In the final session to close Practicing Landscape: Landscapes of Energy & Extraction, two artist researchers Margarita Certeza Garcia and Désirée Coral discussed their contributions to We are Compost / Composting the We, a forthcoming show at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow. Chaired by Sue Brind:
Margarita Certeza Garcia:
To mark the occasion of the 22nd World Congress of Soil Science – Crossing Boundaries, Changing Society, an exhibition and outreach programme took place at the CCA from 29 July to 10 September 2022. This featured examples of radical composting that explore issues such as food sovereignty, meal cultures, waste streams, allotment politics, right to land movements, seed saving initiatives, and soils as relational, subjective bodies in multispecies communities that demand attention and time in all forms of land stewardship.
Titled, We are Compost / Composting the We, the exhibition programme responds to Haraway’s metaphoric use of composting and other fermented fruits of feminist STS (science, technology and society studies), environmental humanities, and critical soil science to explore what can be “composted” in and through socially engaged art and design. In an age characterized by the entangled crises of climate change, political instability, post-pandemic cultural production, and post- colonial legacies we ask: how can compost be used as a tool for conscious permutation, grieving and reconciliation in the face of mass extinction? How can creative soil-building practicescounter
inequality and promote environmental justice to transform civil societies on the verge of erosion? How can multi-species compost heaps stir up the hegemonic “we” at the centre of the Anthropocene? And how can healthy soil become not only a metaphor but a driver for social change?
Margarita Certeza Garcia (she/her) is a Lecturer in Artistic Research at the Bauhaus University Weimar, where she is also pursuing a PhD in art. Margarita also leads the Antidiscrimination Office in Weimar and is a member of the International Advisory Council for the City of Weimar. In her artistic research she focuses on the gendered topics of food politics, meal cultures and public space as theyrelate to post-colonial discourses.
Margarita contributes to the curatorial team behind We are Compost / Composting the We, in collaboration with the Bauhaus University’s Prof. Alex Toland, Public Arts Lecturer Lea Wittich, and the Centre for Contemporary Art’s Sabrina Henry, Alaya Ang and Francis McKee.
Désirée Coral:
Seed representations in art and pre-Columbian artifacts as a lens to understand human interactions with seeds.
Colonial Seeds was the title of the Research Residency the artist undertook with the Glasgow Seed Library. This residency started at the end of January and concluded July with an artistic response as part of the exhibition. Désirée Coral discussed her proposed piece for the show that looked into the early American domestications of crops and seeds, such as maize, potatoes, tomatoes, quinoa, beans, and pumpkins amongst others, contrasting our contemporary approach to these seeds.
The artist discussed some elements of the research and the exhibition as the representation of domesticated seeds from the Americas in archaeological gold, ceramics, and textile objects. This included looking into the pre-Columbian Andean cosmovision and possible interpretations through archaeological objects and contrasting them with some art history representations of crops or seeds in art pieces as well as their incorporation into the gastronomical landscape of Europe and later in the UK. Within this presentation notions of decoloniality, geographical movements, displacement, adaptation, responsible safekeeping, and collections were further revealed.
Désirée Coral is an artist born in Ecuador who received her MFA degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she researched the politics of gold as material in the arts and the mining environmental implications and its bureaucratic responsibilities. She is currently a Doctoral researcher at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in the University of Dundee in Scotland.
Désirée explores and examines early global botanical exchanges from the Americas and its trajectories. She is an artist/researcher at the Botanical Gardens of the University of Dundee, and is the Glasgow Seed Library’s first artist/researcher in residence at the Contemporary Centre for the Arts in Glasgow.
Desirée’s art/research is supported by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.
Susan Brind studied Fine Art at Reading University and the Slade School of Art, London, specializing time-based installation. Maintaining her interest in the tension between subjectivity and rationalism, her recent independent and collaborative works (with Jim Harold) have sought to question how knowledge and history shape our understandings of the contemporary world; an engagement with place and context being integral in the development of works. Her work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, and she has received a number of awards and commissions. In addition to exhibiting work, curatorial and publishing projects have been considered as integral to her practice. Most notable examples have been The Reading Room (co-curated with Jane Rolo, Book Works for venues in Glasgow, Oxford and London, 1994), The State of the Real: Aesthetics in the Digital Age (Sutton, Brind & McKenzie, IB Tauris, 2007). More recent activities include Nomadic Dialogues, in Cyprus and Norway, conducted through an international network, the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories.
Sue is a Reader in Contemporary Art: Practice & Events at Glasgow School of Art, based in the Dept of Sculpture & Environmental Art, teaching at undergraduate and PhD levels. In collaboration with Dr Nicky Bird, she co-founded Reading Landscape.
In this talk Dr Alex Hale and Dr Gina Wall shared their collaborative work which explores heritage landscape-as-archive.
Their interdisciplinary research engages in the practice of what Henk Slager calls the para-archive, provoking affective ways of thinking and making which have the potential for new intersubjective relations to manifest between the human and the world. The archaeological tropes of excavation and stratigraphy speak to the discipline’s historic concern for the extraction and archiving of artefacts, including human remains, from the past. However, to think of the landscape-as-archive is to orient our attention to the surface, and to the archaeology of the present. In the thick present, the past and present are diffract through each other, and the future is continuously re/assembled.
This session was chaired by Michail Mersinis.
Alex Hale is a Senior Archaeology Researcher at Historic Environment Scotland. He undertakes research into Scottish heritage landscapes, ranging in scale from historic and contemporary graffiti, to climbing heritage landscapes. His work attempts to be collaborative, practice-based, creative and research focused. He was recently awarded a Royal Society of Edinburgh research workshop grant with the aim to explore archaeological perspectives to the political, economic and environmental challenges facing Scotland in the present day. Alex is a Member of the Chartered Institute of Archaeologists.
Gina Wall is a research-led practitioner who works within the landscape, exploring the relation between land, photography and text. She has an interest in the physical and photographic encounter with landscape as spectral which has led to a preoccupation with time and landscape, and a sense that particular landscapes of ruination may lend themselves to experience and interpretation as places of competing temporalities. Gina is an invited member of a number of external funded research networks and she is an active member of the cross-disciplinary Reading Landscapes research group at the Glasgow School of Art.
Michail Mersinis is an artist from Greece, whose work revolves around the utopian imaginary and the sense of place.
