Flights now booked so it's off to the States in mid January! I am now thinking I must get down to writing the outline for my lecture since I know that time will slip by very quickly.
On another issue entirely, I went to a symposium at the University of the West of England in Bristol at the weekend entitled All Over the Place. It accompanied the opening of a drawing show of the same name in which there were pieces by several of the speakers at the symposium. What I found interesting was the tendency for the symposium title to be explored in relation to landscape rather than the wider interpretation of place. Of course the particular interests of some artists was landscape and this came through strongly in their talks. Nevertheless it seemed to me that place was frequently taken as the grand 'Caspar David Freidrich type' location. For me, equally relevant works are those of Idris Khan and Bernd and Hilla Becher, that do not use the 18th Century landscape idyll as the way to explore place.
If I can venture about my work in the same paragraph as the above artists, the sitting room drawings are for me very much about place, even though these are as far removed from rolling hills and crashing waves as can be.
