Topography & Hidden Memory, or An Imagined Historical Narration

Description: an attempt (by, or through, the fictional character Frieda Frowhawk), to ‘get to the bottom’ of the problem, to Illustrate the Bigger Picture.

To pin something down, to express something ancient; a ‘sense’ which sits, meme-like, in my heart, in my brain and beneath the surface that I tread. Might it be something to do with identity, or to do with validation and recognition. Attempting to describe a sense, both of me and for me, and of and for ‘the place’, which my remembered stories are centred. And if I can validate my own deep feelings by expressing them visually, by describing the parts that make up, and pull into clearer focus, ‘The Bigger Picture’ then maybe, I will have found the point, the pin in the map, by which experience of a ‘place’ can be defined and understood.

Display findings, share in a ‘show and tell’ compulsion. How to express this? So difficult to pin down.

The Subject Matter:

Walking

Taking a walk. Recording the walk. On foot. Habitual. From A to B.

Walking: does the measured stride match the unfolding process of the thought process?

Does my imagination respond to the pace of the stroll?

Through walking you can be ‘in’ the landscape, rather than ‘on’ it.

What catches the eye? What arouses the senses?

Topographical rambling. Psychogeography. Guy Deborg. Situationists.

What do I wear? Is there a uniform? What do I carry? A bag. Sometimes a phone, which comes with a camera. Maybe some mints.

How do I document? Memory. Footprints. Hand-drawn maps. Maybe a camera-phone photo. Maybe notes in a pocket book. Maybe a diagram.

Mapping and Reference

Ordnance Survey. Using a Map. Points of interest. On the beaten track.

X marks the spot. Finding clues of the historically forgotten, the overlooked evidence, of our shared recent and ancient past.

Imagining the feet on a mapped surface.

The topographical tradition (maps and geography), levels above (or below).

The paths and tracks, the too-ing and fro-ing from point A to B, on or off the Beaten Track.

Drainage, ditches, field boundaries.

Reading about the place you discover after you’ve visited. Knowing about it beforehand?

Process? Take on knowledge, increase the body of awareness…

Liminal People

Imp of the Perverse.

Environmental psychology.

Agricultural roots.

Travellers. Showpeople. Fairground. Small-holders. Bohemian.

Social stigma.

Class (or class-bound society) – that leads us to re-imagine our surroundings?

Ethos? Kindred spirits?

Liminal Landscape

Edgelands. Plotlands.

The impression of regional characterisation of landscapes

Place: a conceptual character with folk elements based on nature?

Liminal spaces on the edge of populated areas: Arcadia and the history of Plotlands.

The fringe area. Lifting the corrugated sheet of iron to expose what lies beneath.

Drainage, ditches, field boundaries.

Disney-fication of landscape.

Sense/Spirit of Place

The local history.

The dramas (crime and passion). Birth and death.

Points on the verge (e.g. memorial flowers).

Records, the local paper.

Architecture.

Municipality.

The dangers and rewards of trespass.

Exploration of the familiar, examine the distance, psychologically.

Stories translated into the bricks. Evidence of a creative hinterland: found in the attics of houses, the shoe-boxes of documents stacked under the stairs, the boot markets on the recreational fields, the bus-stop banter of pensioners, school projects, village parish notes, second-hand bookshops.

Idea:

Historical geography. Rural nooks in 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. Old buildings, derelict, un-used and with only traces of its past. Revelations.

Sensory experiences conspire to create ‘time’ out of ‘place’. The season and the weather, the hour of the day, all combine to make each walk unique and markedly different from one taken the day before. Or after.

Specific themes and preoccupations can be woven through short, sometimes allusive walks. The result could be a rich audio/visual tapestry that moves from an exploration of the locality to the creation of imagined narratives.

Explore 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 could arrive at a subtle, multi-layered and ‘deep’ map of a small area of the earth.

To devise a memory of the past, which could culminate in a sense of its continuation through tradition and the future.

Walking takes me out and away from the art gallery space. But the desire to show the results of my practice, to have an exhibition is of odd importance.

To include a fascination with ‘the local and the circumstantial’.

To include a fascination for ‘assimilation and adaptation’.

To include a fascination and interest in memory and landscape.

I imagine marshalling the minutiae.