Art & Archaeology References
Bailey, D. W. (2014) Art//archaeology//art: letting-go beyond, in I. A. Russell & A. Cochrane [Eds] Art and Archaeology: Collaborations, Conversations, Criticisms. New York: Springer-Kluwer, pp. 231–50.
Thomas, A., Lee, D., Frederick, U. &White, C. (2017) Beyond art/archaeology: research and practice after the ‘creative turn’ forum, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 121–9.
The second symposium of this series, Mining the Animal involved two presentations by Dr Michail Mersinis and Dr Elizabeth A. Hodson, followed by a response to the symposium themes by artist-academic Jim Harold.
Mining the animal is concerned to address the relation between the non-human animal, landscape and people. Specifically, we explored how the voice of the animal reveals itself, whether through its absence or artistic intervention. Michael Mersinis’ presentation focused on the silk worm as both an agent and an interlocutor. Following a research project in the small village of Soufli in the north part of Greece, Michael examined the animal that was single handedly responsible for the rise and fall of a community that solely relied on its existence. People who worked in the factories of silk are brought forward to weave a complex narrative of economy and ecology in fringe societies. Following on from this, Elizabeth A. Hodson turned to the work of contemporary artists working in Scotland to explore the transformative and disruptive potential of vocal mimesis in art. Speaking as if animal sheds light on our relationship with the non-human; its symbolic function but also its gendered dynamics. From Butler (1990) to Irigaray (1985), mimesis has been theorized as a platform for subversion. But it can also be a route towards a potential symbiosis with the non-human. Contemporary art practice offers us paths through the climate change crisis in the era of the anthropocene by suggesting a reconfiguration between the human and the non-human animal, an realignment which hears the voice of the non-human animal as equal, autonomous and instructive.
Michail Mersinis
Michail Mersinis is an artist from Greece, whose work revolves around the utopian imaginary and the sense of place. By using photography’s elusive relationship with reality and its indexical qualities he makes work that superimpose the projected qualities of places with the real, working mainly through photography and sculpture. Relying on notions of land art, where the work of art and landscape are inextricably linked, the additional layers of history, storytelling and hearsay form the basic material from which contemporary hybrid notions of place emerge. By utilising the methods of travelling, picture-making and combining them with notions of a primary material as indicated by Presocratic philosophers, he makes works that exist between the document and the projection, which rely on the inherently photographic notion of latency. After the picture is made, and before the chemical development is finalised, both the real and the imaginary are states of equal importance and possibility in a state of existence which fluctuates from the scientific to the alchemical.
Recent projects include the travelling to all the seven alleged locations of the Homeric Ithaca and making a series of photographic and sculptural works that deal with the identification and documentation of the homeland of Odysseus. From mainlands and islands in Greece and Denmark to Scotland Mersinis travels and makes pictures about potentiality rather than fact. History and conflict are important considerations in his work. The investigation of the residue in cultural memory on the battlefield of Culloden Moor led to a body of work that negotiates the idea of battle and loss. Currently he continues to work on ‘The Old World Cycle’, a project that seeks to consolidate the cultural and geographical significance of place of the Mediterranean and spans from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Black Sea. He is now travelling to remote islands in search of earthquakes and residues of presence and history.
Elizabeth A. Hodson
Dr Elizabeth A. Hodson is a Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies and Postgraduate studies at Glasgow School of Art, UK. Her research and teaching is concerned with the interstices between art, anthropology and art history. Trained as a social anthropologist with a PhD from the University of Aberdeen, she has conducted ethnographic research on art in Iceland and Scotland, exploring a range of topics including drawing, interdisciplinarity, alterity, the imagination and materiality. Before taking up her current position at GSA she worked as a Research Fellow on the an ERC-funded project at the University of Aberdeen called ‘Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design‘, led by Professor Tim Ingold. Based in anthropology the project was designed to speculate on and reconfigure the relationship between theoretical exposition in the academic human sciences with the often-neglected sensory, embodied nature of our relationship to the dwelt-in world. Elizabeth has published with the Journal of Material Culture, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, and Visual Studies, amongst others. She is also the co-editor of the Journal of Visual Culture in Britain. Alongside her written work she has also curated a number of interdisciplinarity exhibitions both here in the UK and abroad including: ‘Jaðarsýn’ (2010), at Kling og Bang Art Gallerí, Iceland; ‘Beyond Perception’ (2015), University of Aberdeen; ‘Drawing the Anthropological Imagination’ (2016), University of Durham.
Elizabeth’s most recent research project, which is funded by the Association For Art History, is concerned with art in rural communities in Scotland. Entitled ‘Imagining Landscape and Myth in Scottish Art’ it addresses how artists work with and in rural landscapes to articulate broader socio-political narratives (gender, sustainability and ecology for instance), through their engagement with coastlines, land boundaries and waterways. Central to this is how these new narratives interweave with the myths and stories attached to place. That is, how mythology is reimagined and reused in light of the anthropocenic crisis to speak to contemporary audiences and new concerns.
Jim Harold
Dr. Jim Harold is an artist based in Glasgow. He has lectured extensively in Fine Art within the UK and Europe, and has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work is held in public and private collections in UK, Australia and USA. His practice focuses on the way ‘value’, whether conceptual or aesthetic, shapes our readings of landscapes. In particular, those areas of border or marginal lands and terrain vague spaces that lie at the edge or limit between nations (often contested spaces) or those areas that have become isolated, neglected and under-valued. Recently, he has been working with members of Historic Environment Scotland (HES) to consider interdisciplinarity links between art and archaeology: the nature of contemporary archaeology, the language of the archive and the alternative values of a ‘re-wilding’ or a ‘ferality’ of language in relation to landscape experience, description, artefacts and the archive.
He is a member of the international research group Creative Centre for Fluid Territories (CCFT), whose projects in Cyprus and Norway focus on perceptions of place with particular regard to locations with contested histories and/or ecologies.
