Kingley Vale – the road to the interior

Summary of insights from a talk and seminar at Tate Brtain 30th May 2015 led by artist Emma Smith, relevant to the Kingley Vale residency.
Emma Smith introduced her project ‘School for Tourists’:
“The School For Tourists is an ongoing project to examine our relationship to place, to question the roles of host and guest and to consider new possibilities for belonging.”
http://www.emma-smith.com/site/work/school-for-tourists/
Her workshop began with an exercise to demonstrate that speed of walking is affected by speed of thinking. This was pertinent to the two approaches I compared at the start of the residency of walking through the forest slowly off the main paths to pacing through the site on a visitor path. The thinking was faster with the faster pace, there was also a sense of being closed and frustration at missing out on stopping at interesting places, of not seeing as much.
“walking creates space for imagination” – Emma Smith
“Walking slowly increases level of consciousness” – Iain Sinclair
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/walking-vs-sitting-042414.html
I’ve been recording ‘whispering walks’ through two repeated routes at and near Kingley Vale for five years. Audio trails with the purpose to process life events and experiences, sometimes to develop creative work.
Walking through the landscape on this residency has given me a sense of ownership of the place, in naming specific trees, in spending time and returning to and through locations, in recreating the familiar, in discovering places previously unknown to me, in not following the main paths. Emma described the visceral relationship to location and feelings of ownership created by a connection to the land. She talked about how her project had encouraged people to cross the boundaries set by planners to keep tourists and residents apart . Her residency at Grizedale found tension between local residents and visitors, and how artists had changed the way the landscape was perceived through romanticising it in paintings, poems and stories, that the views had been constructed to create these romantic vistas. Pre 1840 the region was considered ugly. Later in the seminar Prof John Urry defined the difference being:
land is the place where tilling and working takes place, landscape is the transformation of land to be gazed at for visual consumption and pleasure.
He also defined difference in gaze:
‘Collective gaze’ – seeing with others
‘Romantic gaze’ – solitary or with someone close to us, a dislike of ‘other’ viewers/tourists
‘Spectatorial gaze’ – person collecting views (photos, memories, passing by, adding to their collection)
Referred to mediated and constructed views for tourists, Kingley Vale is SSSI status so there is a limit to how much the site can be changed, but views are constructed through the paths, the Nature Trail, fencing. The tumuli burial mounds (Devils Humps) on the top of the hill were constructed hundreds of years ago with the spectacular views. There are many different types of visitors for education, religion, performances, hiking, leisure and dog walking, research, wildlife spotting.
“Viewpoint is what we see and what we think” – Emma Smith
In the forest there are cameras to watch the wildlife, so animals and visitors can also become the viewpoint.

The act of walking – looking up means the walker feels safe, feeling safe is influence by thoughts. I reflect on my early days and fear of adders, now I walking confidently everywhere in wellies and have less fear I look up more.

Sensory perception – sight and sound. Emma explained how both use the same area of the brain, that there is a limited capacity which means that if we are looking intensely we hear less, and vice versa. Silence allows us to see better, important for the drawing trails.

Emma had questioned with a choreographer how much movement makes a walk, and embodied thought, ie imagining to be on a walk. Would this give the same sense of wellbeing?

Some artifacts can only be viewed through walking, just like the landscape, and the wardrobes I’m hoping to instal inviting visitors to explore further. Natural England encourage people to do this, I rarely see others though.

Emma pointed out that we walk in a different way when we walk away towards something than we do when walking towards home.
“Walking is the most democratic form of movement”
“Walking with another person we accommodate each others physical personal capacity”

So the sensory workshops focus on engaging with land using different senses, one at a time, drawing from those different viewpoints ie what is seen with what is experienced through each sense.
Consider the different viewpoints that have brought more intense or inspired responses, whether these are ‘romantic’.

The last activity of the workshop we devised a way of walking through the exhibitions, I chose smell noticing the smells of the different areas, perfumed cleaner on the stairs, woody floors of the main room. With this focus when I came across a large Turner painting of the sea I could smell it. All the inhaling added to a sense of exhilaration (I presume from the extra oxygen). Breath is another way of affecting experience. Something to follow up.

TRANSFORMATION

‘On drawing and painting trees’ (Adrian Keith Hill,1936, Pitman Books):

‘It will be found that the underlying muscular development which categorizes the trunk and limb formation of the human contour is often reproduced in tree life.’ p.69

‘on Huxley’s definition of a tree as “an animal confined in a wooden box”, a phrase which should be a continual reminder to us to observe trees as individual forms of life, and therefore worthy of the greatest respect.’ p.70

He went on to found ‘art therapy’ introducing art activities to patients with mental illness, bringing prints to hospitals for discussion on art but was against incorporating psychoanalysis. To make art and discuss it is about the person engaging with the world outside, to make art for psychoanalysis is about letting others in for scrutiny. As an artist each piece of work I present for public gaze or engagement opens me and the subject for scrutiny.

I’m interested in the transformational and experiential aspects of art practice.

Return to strategies:
Drawing the space in between
Drawing something found from observation, another from imagination, writing to connect the two to experience
Sensation drawing larger scale

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Found holes in the earth beneath the trees, something dug up, something once hidden and buried had been unearthed. I guess at squirrels and nuts. Consider cultural rituals of burying objects for cleansing in the forest. The drawing strategies feel ritualistic, I write and then follow them in silence.

