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Ms. Thomson is a doctoral candidate in interdisciplinary fine art practice at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Inverness  , Scotland; [www.artt@passingplace.com]. MAKING A PLACE: ART, WRITING, AND A MORE-THAN-TEXTUAL APPROACH AMANDA THOMSON †In this article I discuss both a process of making artwork about a particular landscapethe forests in parts of the north of Scotlandand an arts practice that has expanded to include ethnographic fieldwork. Not only have I shadowed foresters, ecologists, and other people who work in these outdoor spaces, I have actually performed tasks with them. My work is concerned with the familiarization of place that can come through repeated visits, processes of coming to know, and exploring how others' knowledge can be brought to bear on process, practice, and outcome. In the following description and discussion of some of my work, I explore the ways in which the concerns and interests of my practice-based research may sometimes overlap with the concerns and interests of geographical inquiry.I am interested in how the "more than written" (and, perhaps, the "other-than, or not-quite, explained") can add value to investigations of place and how the kind of writings on landscape and place that Hayden Lorimer described as "morethan-representational"the "diverse work that seeks better to cope with our selfevidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds" (, ) can add texture, depth, and context to an arts practice. In doing so, I draw on writers such as J.-D. Dewsbury and his coauthors, who argued for "accounts that leave a space for something else to happen" (, ), and John Wylie, who wrote about how "forms of narrativememoir, montage, travelogue, ethnography are being used both within and beyond academia as creative and critical means of expressing post-humanist philosophies of place" (, ). More recently, Wylie has claimed that there exists "a desire for different types of writing, methods, formats and 'outputs,' and a shared stress also on the affective, emotive and praxis based aspects of life" (, ).F. "Treescape, Abernethy." Digital print.

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Situating myself as a visual artist with a multi-modal practice, this paper will explore the relationship of writing to making, using the relationship of writing to my own practice to explore questions relating to research processes, the volume of information gathered, and the insertion of other disciplinary perspectives. Here, I will address the element of my practice that is based in landscape, specifically explorations that begin with the idea that places are multi-layered, ever-changing, embodied and always active. In seeing places as experiential fields of investigation, writing can add a more complex dimension as it flows from the landscape itself and research about it, to practice, with writing occasionally becoming the artform itself. This article will consider the connection of writing to practice, and specifically use the relationship of writing within my own arts practice to explore questions relating to research processes and the potential outcomes and outputs of that research.The relationship of art and writing, art to writing and writing to art is complex and ongoing, and it is not my intent in this article to survey its complex and multifaceted history. Rather, this article will consider a specific subject, that of landscape and place 1 , and the interplay between research -writingmaking, how each of these elements can inform the other and what happens in the spaces of research and its aftermath when one brings other disciplinary perspectives, investigations and ways of seeing and encountering into one's work. In particular I will address how writing has shifted from being an integral but inward and private part of an arts practice to an element of work which can be outward Image 1. Tetrao urugallus (male) Found object collected while broodcounting