References
Michael Mersinis Silk Town
Agamben, Giorgio (2002). The Open Man and Animal, Stanford University Press
Berger, John (2009). Why Look at Animals in Berger, John (2009) About Looking, Bloomsbury
Derrida, Jacques (2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am, Foldham University Press
Fox, Robin (2011). The Tribal Imagination, Harvard University Press
Frankopan, Peter (2015). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Bloomsbury
Goody, John Rankine (1995). The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge University Press
Hansen, Valerie (2012). The Silk Road: A New History Oxford University Press
Ingold, Tim (1994). What is an Animal?, Routledge
Levi- Strauss, Claude (1966). The Savage Mind, Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Τράντα-Νίκολη Αλεξάνδρα (2008). Από το Κουκούλι στο Μετάξι: Σηροτροφία – Μεταξουργία, Πολιτιστικό Ίδρυμα Ομίλου Πειραιώς
Η σηροτροφία στο Σουφλί (Πολιτιστικό Ίδρυμα Ομίλου Πειραιώς) 1993 9789602440261
E A. Hodson, From Mimesis to Symbiosis
Bennett, J. 2001. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.
Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble. London: Routledge.
Irigaray, I. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Jamie, K. 2018. ed. Antlers of Water. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Plumwood, V. 2018. ‘Ecofeminist Analysis and the Culture of Ecological Denial’, in eds. L. Stevens, P. Tait, D. Varney in Feminist Ecologies: Changing Enviroments in the Anthropocene. Palgrave MacMillan. Pp. 97-113.
Jim Harold, ‘Mining the Animal’ and the ‘Strange Stranger’
Maurice Blanchot, (1995). ‘The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin’ in: The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press.
Manuel DeLanda, (2000). A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, Cambridge, Mass: Zone.
Timothy Morton (2008). The Ecological Thought, (pp.38-58), Harvard University Press.
Ann Waldman (2009). Manatee/Humanity, London: Penguin.
Diane di Prima (1978/1998). Loba, London: Penguin.
Diane di Prima (January 2021). Interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Justin Carter and Onya McCausland in conversation with Geographer Dr. Danny McNally about their recent projects involving material extracted from the landscape.
Avoiding the traditional monologic approach to presenting work, Justin and Onya built a shared dialogue framed by a small selection of relevant images used as wayfinders. In keeping with the speakers’ practices, their conversation was open and fluid, allowing ideas to emerge through conversation and exchange. This symposium explored various approaches to engaging with materials as active agents within the art making process.
This session was chaired by Dr. Frances Robertson and re-interpreted by Dr. Danny McNally for publication. The findings from this symposium was then published in the online critical review The Drouth in a special issue themed simply as ‘Climate’ to coincide with the COP26 conference in Glasgow. The climate-themed Special Issue presented a new article/feature online every few days (thus adding to the full issue over that time) which will usually focus on contribution to the debate on the climate crisis through art, architecture and design. The issue was launched in the first week of October at an exhibition in the New Glasgow Society gallery curated by our guest editor and sponsored by the Rachel Carson Centre in Munich and by Glasgow University.
Speaker Biographies
Justin Carter
Justin Carter is Reader in Contemporary Practice: Art & Environment at Glasgow School of Art. Recent exhibitions include: The Howse Shal Be Preserved at Rockingham Castle (2021), Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation at The Lighthouse, Glasgow (2020) and Blood From Stone at Fineshade Wood, Northamptonshire (2019). Over the past 20 years Justin has exhibited work and developed projects throughout the UK, Europe and in Japan, China, Australia and the United States. “My research is an attempt to understand the natural environment we are part of. How do we sense it and make sense of it? The resulting (art)works are an attempt to make this connection tangible”.
References for Justin Carter
Jean Dubuffet’s ‘Phenomenes’ print series (1958-1962)
Justinus Kerner. ‘The Seeres of Prevost: Being Revelations Concerning the Inner-Life of Man, and the Inter-Diffusion of a World of Spirits in the One We Inhabit’. (1855)
Tim Ingold, ‘The Perception of The Environment’ (2011)
Robert Macfalane, ‘Underland – A Deep Time Journey’. (2019)
Jane Bennett, ‘Vibrant Matter – a Political Ecology of Things’ (2010)
Jean Michel Rabate, ‘Rust’. (2018)
Onya McCausland
Onya McCausland is an artist and Lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art where she leads a visual reading group Environment, Ecology, Sustainability. Her work examines the materiality within painting and how paint itself can be a social tool for making visible distinct ideas that point toward the interdependencies between humans and the environment.
Selected exhibitions include 51°43 33.56 N 3°07 58.63 W Karsten Schubert London 2021; Embrace Norrtälje Konsthall, Sweden 2021; The Howse Shal Be Preserved, Fermynwoods commission Rockingham Castle 2021; Working on it and Landscapes of the Future Helsinki Contemporary Finland 2020; Europe After The Rain Newlyn Gallery Cornwall 2019; Aerial Landscapes Flat Time House London 2019; Red Wall Hauser & Wirth Somerset 2019; Turning Landscape into Colour Camden Arts Centre, London 2014; White Earth Kettle’s Yard Cambridge 2011. Forthcoming exhibitions include Chemical City at Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art – November 2021 and Embrace Akureyri Art Museum Iceland 2022. A book collaboration Aerial Landscape is due in 2022.
Danny McNally
Dr. Danny McNally is a cultural geographer and lecturer in geography at Teesside University. His research engages with socio-environmental issues through interdisciplinary research and practice-based collaborations with artists, curators, and urban and environmental practitioners.
Top Image: Justin Carter – Detail of installation ‘Elephant in the Room’ (2021) at Rockingham Castle, part of the group exhibition ‘The Howse Shal Be Preserved’.
‘Sundew’ – part of ongoing Signs of Life series by Justin Carter (2022) Oak gall ink on paper
The exhibition is the result of the project National Islands Plan – Embedded Artist. Contextual material to accompany the exhibition includes an essay and a podcast of an interview with the artist by Susan Brind and Monica Nunez Laiseca covering different aspects of the commission and her working process.
Distant Views of the Land. Film still. Copyright Saoirse Higgins 2019
Sessions 1-6, ‘Practicing Landscape Land, Histories and Transformation’, 6 Nov – 11 Dec 2020
The symposium Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation was organised by the Reading Landscape Research Group, formed by artist-academics from the School of Fine Art, Exhibitions Department and Design History Theory at the Glasgow School of Art. Read more about the symposium here. This page shares recordings of Sessions 2-6.
All material is subject to copyright of the speakers.
