Whilst chatting over food and waiting for our first parents evening appointment, a colleague of mine, a geography teacher, once defined Geography in three simple words: place, space and scale. Confident about scale (as opposed to size, it was concerned with proportion, how big things were in relation to other things, though it is also a flaky deposit and a bony plate), I had to admit at the time that I was unsure the difference between place and space.
Place, he explained was a specific location, one we could point to on a map, like my postcode or France (two places, on different scales). Space was a type of place, like a kitchen or a country (again, two types on two different scales). Fascinating.
I said all three had a role in art, and art education. We deal all the time with both kinds of geographical definitions, place and space, and often discuss size.