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Notice a rule of three in drawing approaches:

three perspectives (from Japanese ink painting) – bird eye, human eye, frog eye in films i’ve made
three perspectives in process – drawing an object from observation; drawing another from imagination; text response to connect both relating to experience
three planes or platforms – light revealing movement of canopy on artist sketchbook, the drawing on the page, the soundscape of the forest; the found object, the imaginative response to it, the response through medium on paper or film.
Each work has more than three when reviewed, but three are considered when making each piece.

 

Taking the idea of anthropomorphism further, of humanising the forest, I clothe trees with underwear. I want to accentuate this idea, using bras work best as they can fit onto the tree.

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How does humanising the forest through the process of characterisation through drawing, naming, writing about specific trees, affect how I experience the forest?

Location and false sense of security. Through developing the human or animal association with certain trees they become familiar, I quickly locate where I am in the forest by recognising these trees. The familiarity gives a sense of security, but I am no more or less at risk than I was Day One. There are still unexploded bombs, badger sets, adders, branches that stick out at eye level.

In terms of relationships it’s clear that disassociation and projecting ideas about other people can bring familiarity, a way to locate oneself in relation to another, but it too can become a false sense of security.

I look at a photograph of my grandparents, they might as well be trees as the picture never moves but the ideas about them grow in my mind through the stories I hear about them from family. They smile. Expressions as masks?

Masks – those that people wear to hide themselves and those that people project to hide what they don’t want to admit to seeing in others.

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Three ways to communicate ideas through one tree.

 

The residency includes weekly mentor sessions with Veronique Maria who is challenging me to push my practice further. The sessions provide a platform to review the developing ideas, identify themes arising from intuitive process, to take risks and to consider the context for the work made.

Whilst the blog is written as a daily account, the ideas continue throughout the week:

At the start of my arts career I created installations, spaces designed as immersive environments using film, sensors Re-Sembling Nano, sci-art installation

The projects were designed and then built in exhibition space. When I rented a small studio space at Unity Studios the audiences that visited found the work interesting, but it was documented versions rather than immersive spaces. I returned to working with materials with which I could physically engage and experiment with and present. The work with the residency is very much about the space, immersing myself in a natural environment, claiming space and transforming it through the ideas in the work.

On Nicholas Bourriaud and Relational Aesthetics-

“He saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world.” – TATE.ORG.UK

Questioning why I anthropomorphise the trees?

Association for psychological science, Feb 2010:

“Neuroscience research has shown that similar brain regions are involved when we think about the behavior of both humans and of nonhuman entities, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be using similar processes as those used for thinking about other people.”

He goes on to say that to anthropomorphise an inanimate object gives a sense of moral duty to care and punish, and that objects are selected that look more familiar to human forms than others.

When I walk through any forest I notice immediately the shape of a belly, an eye, a grin, a torso.
A root pull presents: a sense of striving and surviving.
A branch fallen to the ground: of pushing onwards. Sprouting bunches of yews on a fallen tree: rebirth, refresh, infallibility of life.

The opposite to anthropomorphise is to dehumanise. Apparently those socially isolated are more likely to anthropomorphise and those that dehumanise (Nazis, soldiers at Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq) are more likely to be socially connected.

“Social connection may have benefits for a person’s own health and well-being but may have unfortunate consequences for intergroup relations by enabling dehumanization.”

‘The authors conclude that few of us “have difficulty identifying other humans in a biological sense, but it is much more complicated to identify them in a psychological sense.”’

Does someone more socially isolated have a heightened sense of anthropomorphism from trying to understand other people?

Religious icon objects hold power of association (a sculpture of Jesus, a drawing of the Prophet). Social religious grouping can lead to dehumanising of other social groups.

Consider the power of association in making work that gives an experience to the viewer.

The sensory drawings I made have significance to me, they represent my physical location in time and sensory experience of the body and landscape. The marks on the paper have a relation to each other that is experienced in a different way. The text informs the viewer of what the drawing is about to facilitate their relation to the  experience of another person, the artist.

Alongside this residency I’m preparing for a group show at Chichester Guildhall with ARTEL Contemporary Art Group. The material object will be a wardrobe and the significance of this resonates with the ideas forming on this residency: I’ve requested permission to instal one in the landscape.

 

 

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Took a small sketchbook and drew sensations of being in the forest using graphite stick and colour conte pastels. Drawings began with feelings of tension in the body from sitting, standing, the cold air, smells, sounds and marks were made in relation to position. For each drawing I wrote a few lines of text.

I then found myself back at the same oak and drew my sense of the oak, repeated this with a nearby yew.

These drawings meant more than the earlier depictions, the process was more engaging, and drawings more interesting. This will form the exercises for the workshops with children allowing me to focus on the more adult themes in my research.
I used this method for the lunch time drawing group at work, interestingly two drawings had similar relational marks in terms of position.

Reflect on the anthropomorphic tree drawings previously made, the light lines that suggest human and tree, and why and how this could be a useful drawing method. The trees I’ve drawn have allowed me to project feelings, ideas and snippets of narrative that are disassociated by one degree.

Drawing myself through the trees. That this could provide a way to explore the issue of shame more freely.

began to look at other artists who have worked with ideas of shame.

Kara Walker
http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker/

Penny Siopsis
Pinky Pinky and the unspoken shame of rape and violence against young women and girls and of relationships
http://www.stevenson.info/exhibitions/siopis/images/siopis-love.jpg

Shame and gaze
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/sex-and-shame-visual-arts