Over the last few days I have continued to work with what I have gathered on walks. Thinking about my place within the landscape being walked, it being dramatic in its scale and impression on me, mountainous, and very isolated at points. The other day I found myself walking down a path surrounded to head height by a tall green bush, the path narrow and my pace becoming faster as I went through. Considering how to plot my place within this territory.
Whilst continuing to collect pedometer notes I have also continued to trace interesting interventions within the landscape that suggest a structure, or structuring of land by man. The relationship of straight line to surrounding land still feeling very important. On 25/8 on a walk through the Aberllefenni slate quarry I began to question the role of these in the work, whether they are a part of the plotting works I have been attempting, or another element to be explored, also whether they need to be traced or not. However, the tracings of paths have been very interesting to investigate within plotting pieces, but whether these need to be traced directly from the landscape, or can be drawn, I am unclear at present.
Here are a few examples of plotting pieces being developed, working on tracing paper, and an acrylic sheet, scratching into the plastic.
The Aberllefenni quarry walk being an extremely interesting walk, landslide amounts of slate on the hillsides, alongside the remains of structures from the quarry still attempting to hold form amongst the slate spill around them.
The plotting process has involved developing a strategy for how to plot points, referring to the OS maps layout in order to strategize how the footsteps are mapped. Also looking at the graphic layout of the map and how this can be thought about within the work. I was given a wonderful opportunity to have a look at an OS map from 1901, the graphics and look of the map very different from todays. It showing a definite change in the landscape due to the increase in Coniferous trees planted.
Being well into the second week of my residency I am increasingly thinking about the relationship of this experience to the focus of urban space within recent work, both very different landscapes.
An interesting quote by Denis Cosgrove that I found whilst reading Julie Mehretu City Sitings ‘Cartography acts not merely to record the various ways that the city is materially present, but as a creative intervention in urban space, shaping both the physical city and the urban life experienced and preformed here’, Denis Cosgrove, ‘Carto-City: Mapping and Urban Space’, in Mapping a City, eds. Nina Montmann and Yilmaz Dziewior (Hamburg, 2004), 49.
This is increasingly making me think about the creative intervention I hope to have within the works I have been making here but also previously, and how this can manifest itself.
