Making A Place: Art, Writing, and a More‐Than‐Textual Approach

Abstract

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.

The Art of Writing Place

“…A creative approach to writing place allows the author to leave room for the reader's own ideas – to show rather than tell, and in so doing expand the possibilities of the text. As Thomson points out, art can “give the viewers, the audience, space in which to pause and reflect” (: 247). Readers, in particular, have the opportunity “to bring thoughts of their own to the experience that reinforce the possibility that each reading […] will become an individual journey” (Barnes , 171), since they largely control the experience of reading, being able to choose what to read, where to read it, and how much to read at any one time without direct input from the author.…”