Session 1: KEYNOTE Dr Ingrid Pollard, Respondent Dr Tiffany Boyle (GSA)
Ingrid Pollard is a mixed-media artist and researcher, using digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio. This recording is not available for public viewing.
‘Parabiosis’, from Landscape Trauma series (2001), Ingrid Pollard
Session 2: WILD SPACES
Speakers: Dr Elizabeth A. Hodson, (Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies, GSA), The Posthuman Sublime: The Art Practice of Katie Paterson; Dr Nalini Paul, (Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies and Design History and Theory, GSA), Embodying Language in Wild Spaces: Place, Memory and Transformation; Sam Nightingale (PhD Candidate, Goldsmiths), Salt: a crystal image of time; Respondent Justin Carter (GSA)
Session 3: HISTORIES
Speakers: Seán Laoide-Kemp (Masters by Research Student, IADT Dún Laoghaire), Landscape as Witness: Aftermath Photography, Oral History, and Ethnography in Representing the Public Works Scheme of the Great Irish Famine; Joe Crowdy (PhD Candidate, Oslo Centre for Critical Architecture Studies), Writing Rack Fen: 1583-1606 and 2019-20; Dr Frances Robertson (Lecturer, GSA) Alien Introductions: trees, memory and landscape history; Respondent Michail Mersinis (GSA)
Session 4: KEYNOTE Dr Louise Purbrick (School of Humanities, University of Brighton), RespondentDr Marianne Greated (GSA)
Session 5: PEOPLE AND PLACE
Speakers: Dr Nicky Bird (GSA), Raging: Revisiting Raging Dyke Network; Jordan Whitewood-Neal (MRes student, University of Brighton), Epistemological Hinterlands: Non-Normative Embodiment and Sublime Perceptions of Landscape; Dr Jo Vergunst (Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen), Exploring landscape decision-making with the arts: agency, scale and temporality; Respondent Dr Frances Robertson (GSA)
Session 6: CONTENTIOUS LANDSCAPES
Speakers: Minty Donald (Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice, University of Glasgow), Erratic Drift: approaching human geological performance; Jane Brettle (Visual Artist, in collaboration with Musician Robin Mason) Mine – walking; Jasper Coppes (Artist / Tutor Royal Academy of Art, The Hague), Mud; Respondent Susan Brind (GSA)
The symposium Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation was organised by the Reading Landscape Research Group, formed by artist-academics from the School of Fine Art, Exhibitions Department and Design History Theory at the Glasgow School of Art.
It ran over six Fridays, from 6 Nov – 12 Dec 2020. The symposium comprised of two Keynote speakers – Ingrid Pollard and Dr Louise Purbrick – and four thematic sessions, each with three 20 minute presentations, chaired by a respondent from the GSA. Read the speakers biographies here
The symposium asked: How do contemporary art and other interdisciplinary practices engage with (and expand) the themes of Land, Histories and Transformation? How can such practices work with contested histories, identities and remoteness in specific locations? What do land and other material practices reveal in terms of transformation, heritage and sustainability? Which practical, creative and critical theoretical frameworks are currently being utilised to interrogate the politics of Land, Histories and Transformation? How can a reflexive curatorial process activate these themes?
The Symposium had four key themes:
Wild spaces (including peripheral territories, deserts, forests or ideas of remoteness);
Histories (including land ownership, commons, cultural perspectives, border territories, heritage and preservation);
People and Place (including alternative voices and experiences of landscape including embodiment and auto-ethnographic practices);
Contentious Landscapes (including sustainability, interventions, conservation and ecology).
The schedule was as follows:
SESSION 1: Fri 6 Nov 2020
Keynote Dr Ingrid Pollard, Respondent Dr Tiffany Boyle (GSA)
A mixed-media artist and researcher, Pollard uses digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio. Pollard studied Film and Video at the London College of Printing and MA in Photographic Studies, University of Derby and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster.
SESSION 2: WILD SPACES, Fri 13 Nov 2020
Dr Elizabeth A. Hodson, (Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies, GSA), The Posthuman Sublime: The Art Practice of Katie Paterson
Dr Nalini Paul, (Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies and Design History and Theory, GSA), Embodying Language in Wild Spaces: Place, Memory and Transformation
Sam Nightingale (PhD Candidate, Goldsmiths), Salt: a crystal image of time
Respondent Justin Carter (GSA)
The panel expanded upon the theme of ‘Wild spaces’, to encompass contemporary art practice, peripheral territories, ideas of remoteness along with notions of the sublime, embodiment and materiality.
SESSION 3: HISTORIES, Fri 20 Nov 2020
Seán Laoide-Kemp (Masters by Research Student, IADT Dún Laoghaire), Landscape as Witness: Aftermath Photography, Oral History, and Ethnography in Representing the Public Works Scheme of the Great Irish Famine
Joe Crowdy (PhD Candidate, Oslo Centre for Critical Architecture Studies), Writing Rack Fen: 1583-1606 and 2019-20
Dr Frances Robertson (Lecturer, GSA) Alien Introductions: trees, memory and landscape history
Respondent Michail Mersinis (GSA)
The panel expanded upon the ways art practice and historical research investigate this theme to address land as witness, oral histories, cultural perspectives shaped by politics and memory, through issues of heritage, ecology and conservation.
SESSION 4: Fri 27 Nov 2020
Keynote: Dr Louise Purbrick (School of Humanities, University of Brighton), Respondent Dr Marianne Greated (GSA)
Purbrick’s keynote reflected upon empty, or almost empty, distant landscapes, examining the ruptured nitrate fields of the Atacama Desert. From the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, the Antofagasta and Tarapacá regions of north Chile were extensively and intensively mined for nitrate. The industry, which supplied the agricultural economy of Northern Europe with fertiliser and its chemical industry with explosives, was driven by British capital. Residues of a history of the past exploitation of life remain in the desert landscape and appear in the present in other landscapes and in other forms: archives and images. Purbrick also considered the once derelict site of the H Blocks. 12 miles south-west of Belfast, it was the largest male prison for those serving life sentences for ‘conflict-related’ offences and frontline in the Northern Ireland conflict. Through the political stalemate of the peace process of the last 20 years, this site of conflict became a source of disagreement, a space of denial and silence. Most recently, it has been transformed, ecological and economic forces taking their effect, yet the site of the H Blocks still raises the question of how the material forms of history remain in landscapes of loss.
