Interior and Exterior Landscapes

In musing about the purpose of art in public space (and particularly in ‘landscape’), I’m struck at how terminology that was once used as a generic term for a multiplicity of approaches has become detached from its anchor and now floats about lazily with the current…..I’m thinking here of engagement in the sense of ‘artworks engage people with places’. 

I've recently been looking at Current Maps from the Marshall Islands and got interested in the way that these are not maps in the sense we understand but are rather very personal mnemonics made by individual families that aid the navigator in finding their location through picturing the interference patterns of waves created by different coastlines.

Researching around the topic I found these two references that are helping me reconnect my own personal anchor to engagement:

'In all of us is some remnant of an ability to understand relationships of physical space to survival and the evolution of stable community life. In admiring the mapping of aboriginal cultures, the goal is not to copy others, but to rediscover in ourselves a genetic memory of ancient skills.'
                                                                      Doug Aberley ‘Bio-Regional Mapping’

'We learn a landscape finally by not knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it--like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalogue of events.The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.'
                                                                   Barry Lopez – ‘Landscape and Narrative’

Some images from the landscape around New Luce, where I am currently developing work.

swells, patterns, family and place

A Geomorphologist at Edinburgh Uni directed me to Polynesian Stick Charts last year when we were chatting about how artworks could interact with geological processes.

 When you start to read into these lovely objects the first thing you discover is that they are known as current maps - that is, literal pictures of the way ocean currents move around a group of islands. Interpretation of any object like this places you in the realms of classical archaeology - you get to make a creative choice about what you want to believe. I like the version of the Stick Charts laid out in Varieties of Unreligious Experience:

VoUE lays out a long and convoluted tale about the search for the truth of these 'charts'. The story that emerges is that these are not conventional charts in the sense of being 'pictures' of anything, rather, they are family mnemonics that are passed down generations and are incomprehensible to anyone outwith the clan. The only clue to how they work that could be uncovered was that they relate to the way that ocean waves bounce back off specific pieces of shoreline and the way that those waves mix together with others to form complex patterns - reading these patterns is the key to finding your position at sea.

The way that we understand space and place is intensely personal - it makes sense, to me, that this understanding be passed down by and to those closest to us - after all, these are the people that we experience things with and share an individualised descriptive language with. I love the idea that this shared language could be distilled into a tactile object that can be carried, held and passed down.