Notes:

I find that my internal running commentary, my constantly glimpsed day-dreams, my problem-solving inner voice, habitually organises itself, settling itself in considered and aesthetic layers, like the strata beneath our feet – in relation to the landscape I walk through. The ‘walk through’ the landscape must be specifically noted; not (necessarily), the view of it, or the journey across it, not a ramble or trek, not of walking generally perceived beautiful or stunning landscape, but of the localised walks close to home, or for the routine walk from A to B. A ‘view’ is not necessarily of importance, although the vista and view are. And since my eyes often scan the ground before me, or strain to glimpse what may be seen through hedgerows and fences, over walls and between objects, the visual is only of equal importance as the sound, the smell, the history and the woven narratives threaded through. I consider the elements of weather and light that buffet me, and the responses triggered by these. It is as if the land is trying to transmit a message through me, or as if I want to communicate to some as yet unknown loved one what it is I see. There is a need to convey magnitude. It is inevitable that some sort of art should rise out of the encounter.

Pinning down the process of A Rambling Narration becomes illustrative of a walk: the explanation rambles. The explanation wanders off, distracted by a new thought, gets stuck in a cul-de-sac, ricochets off a high wall or meanders along a ditch, dribbling its way into brambles. I am not inspired by anything to do with an art/political movement, to do what I do. I am describing a physical compulsion, I am pressed to record an emotional exercise, and I am inspired by the natural world that grows amongst my manmade habitat. I feel liminal as a human. I feel comfortable and at home in the liminal spaces.

When I stumble across something – a concrete pillar, a wooden post, the remains of a stone wall – I feel the historical narrative, sometimes an unbelievable sense of loss –literally buried – in the ground beneath. Maybe because of a childhood sense, or lack, of belonging, I wandered 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, whilst simultaneously enjoying absolutely no need for travel. I just had a sense of exploration, in the space just proud of my natural vicinity. So that I could know what was beyond my edge. I store a variety of senses and memories in these items. And in these places, these fringes, voices would be unlocked from early memory, of a grandmother’s stories of earthworks and burial mounds, of a father’s stories of carving his name in the church and I feel compelled to record these places, or certainly the element that will prompt the vision, the memory, of that just-beyond-the-edge place in a painting or drawing. 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. Rambling the Fringe.

As an irreverent individual of the electronic generation/morphed into a member of the digital one, I should experience the fringes with the sensibility of the individual. I should no longer be suspicious of the language of power, I should climb fences, I should ignore the Trespassers will be Prosecuted signs. But I note the pressure of the invisible hand of the Landowner on my shoulder.

Class is an ever-present quicksand at the heart of my thought. I become more deeply entrenched in my relative position the more I attempt to engage with the idea. Intense narratives are kicked off by discussion though, of that I must be reminded.

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: does 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?

Why not choose to stroll in the urban open-space of designated parkland, woods and lake (the spaces created by urban-planners to tick-box the environmental ‘needs’ of citizens)? I am uncomfortable with both ‘conservation’ and/or man made green-space, of planned paths in landscaped greenery, of picnic tables and information boards (You Are Here), of saplings in those plastic collars and little markers that tell joggers how many miles they’ve run. Uncomfortable with ‘planned’ landscape. I miss old paths alongside disused rail-yards, of being able to explore roofless red-brick agricultural buildings and Water Treatment Works. I am saddened at the newly erected high-fences with spiked tops, of security cameras and signs fixed to fences alerting me to Guard Dogs and 24 hour Security. They speak clearly of changes in the national psyche, the emergence of intolerance and fear, the growth of the impulse towards control.

Landscape of conflict and difficulty: features that emerge through history, fly-tipping, ancient earthworks, agricultural buildings, ‘desire-paths’, time emanates and radiates off the remains and ruins that litter the liminal spaces. Walking is far more an experience than merely crossing a landscape, or traversing a town. It creates an alteration of my consciousness, gaining an awakened deeper sensibility.

Cattle-sheds, or Second World War bunkers, off un-used lanes, become store-vats of unused memory. Can objects store memories? The memory is prompted by stumbling across the object in landscape…

Living on the edge; at the end of the lane, or beyond the boundary, slightly apart from the throng. Like a starling on the fringes of a murmuration, able to change direction without (mixing metaphors) anybody treading on your heel, breathing on the back of your neck or pressing you to change direction. Outside of the hub. Not a member of the clique.

Do children (statistically) spend more time indoors (or being transported by vehicle)? My own anecdotal evidence supports this; how often do I pass children on any of my ambles? Is there a chance that a generation of children, (or future ones) will overlook our liminal landscapes, which, un-trod, may be re-defined as no-go areas by a cautious and fearful populace?

I find places, which resonate with ‘memory’ (fictional or otherwise), and the ‘place’ prompts a painting. Occasionally an ‘artefact’ is found, which further prompts a narrative (either recalled or invented), which in turn prompts further drawing/painting/recording. A visual/audio record begins to ‘map’ the ‘place’.

Place: As a starting point

Dean Farm.

It all really kicks off there.