Louise Purbrick is an academic, activist and artist based at the University of Brighton. Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton, her work is devoted to understanding the sites of extraction and incarceration; she investigates the material culture of conflict and everyday life.
SESSION 5: PEOPLE AND PLACE, Fri 4 Dec 2020
Dr Nicky Bird (GSA), Raging: Revisiting Raging Dyke Network
Jordan Whitewood-Neal (MRes student, University of Brighton), Epistemological Hinterlands: Non-Normative Embodiment and Sublime Perceptions of Landscape
Dr Jo Vergunst (Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen), Exploring landscape decision-making with the arts: agency, scale and temporality
Respondent Dr Frances Robertson (GSA)
in this session on the theme of ‘People and Place’, the panel teases out questions of community, alternative voices, gender politics and experiences of landscape including embodiment and auto-ethnographic practices.
SESSION 6: CONTENTIOUS LANDSCAPES, Fri 11 Dec 2020
Minty Donald (Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice, University of Glasgow), Erratic Drift: approaching human geological performance
Jane Brettle (Visual Artist, in collaboration with Robin Mason: Musician) Mine – walking
Jasper Coppes (Artist / Tutor Royal Academy of Art, The Hague), Mud
Respondent Susan Brind (GSA)
Led by three distinct contemporary art practices, the final panel draws out the tensions and legacies of between the human and non-human environment, including sustainability, interventions, conservation and ecology.
Mixed-media artist and researcher, Pollard uses digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio. Pollard studied Film and Video at the London College of Printing and MA in Photographic Studies, University of Derby and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster. She was one of twenty founding members of Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2018, Pollard was the Inaugural Stuart Hall Research Fellow in the same year. She has worked as an artist-in-residence at a number of organisations, including Project Row Houses, Houston Texas, US, 2004; Croydon College of Art, 2011; and Glasgow Women’s Library, 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum & Photographers Gallery, London; NGBK, Berlin; the Caribbean Cultural Centre, New York; the National Art Gallery of Barbados; and Camerawork, San Francisco. In 2019, she received the BALTIC Artist Award and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.
Ingrid Pollard has been in residence at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), as part of Glasgow International, now 2021. Having taken part in GI2018 with Deep Down Body Thirst, curated by Radclyffe Hall, Ingrid returns to Glasgow and the festival with a new exhibition exploring Lesbian history and culture.
‘Parabiosis’, from Landscape Trauma series, (2001), Ingrid Pollard
Respondent: Dr Tiffany Boyle (GSA) is a researcher, curator and writer, based in the Department of Design History & Theory at GSA and working as part of the curatorial duo Mother Tongue. Forthcoming projects include ‘7×7’ – a solo presentation from artist susan pui san lok for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2021. Between Spring 2019-2020, she was a Postdoctoral and Senior Scholar Research Fellow with the Hauser & Wirth Institute NY.
Dr Louise Purbrick
Louise Purbrick is an academic, activist and artist based at the University of Brighton. Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton, her work is devoted to understanding the sites of extraction and incarceration; she investigates the material culture of conflict and everyday life. . With Xavier Ribas and Ignacio Acosta, she is part Traces of Nitrate, which examines legacies of mining colonialism and political ecologies of extraction.
Image credit: Plate 7, Series of Open Trenches’ Oficina Alianza and Port of Iquique 1899, Album 12, Fondo Fotográfico Fundación Universidad de Navarra/Museo Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona
Respondent: Dr Marianne Greated is Acting Head of Drawing and Painting at The Glasgow School of Art. Through her painting practice Greated explores how sustainability manifests within the landscape. Her work addresses landscape painting, constructing uncertain narratives around human intervention into the landscape. The paintings focus on renewable power structures, displacing the notion of the site and redressing histories of landscape painting. Greated’s research includes field trips, such as a site visit to Southern India from which these paintings stem, and ongoing explorations of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The visual representations of the environment are informed by the complexities of sustainability, public and political influence and how the landscape is forged by industry and power.
WILD SPACES
Dr Elizabeth A. Hodson
Dr Elizabeth A. Hodson is an anthropologist (PhD Uni. of Aberdeen) working in the interstices between contemporary art, anthropology and art history. She has conducted ethnographic research on art in Iceland and Scotland, exploring a range of topics including drawing, interdisciplinarity, alterity, the imagination and materiality. From 2013-2016 she was a Research Fellow on a five year ERC-funded project at the University of Aberdeen called ‘Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design‘ (KFI, 2013-2018), led by Professor Tim Ingold. Recent publications include: the edited volume ‘Imaginations – Interiors – Surfaces: An Exhibition of Artefacts’ (2017); ‘Drawing’s Alterity’ in Collective and Collaborative Drawing in Contemporary Practice, ed. J. Journeaux and H. Gørrill (2017); ‘Cracked Glaze’, in An Unfinished Compendium of Materials, ed. R. Harkness (2017). Elizabeth has also published with the Journal of Material Culture, Journal of Visual Art Practice and ART/E/FACT, amongst others, and written on the art practice of Margrét H. Blöndal, Haraldur Jónsson, and Steingrímur Eyfjörð. Alongside her written work she has also curated a number of interdisciplinarity exhibitions both here in the UK and abroad including: ‘Jaðarsýn’ (2010), at Kling og Bang Art Gallerí, Iceland; ‘Beyond Perception’ (2015), University of Aberdeen; ‘Drawing the Anthropological Imagination’ (2016), University of Durham.
Nalini Paul’s poetry is inspired by natural landscapes, walks and memory. Born in India, she grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and has been living in Scotland for most of her adult life. She is widely published and has collaborated across various art forms. She was George Mackay Brown Writing Fellow in Orkney from 2009 until 2010, where she worked with dancers, musicians, visual artists, archaeologists and the RSPB. Her first poetry collection, Skirlags, was shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Award in 2010. Her collection, The Raven’s Song (2015) is inspired by raven and crow myths from Orkney, Shetland and Canada. Nalini’s poetic work for stage with Stellar Quines Theatre Company, Beyond the Mud Walls, is set partly in 1940s India and was showcased for ‘Rehearsal Rooms’ at the Traverse, Edinburgh, in September 2016. She was a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow in 2017, spending a month at Grez-sur-Loing, France writing poetry partly inspired by The Bhagavad Gita. Nalini undertook a residency in Lewis and Kolkata as part of the ‘New Passages’ project (2017-18), exploring connections between India and Scotland. Since December 2019 Nalini has been working with Enough! Scotland on an artistic response to climate change, which includes writing exploring language, memory and belonging. She works as a lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies and Design History and Theory at The Glasgow School of Art.
