I am a practice-based researcher in fine art who engages in collaborative fieldwork with practitioners from various academic backgrounds on transdisciplinary research projects concerned with time, landscape and affect. The visual work that I will discuss during the presentation for the webinar has been made in response to field research undertaken with the culinary artist/chef Marente van der Valk (www.marentevandervalk.com) on the Altyre Estate in Northern Scotland, which is home to The Glasgow School of Art’s Highlands & Islands campus. This fieldwork investigated the lively, agentic landscape through experiments with fermentation using wild yeast and bacterial cultures. Building on the knowledge that I gained from the generosity of this collaboration, I began to understand fermentation as intrinsic to the liveliness of the landscape. This is a process that produces living edible organisms that are part of the microbial terroir of Altyre, which ‘breathes with the humours of place’ (Wall, 2022, 74) capturing the unseen agentic realism of a landscape teeming with life. The images that I intend to show during the presentation are a suite of prints, which chart the assembly of different visual information such as the basic chemical profile of soil as revealed through soil sampling, prints of edible plant specimens and text about their lore -particularly that which is associated with women through craft, medicine, and cooking. The images use a combination of printing from laser cut plates, hand painting and writing. These images are a momentary imprint of the intangibility of place, they feel their way towards memory, to knowledge, reaching for something that does not quite exist, and borrowing from Ann Cvetkovich (2003), they tentatively evoke the landscape as an archive of feelings. These maps are visual accretions of landscape, charting relations between the human and non-human; they are more than human, what Mar a Puig de la Bellacasa might call ‘cartographies of sociotechnical, naturecultural assemblages’ (2017, 29). In these imprints, everything is scaled at one to one which is of significance because it is in scalar consistency with the world, the elements are neither magnified nor diminished by human intention. This is not to argue for a pseudo-neutrality, rather the aesthetic emerges in the act of bringing together, of idiosyncratically archiving the concrete and the intangible in word and image.

References
Cvetkovich, A. (2003) An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press
Wall, G. (2022) Trans-corporeal Photographies: Landscapes of a More Than Human World Relate North #9 (Ed) Coutts, G. & Jokela, T. InSEA Publications