As part of a limited-edition workbook "Pedagogy of Place - A Field Guide to Reading Landscape for Artists, Architects, & Designers" (https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/9666), intended for a GSA winter workshop on Reading Landscapes, this "action" is for readers/students to perform, based on their practice.

My action submitted for the book is as follows:

A Solitary Walk in the Dark, (pre-dawn)
(*note, for practical reasons, this exercise is more easily done in the winter months)
(** do not do this exercise in a built-up/urban environment: 1] for personal safety, 2] because there will be too much light pollution)

Set an early alarm so that you are up and outside in a rural landscape away from any artificial light in darkness before dawn (with enough time to walk for at least 30 minutes in complete darkness before the sun begins to come up). Taking a head-torch, go for a solitary walk and consider how your normal perceptions of place and your senses are affected by having your field of vision limited to the reach of the head-torch’s beam. Which senses are most heightened? Are you more aware of the sound of your breath? Does the torch highlight moisture in the air? Can you hear wildlife that you would not normally be aware of? What other sensations and thoughts do you experience? You may also wish to pause and turn off your torch for a time and experience complete darkness. Is your way also assisted by moonlight or starlight and if so, what is the quality of that light?

As soon as there is just enough pre-dawn twilight to walk without the assistance of the head-torch (usually in the period of Nautical Twilight), switch it off entirely and continue walking. How do you feel now? What happens to your vision as the day grows brighter?

Record your thoughts and sensations as soon as you can once the sun comes up.

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This will be documented in a limited edition softcover workbook for GSA use in the Winter School in the Highlands Campus in Forres, and it is the intention for the book to be distributed more widely after the completion of the Winterschool through approaches to University Press Publishers.

My action and artist statement submitted for the book is as follows:

A Solitary Walk in the Dark, (pre-dawn)
(*note, for practical reasons, this exercise is more easily done in the winter months)
(** do not do this exercise in a built-up/urban environment: 1] for personal safety, 2] because there will be too much light pollution)

Set an early alarm so that you are up and outside in a rural landscape away from any artificial light in darkness before dawn (with enough time to walk for at least 30 minutes in complete darkness before the sun begins to come up). Taking a head-torch, go for a solitary walk and consider how your normal perceptions of place and your senses are affected by having your field of vision limited to the reach of the head-torch’s beam. Which senses are most heightened? Are you more aware of the sound of your breath? Does the torch highlight moisture in the air? Can you hear wildlife that you would not normally be aware of? What other sensations and thoughts do you experience? You may also wish to pause and turn off your torch for a time and experience complete darkness. Is your way also assisted by moonlight or starlight and if so, what is the quality of that light?

As soon as there is just enough pre-dawn twilight to walk without the assistance of the head-torch (usually in the period of Nautical Twilight), switch it off entirely and continue walking. How do you feel now? What happens to your vision as the day grows brighter?

Record your thoughts and sensations as soon as you can once the sun comes up.

**************
Artist Statement, Dec 2023

I am a visual artist working across media with an interest in text, photography, film, painting and drawing. My practice is centred around how we experience and translate our experiences of landscape, and much of my work emerges through the act of walking and spending extended periods within remote places, often in mountain landscapes. Time spent in such places, for me, acts as a catalyst for thought.

Much of my work is concerned with the slippage between two different experiences of time – lived-time whilst walking, where an awareness of time passing, the sensualities of twilight, and the rhythms of the seasons and weather are made tangible; and the deep time of geology where time vertiginously stretches back in ways difficult to fully rationalise or comprehend from a human perspective.

My approach often employs autoethnographic methods. In works like “Collection”, a vitrine containing a selection of unremarkable stones collected over many years and accompanied by a series of texts, - one for each stone – the writing often scientific or geopoetic in tone, we are pulled between the language of knowledge and research, and the intimacies of parallel narratives that exist, for example, within the context of my ordinary family life.

The work is always made through my lived, embodied experience within landscape - an association between mind and matter. However, my work is not about me, it is not autobiographical and insistently aims to look outwards, concerned with how space and place has the potential to somehow open us up spiritually (if that is not too strong a word) by a receptivity to the commonplace joys of exploring and experiencing wild land.

As we walk over the ground, step by step, hour after hour, the repetition of our movements can shift us into different ways of thinking. Sometimes the discomforts borne of effort and exertion as we ascend a steep slope or traverse arduous terrain consumes all thought (and that’s interesting enough in itself). But more often, we move into a rhythm and a zone where slow passage through a place reveals ways of thinking that don’t emerge when sitting in our comfortable armchairs at home.

Opening up to the possibilities of observing and experiencing the landscape through light, darkness, twilight, vapour, cloud, wind, rain, snow, scent, movement, stillness, silence, storm, wildlife, trees, vegetation, and rock reveals to me a way to think outside of myself. To paraphrase Kenneth White, my work isn’t about my self in the world – I have no interest in declaring what I make to be my vision; I am more concerned with quiet observation in order to see things in their intelligible reality.

Oftentimes, my work explores shifts between apparent opposites; between solidity and immateriality, between a longitudinal understanding of deep time to impermanence, between light and dark, or culture and the non-human, with an especial interest in those liminal spaces in between.

Given the world’s precarious political and ecological position, I often guiltily wonder why I make work that is essentially celebratory, work that is quietly joyful, and what place this might have in these anxious times. That we might begin to understand ourselves, and care for the land we occupy through an embodied knowledge however, gained through a slow, quiet attentiveness and respect for such places – with hope perhaps - still seems to me to hold value and worth.

• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/9666/