Sam Nightingale
Sam Nightingale is an artist and researcher working in environmental media. He uses experimental forms of photography and speculative fieldwork to explore ‘spectral ecologies’ and the geopolitical interface between history, ecology and the image. His work explores how ‘spectral ecologies’ trace human and nonhuman histories and events enmeshed within organic and inorganic life, of salt, soil, and plants, as well as in the built environment. The work draws as much on technical media as it does on a biophysical environment’s capacity to act as ‘elemental media’ or ‘natural media’.
Nightingale is involved in various interdisciplinary projects, including running field-labs, and working with rural communities, scientists, geographers and social scientists in Europe and Australia. Residencies include Røst AiR, Norway; Ecology of Senses (Bioart Society, Finland); Practicing Deeptime (TimeSpan, Scotland); Dark Ecology, (Sonic Acts, Russia/ Arctic Circle). Recent publications: ‘Para-photo-mancy: notes on biochemical images,’ Antennae (2019); ‘Cinétracts – cinematic cartography in the Australian Mallee’, Living MapsReview, (2019) ‘Photochemical Alchemy,’ CAA Art Journal Open (2019). He is also co-editor of A Guide to Experimental Fieldwork for Future Ecologies (Onomatopee, under contract). His artwork is held in public and private collections. Nightingale is undertaking a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London.
‘A Crystalline World’, Sam Nightingale (2018), photographic salt print
Respondent: Justin Carter is Reader in Contemporary Practice: Art and Environment and Lecturer in Sculpture & Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art. “My research is an attempt to understand the natural environment we are part of. How do we sense it and make sense of it?How can a connection be made with a particular place and shared with an audience or viewer? The artwork is an attempt to make this connection tangible”.
Justin has been artist in residence at Tate Liverpool (2001), Grizedale (2002) and Berwick Gymnasium (2004). In 2013 he was commissioned by Trust New Art to make a response to Leigh Woods in Bristol where he developed a project which sought to reconnect the urban museum with the rural wood through the practice of walking. More recently, in 2018 he worked on a residency at Fermynwoods Contemporary Arts in partnership with the Forestry Commission where he made a series prints alluding to habitat loss and species extinction. These prints were produced using ink made by combining rust from giant excavation equipment with oak galls from local trees.
HISTORIES
Seán Laoide-Kemp
Seán Laoide-Kemp is a photographer based in Ireland, who completed his studies on the BA (Hons) Photography programme at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dún Laoghaire (IADT). He has also recently completed a practice-led Masters by Research course in IADT. Laoide-Kemp practices mainly in the genre of Aftermath Photography (the photographing of dark events after they have taken place). This particular genre combines two of his great passions in life: history and photography. An example of this union can be seen in his ongoing project, Landscape as Witness, which aims to visually represent the constructions that were built as part of the Public WorksScheme in North Clare during the Great Irish Famine (1845-52). The project consists of images takenof these constructions and their surrounding landscape, accompanied by oral history and ethnographic accounts. By using these methods, Laoide-Kemp hopes to shed light on histories that are at risk of being forgotten.
‘Landscape as Witness’, Seán Laoide-Kemp (2019)
Joe Crowdy
Joe Crowdy is a PhD candidate at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, researching the built environment of the Fens as it became the object of intense speculative development in the early seventeenth century. His research – provisionally titled The Anti-Projector Anew: The Administrative, Vegetal, and Rebellious Architectures of the Seventeenth Century Fens – responds to the words and practices of those who opposed the newly imposed architecture of drainage and enclosure, who rejected depictions of their environment as a barren wasteland in need of ‘improvement’, by asserting its existing economic and ecological vitality.
Crowdy holds an MA in Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, UAL. Prior to his PhD studies, he worked in London as an artist – producing installations, performances and texts for exhibitions and commissions in the UK and Europe – and a gardener, and these practices continue to inform his academic research.
Still from ‘Writing Rack Fen’, Joe Crowdy (2020)
Dr Frances Robertson
Dr Frances Robertson teaches at Glasgow School of Art. She researches practices of drawing and print with reference to the history of technology, visual communication, and the constructed environment. Recent publications include: Print Culture: Technologies of the Printed Page from Steam Press to eBook (2013); ‘Power in the Landscape’ in Kjetil Fallan, ed. The Culture of Nature in the History of Design (2019). Her landscape observations are carried out in words and through drawing—in parallel investigations of the interactions between landscape representation, notions of national and regional identity and the cultural politics of design and landscape shaping in Scotland. In her drawing practice she aims to develop an immersive contemplative practice of being in the environment through such long-duration drawings as that in the Practicing landscape exhibition currently in the exhibition at the Lighthouse. Previous projects include exhibitions and workshops with the art collective ‘Composition’ project and artist book publication 2004-2007, funded by Glasgow City Council Cultural Fund and the National Lottery Awards for All Scheme working with the poets Nalini Paul and Gerry Stewart with exhibitions at Tramway, Glasgow; Glasgow Women’s Library; the Mitchell Library; and book launch at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh.
PEOPLE AND PLACE
Nicky Bird
Nicky Bird is an artist work considers contemporary relevances of ‘vernacular’ photographs and latent histories of specific sites, investigating how they remain resonant. She is interested in a key question: What is our relationship to the past, and what is the value we ascribe to it? Her work incorporates new photography with oral histories and collaborations with people who have significant connections to the original site and its photographic archive. Alongside commissioned projects she has exhibited nationally and internationally, with whose published essays on themes of erased place and digital exchange of photographs. Nicky is also a Reader in Contemporary Photographic Practice at The Glasgow School of Art.
Jordan Whitewood-Neal
Jordan Whitewood-Neal is a MRes student and independent researcher currently exploring relationships between disability and landscape infrastructures through autoethnography. Having previously completed his undergraduate degree at the Canterbury School of Architecture, Jordan then went on to work for Stirling Prize winning practice de Rijke Marsh Morgan, before then starting his Part 2 at the University of Brighton. Over the past 2 years he has developed research interests in the themes of body, pedagogy, semiotics and epistemology and completed his first Masters thesis on Spatially Augmented Machine Intelligence.
