Surface: land/water and the visual arts symposium 2004

By Simon Standing

This book is a collection of six papers from the 2004 Land/Water and Surface symposium. These works contribute both to contemporary academic debates within artist and curatorial practices, and to understanding within related areas of experience and knowledge. Central themes include: sustainability; representation of change, journey, place and visual practice; West Country and regional specificity. There is particular focus on coast as a littoral space, and interest in exploring relations between site-theme-art process-narrative. The collection also includes material about the Land/Water Research group, the programme for the 2005 symposium and speaker biographies illustrations, and a poem by Thomas A Clark written especially for the occasion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781841509457

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Surface:     illusion, optical/visual or metaphoric

medium and materiality

unearthing/bringing to the surface

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for surface is lengthy. Given definitions include, ‘the outermost limiting part of a material body’, ‘the outward aspect of something, what is apparent on casual viewing or consideration’, ‘the upper layer or top of the ground… the top of a body of liquid’, ‘an extent or area of material considered as a medium’, ‘a magnitude or continuous extent having only two dimensions… whether plane or curved, finite or infinite’; also, ‘raise to the surface’, ‘make known or visible’, and ‘become fully conscious or alert’. Read together, such phrases become hyper-evocative. Surface is not superficial. In landscape what we see is a two-dimensional layer or visible edge emergent from and, metaphorically, standing for geological, meteorological and oceanic formations. Furthermore, what we see can never be settled; land and water are in constant, interactive flux. The possibility of imaging effects of movement and change through the deployment of medium and materials has been a concern within fine art practice, especially since the Impressionists, one which more recently has been pursued particularly through installation and video. There is a tension between the fixity of the image and the fluidity of the elements which has stood as a paradoxical challenge for many artists. Increasingly ‘landscape’ is also associated with the idea of inner landscape, the realm of the unconscious. Hence, it is the emotional and spiritual responses, as well as literal objects, that may be unearthed, brought to the surface.

It is no accident that a research group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts has developed in the Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth. The South-West has long been associated with landscape practices and creative investigation of the littoral. In Cornwall, the Newlyn School dates from the late nineteenth century and St Ives is associated with Modernism in painting, sculpture and ceramics (Heron, Hepworth, Leach). Dartmoor and Exmoor in Devon have offered spaces of creative exploration by artists and craftspeople. The Land/Water group includes artists, curators and writers, and encompasses photography, painting, installation, film and video. Individual creative practice and critical reflection is central, but collaboration, in the form of exhibitions, texts and publications, is viewed as offering significant opportunity for dialogue and reflective debate. Given that a number of members of the group are concerned with photography, a certain emphasis is placed on photographic methods and references.

Land/Water references: the sea (e.g. as boundary, as access to the sublime); the coastline (e.g. as a shifting margin, as no-man’s land); river as symbol or conceit (e.g. time/memory); geological formation, and the use of charts and maps; and finally, but significantly, landscape as a genre within art practice, historically and now. Dialogue between real and imagined geographies embraces much of the research pursued. The Land/Water ethos invites interaction rather than opposition; the forward slash of the title also indicates a point of transition or change, metaphoric as well as actual. The interaction of wet and dry (photography, painting, printmaking) may also be taken as metaphor for geological, physiological and psychological events. A primary concern of the group is to promote an understanding and dissemination of individual practices in order that other dimensions (spiritual, ethical, political) can be considered as embodied within the physical practice rather than added to it by text and context.

As a research group we are also concerned to work with others. Collaboration falls broadly into two categories. The first category involves institutions and individuals already operating within the field, (galleries; funding bodies; other artists, curators and writers…). The second is more inter-disciplinery, intending to extend theoretical, procedural and communicative possibilities by moving into new sites, situations and academic contexts (hospital; scientific enquiry; international and cross-cultural liaisons...). Within this category projects have been pursued with institutions such as the Eden Project, Jurassic Coast as a heritage site, Oxford Museum of the History of Science. We see reflection and evaluation as dialectically central to our activities. From the perspective of theory and critical debate, the notion of discourse presumes an interactive difference, which is usefully paralleled in the land/water dichotomy and interface, hence the potential richness of ‘surface’ as the theme for our annual symposium, June 2004.

Speakers were invited to address the theme in relation to their own work, articulating their interpretation of the notion of ‘surface’ accordingly. Thus, some speakers chose to critically discuss their work more in psychoanalytic terms, others focussed more on process, medium and materiality, or on reference and metaphor. The first speaker, Iain Biggs, used his long-term exploration of the Southdean area in the Scottish borders, as a springboard for discussing ways in which historical layering nuances psycho-physical spaces. He takes the confluence of histories and (Celtic) myth, recounted in stories and songs, as a starting point, not with a view to resolution or synthesis of conflictual experiences, feelings and perspectives but as a tapestry of sources which he acknowledges as influences. He also set a quizzical tone for the event through suggesting that research conventions associated with academic contexts constrain practice, in effect, commenting on consequences of bringing artistic practice within the orbit of the research audit exercises now mandatory within Higher Education in Britain. Patricia Townsend draw upon psychotherapeutic notions to analyse what might be ‘brought to the surface’ through video. Like Biggs, she is concerned with that which outer surface conceals and with the relation between inner and outer worlds, memory and fantasy, conscious and unconscious and ways in which such interactions are dynamically articulated through the image.

John Goto and Ingrid Pollard variously addressed questions of process and reference – in terms of making, and in terms of viewer interpretation. Goto’s digitally constructed images in High Summer specifically reference well-known European post-Renaissance paintings and landscaped gardens wherein the rules of pictorial composition were pre-eminent. The digitally-produced surface is flat, lacking the depth and textures of oil (or, indeed, of landscape gardens themselves). Picturesque scenes are variously interrupted by contemporary visitors (tourists, terrorists…). Content and surface combine to suggest an ironic comment on art, class, and the Arcadian. Pollard’s discussion drew upon recent residencies in Northumberland, including the Farne Islands. She reflects upon the relation between the surface of the print and the surface of the land which it references, using the camera close-up to explore the effects of light, textures, and visual detail, microscopically. Resulting images shift our sense of scale as, for instance, photographs of organic mass are rendered larger than human scale, at one level echoing the artist’s own curiosity about the relation between the minuteness of the everyday and the enormity of the cosmos.

Susan Derges and Christopher Cook both focus on sources, aesthetics, and the materiality of the image surface. Derges has a longstanding interest in issues associated with making visible that which is normally unseen, for instance, the pulse of a strobe light, or the resonances of sound through water. Surface and viewpoint are often ambiguous; with no horizon or vanishing point our sense of image content and viewing position may not be immediately clear. Although working with photographic principles, much of her work is not lens-based. Her encounter with nature is direct, whether working out of doors or gathering material to work with in the darkroom. Cook’s paintings in graphite emerge through a process with striking geological connotations, although at times there is an equally strong dialogue with black and white photography. Using a sequence of physical journeys, he explores the serendipitous route to this development, revealing how a re-engagement with specific surface qualities transformed his