His current work is design-research based and is currently conducting a series of derives in the Ashdown Forest. These derives are documented via a bespoke filming device which uses the unique distortions created via the wheelchair to project speculative augmentations of the landscape at varying scales. Alongside this work he is also writing an extended research study on body and tools in reference to objectivity, and is studying the work of theorists such as Ranulph Glanville, Paul Feyerabend and Donna Haraway. The hope being to establish a new understanding of how his personal disability affects more general epistemological understanding of place and self.
‘Blackhill Autoethnographic Study’, Jordan Whitewood-Neal (2019) Photo: Simon Beames
Jo Vergunst
Jo Vergunst’s anthropological research is about people’s relationships with their environments. Most of his fieldwork has been in Scotland and he focuses particularly on the intersection between everyday experience and wider political circumstances. Vergunst’s early work was on farming and rural development, and over recent years he has worked on a wide range of themes – from walking in rural and urban areas, to landscape history and heritage, and wood as a craft material and landscape. He is especially interested in anthropology that works with artists and through creative practice.
Postcard of Bennachie from the collection of Peter Smith, Premnay
Dr Frances Robertson (GSA), see HISTORIES
CONTENTIOUS LANDSCAPES
Minty Donald
Minty Donald is an artist, researcher and Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at the University of Glasgow. Her practice-research, which she regularly undertakes with artist, Nick Millar, explores interrelationships between humans and the other-than-human environments that they shape, build and inhabit; environments that also, reciprocally, mould and permeate them. Her practice takes multiple forms, determined by the context in which she is working, but often entails performance, sculpture, participatory events and writing. In her practice, she treats other-than-human matter as a collaborator, acknowledging its liveliness and agency, while also recognising the limits and inequities of human/other-than-human collaboration. Recent practice-research focused on interrelationships between humans and watercourses. Current interests see a shift towards human-geological interrelations. Projects include: THEN/NOW a public art project with/for the Forth and Clyde Canal in Glasgow (with Nick Millar and Neil McGuire), 2014—20 http://www.then-now.org ; Guddling About, an iterative performance practice with water (with Nick Millar), 2013— http://www.guddlingabout.com; Erratic Drift a participatory performance and installation (with Nick Millar), Architecture Fringe, 2019.
‘Quarry Drift’, a performance for Architecture Fringe, Glasgow, June 2019. Minty Donald and Nick Millar with the stones of Glasgow. Image credit: Minty Donald
Jane Brettle
Jane Brettle studied Fine Art at the West of England College of Art, Fine Art and Photography at the University of Sunderland and MA Photographic Studies at the University of Derby. She lives and works mainly in Edinburgh and in South West Cornwall. Her work is a response to the way in which our man-made environment defines us through the construction of institutional and domestic spaces – more recently through landscapes that appear to be ‘natural environments’ but are culturally ‘managed’ for our education and pleasure.
Awards and Bursaries include the Arts and Humanities Research Award, SAC Artist Award(s) and a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Trust Bursary. Commissions, include the National Galleries of Scotland, the Royal College of Surgeons London, Glasgow Year of Architecture and Design, and Photo 98. She has exhibited and published nationally and internationally and has work in various public and private collections including the Deutsche Bank Art Collection, City Art Centre Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland, and Royal College of Surgeons, London. She is currently developing a work in collaboration with musician Robin Mason, supported by St Andrews University, The Hope Scott Trust and Help Musicians UK.
She was Associate Lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art and Associate Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University involved in developing the Contemporary Photographic Practice Course, teaching theory and practice at undergraduate and postgraduate level. She has worked as External Examiner, PhD Supervisor and Course Adviser and occasionally writes on Photography.
In 1984 she established the Education Project at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh and in 1987 co-established Portfolio Gallery, Workshop and Magazine in Edinburgh.
She has been a board member of several arts organisations and awards and consultancy panels and invited to chair, speak and lecture at numerous academic and art/photography events.
‘mine Lothian’ (2020), still, Jane Brettle with Robin Mason (20mins 30 secs duration)
Jasper Coppes
Jasper Coppes (NL, 1983) questions the dominant stories we tell about the natural environment in his work. Long-term dialogues with specific sites, people and other entities form the basis of his practice. Coppes’ works take shape across a variety of different media, such as, film, writing, sculpture, architecture and sound. Recent exhibitions include: ‘Calling for times to Come’ ITGWO, Vlieland (2019), ‘Cabinet Interventions’ Glasgow International Festival, Glasgow (2018), ‘Flow Country’ Glasgow Short Film Festival, (2017), ‘Roineabhal’, Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam (2015). Coppes is a tutor at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, MA artistic Research – and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.
Susan Brind is a Reader in Contemporary Art: Practice & Events based in the Dept of Sculpture & Environmental Art at The Glasgow School of Art. She co-leads, with Nicky Bird, GSA’s Reading Landscape research group and is also a member of the Creative Centre for Fluid Territories (CCFT), an international interdisciplinary research group undertaking practice-led research focused on constructions of place identity. Within her collaborative practice with Jim Harold, she is interested in how our first-hand experience of different places allows us to reflect on culture, on geo-politics and, most importantly, upon ourselves as beings.
Professor Ross Sinclair prepares for the Symposium, 8 March 2020
Postponed due to COVID 19.
Practising Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation is a symposium organised by the Reading Landscape Research Group, formed by artist-academics from the School of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. The symposium was due to take place on 19 and 20 March 2020, as the closing event that informs an exhibition of work, under the same title, by Reading Landscape Research Group members. Both the exhibition (which ran until Tuesday 17 March 2020) and the symposium were to be held together at The Lighthouse, Glasgow. Ticket costs £20 and £70, with allocation of free tickets to GSA Postgraduate Taught and Research students.
The symposium will be re-scheduled later in the year.
Presentations contributing to the Symposium, were selected through an open call and double peer review process. The symposium continues to draw on themes informed by an exhibition.They further the discussion of four key themes of interest:
– Histories (including land ownership, commons, cultural perspectives, border territories, heritage and preservation);
– Wild spaces (including peripheral territories, deserts, forests or ideas of remoteness);
– People and Place (including alternative voices and experiences of landscape including embodiment and auto-ethnographic practices);
– Contentious Landscapes (including sustainability, interventions, conservation and ecology).
About the Speakers:
Keynote: Ingrid Pollard
Mixed-media artist and researcher, Ingrid Pollard uses digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio. Pollard studied Film and Video at the London College of Printing and MA in Photographic Studies, University of Derby and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster. She was one of twenty founding members of Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2018, Pollard was the Inaugural Stuart Hall Research Fellow in the same year. She has worked as an artist-in-residence at a number of organisations, including Project Row Houses, Houston Texas, US, 2004; Croydon College of Art, 2011; and Glasgow Women’s Library, 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum & Photographers Gallery, London; NGBK, Berlin; the Caribbean Cultural Centre, New York; the National Art Gallery of Barbados; and Camerawork, San Francisco. In 2019, she received the BALTIC Artist Award and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.
Ingrid Pollard is presently in residence at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), as part of Glasgow International 2020. Having taken part in GI2018 with Deep Down Body Thirst, curated by Radclyffe Hall, Ingrid returns to Glasgow and the festival with a new exhibition exploring Lesbian history and culture.
Keynote: Dr Louise Purbrick (Principal Lecturer, History of Art, University of Brighton)
Louise Purbrick is an academic and activist who works on sites of political and ecological violence. With Ignacio Acosta and Xavier Ribas, she is part of the Traces of Nitrate collective that has examined the historical legacies of nitrate mining the Atacama Desert, Chile. Their recent photographic installation, Trafficking the Earth (2017), has been exhibited in London, UK, Santiago, Chile, and Huesca, Spain (tracesofnitrate.org). Louise has written widely on the remote or neglected places of exploitation, conflict and imprisonment. She is an editor with Jim Aulich and Graham Dawson of Contested Spaces: Sites, Histories and Representations (Palgrave, 2007) and co-author with John Schofield of ‘Brixton: Landscape of a Riot’ published in Landscapes (2009). She is currently completing a book, ‘An Architecture of Conflict: A History of the H Blocks’. Louise Purbrick is Principal Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Brighton.
Histories:
Seán Laoide-Kemp (Masters by Research student, IADT Dún Laoghaire), Landscape as Witness: Aftermath Photography, Oral History, and Ethnography in Representing the Public Works Scheme of the Great Irish Famine.
Joe Crowdy (PhD student, Oslo School of Art and Design), ‘Writing Rack Fen: 1583-1606 and 2019-20’
Dr Frances Robertson (Lecturer, Design History & Theory, The Glasgow School of Art) ‘Alien Introductions: trees, memory and landscape history’
Wild Spaces:
Dr Nalini Paul (Lecturer, Fine Art Critical Studies and Design History & Theory, The Glasgow School of Art), ‘Embodying Language in Wild Spaces: Place, Memory and Transformation’
Dr Elizabeth A. Hodson (Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies, The Glasgow School of Art), ‘The Posthuman Sublime: The Art Practice of Katie Paterson’
Sam Nightingale (PhD Candidate, Goldsmiths, University of London), ‘Salt: a crystal image of time’
People and Place:
Nicky Bird (Reader in Contemporary Photographic Practice, The Glasgow School of Art), ‘Raging’
Jordan Whitewood-Neale (M. Arch student, University of Brighton), ‘Epistemological Hinterlands: Non-Normative Embodiment and Sublime Perceptions of Landscape’
Dr Jo Vergunst (Senior Lecturer, University of Aberdeen), ‘Exploring landscape decision-making with the arts: agency, scale and temporality’
Contentious Landscapes:
Minty Donald (Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice, University of Glasgow, artist), ‘Erratic Drift: approaching human geological performance’
Jane Brettle (Practicing Artist) ‘Mine – walking’
Jasper Coppes (Artist/ tutor, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague), ‘Nature Represents Itself’
While the exhibition had at its heart contemporary art practice and practice-led research in diverse visual disciplines, the Symposium also welcomed proposals from a diverse range of disciplines – such as archaeology, architecture, design, ecology, geography, literature, music, virtual reality etc – and reflected in contributions from the selected twelve speakers that respond to the themes in inter-disciplinary ways.
Symposium Tote bags by Professor Ross Sinclair. Photo: Jenny Brownrigg March, 2020
Mixed-media artist and researcher, Ingrid Pollard uses digital, analogue and alternative photographic processes, also incorporating printmaking, image-text and artist books, installation, video and audio. Pollard studied Film and Video at the London College of Printing and MA in Photographic Studies, University of Derby and holds a PhD from the University of Westminster. She was one of twenty founding members of Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2018, Pollard was the Inaugural Stuart Hall Research Fellow in the same year. She has worked as an artist-in-residence at a number of organisations, including Project Row Houses, Houston Texas, US, 2004; Croydon College of Art, 2011; and Glasgow Women’s Library, 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum & Photographers Gallery, London; NGBK, Berlin; the Caribbean Cultural Centre, New York; the National Art Gallery of Barbados; and Camerawork, San Francisco. In 2019, she received the BALTIC Artist Award and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.
Ingrid Pollard Photo: Emile Holba
Ingrid Pollard is presently in residence at Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), as part of Glasgow International 2020. Having taken part in GI2018 with Deep Down Body Thirst, curated by Radclyffe Hall, Ingrid returns to Glasgow and the festival with a new exhibition exploring Lesbian history and culture.
Louise Purbrick is an academic and activist who works on sites of political and ecological violence. With Ignacio Acosta and Xavier Ribas, she is part of the Traces of Nitrate collective that has examined the historical legacies of nitrate mining the Atacama Desert, Chile. Their recent photographic installation, Trafficking the Earth (2017), has been exhibited in London, UK, Santiago, Chile, and Huesca, Spain. Louise has written widely on the remote or neglected places of exploitation, conflict and imprisonment. She is an editor with Jim Aulich and Graham Dawson of Contested Spaces: Sites, Histories and Representations (Palgrave, 2007) and co-author with John Schofield of ‘Brixton: Landscape of a Riot’ published in Landscapes (2009). She is currently completing a book, An Architecture of Conflict: A History of the H Blocks.
Louise Purbrick
Louise Purbrick is Principal Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Brighton.
TOP IMAGE: (top) Alan Currall, ‘Four Pools, Wanlock Dod’ (2019)
Reading Landscape 