Page 4 – Arts of Place

Tobacco and Feathers: The Art of Looking

Alexandra Harris on 15/10/2021

How do you read a feather? How did tobacco, a plant cultivated by Indigenous peoples in the Americas, end up in the playhouses of Shakespeare’s London? How were transatlantic objects altered or incorporated into ‘new’ worlds?

Arts of Place supported an exciting evening’s conversation at Trinity College Oxford (Monday 8 November 2021) and an online version with live discussion (Monday 15 November). BBC New Generation Thinkers Lauren Working and Lucy Powell discuss art, literature, and colonialism with art historian Stephanie Pratt. This event was part of the 2021 Being Human Festival.

From parrots to sunflowers to chilis, plants and animals from the Americas have reconfigured cultures across the world for over four centuries. This event will examine objects that crossed the Atlantic in the early modern period, illuminating their place in everything from still life paintings to botanic gardens to the writings of the seventeenth-century playwright Aphra Behn. Drawing on literature, art history, and Indigenous perspectives, Lauren Working, Lucy Powell and Stephanie Pratt will follow the journeys of feathers and tobacco to discuss the ongoing impact of colonialism and empire on society and culture in England.

A Sand County Almanac

Alexandra Harris on 02/08/2021

Aldo Leopold, 1949.

Recommended by Tom Dobbins

A simply beautiful collection of stories and essays on land. Leopold has a wonderful knack of inspiring ecological stewardship through his intimate descriptions of place, while also managing to capture what it is to have an honest, evolving relationship with the world around us. His joyous month-by-month assessment of rural Wisconsin is backed up by sharp ecological critique, which continues to inspire a place-based management practice rooted in community and inhabitation.

The Mushroom at the End of the World

Alexandra Harris on 02/08/2021

On the Possibility of Life In Capitalist Ruins

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Princeton University Press, 2015)

Recommended by Tom Dobbins

Whether at the scale of a building, a material or an ecology, viewing place through a non-human lens is a necessary act towards an empathetic management of its character. It makes space for under-represented qualities and characteristics to gain value, which in turn can expand what is deserving of protection, rehabilitation or praise. Anna Tsing’s observations of the world in relation to the matsutake mushroom are one fascinating example of this. The book exposes a web of hidden global narratives, sited across a series of forests, where place is read in the spaces between ecology, commodity and community.

Julie Brook: Arts of Place Artist-in-Residence

Ellen Addis on 15/06/2021

As part of our celebrations at the close of the first year of Arts of Place, we are delighted to welcome leading land artist Julie Brook as our Artist in Residence. Here, we look over Brook’s career and work.

Brook is a British artist who creates large scale sculpture. She uses a variety of natural materials and incorporates photography and film to combine wild terrains with classical formalism. Drawing from, with, and in the landscape, Brook has lived and worked in the Orkney Islands, on Jura and Mingulay, and in the Libyan desert. She currently lives on the Isle of Skye.

Artist Julie Brook, pictured near her home on Skye. PIC Jane Barlow/TSPL.

Brook travels to and dwells within remote regions, spending time inhabiting the landscape either alone or with local guides. These places are usually quite solitary and inhospitable, from caves in the Hebrides to Libyan deserts. From there she makes art that reconnects us with the natural world, in exciting ways, through sculpture and large-scale drawing. From 1989 Julie Brook has been living and working in remote landscapes in Scotland: Hoy, Orkney (1989); the west coast of Jura (1990-94); on the uninhabited island of Mingulay (1996-2011) in the Outer Hebrides. Recently she has been working in different parts of the desert: in Central and South West Libya (2008-09) travelling with Tuareg guides; Syria (2010); NW Namibia (2011-14) travelling with Himba-Herero guides; Aird Bheag, Hebrides and Komatsu, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan (2015-2022).

Pigment Drawing, poured. Otjize, NW Namibia.

In the early nineties, Brook moved to the remote island of Jura on the west coast of Scotland to paint and draw. Living beneath a natural stone arch, the solitude became part of her art. While living alone and collecting water and fuel for drinking and cooking, Brook began to build artworks using materials found on the island. So became her Firestack series, where she used rocks to build cairns on the shore, and wood to set fires in them as the tide came in. Eventually, the stacks toppled, and Brook captured the whole process on film.

“Brook’s Firestacks are works that we feel could have been made at any time in the past 5000 years, but they have had their pertinence refreshed by the current focus we are putting on the environment. When the tide comes in her artwork has to make its own case against the elements, just as we, in the age of dawning climate change, might still have to.” – Jonathan McAloon for Elephant Art

Firestack, Autumn: Aird Bheag, outer Hebrides, 2015.

We are extremely excited to host Brook at Arts of Place this summer. On the afternoon of 23^rd June, she will be running a practical drawing workshop for Arts of Place writers and readers. This free workshop will be a chance to explore form and emphasis in a different medium. You can read more about the workshop and reserve your place here.

Practical drawing with Julie Brook

Alexandra Harris on 02/06/2021

To celebrate the end of the first year of Arts of Place, we were thrilled to welcome leading land artist Julie Brook to a summer residency with us. Brook registers the infinite drama of the four elements and measures time on multiple scales. She has worked over many years in Libya, Namibia, Japan and Scotland, learning from local communities about the materials of the earth.

Julie ran a free Drawing Workshop on 23 June, 2-5pm and there was no artistic experience required! This was drawing for writers and readers, a chance to explore form and emphasis in a different medium. We worked with charcoal and swapping the usual A4 paper of our working lives for the expansiveness of A1. Julie provided special charcoal and rubbers for those who participate which were sent to participants in the post. It was a treat of an afternoon.

Here are a couple of the participants’ wonderful drawings from the workshop:

A huge thank you to @artsofplace and @BrookJules for an inspiring and fascinating workshop this afternoon. I gained so much from it and came away fired with enthusiasm!#drawing #sketch pic.twitter.com/2kxg9hiere
— Deborah Vass (@deborahjvass) June 23, 2021

Thanks to Bham research network @artsofplace for organising a wonderfully stimulating charcoal workshop with @BrookJules! pic.twitter.com/JsipAXhCKl
— Rachel Coombes (@r_coombes) June 23, 2021

*Untitled*. Jebel Acacus mountains (Julie Brook)

Cover image: Firestack. Outer Hebrides, Autumn 2016

An Oxfordshire Market Gardener

Jessica Fay on 23/05/2021

The Diary of Joseph Turrill of Garsington 1863-67

Edited by E. Dawson & S.R. Royal (Alan Sutton, 1993)

Recommended by Martin Stott

Joseph Turrill was a young man working as a market gardener in the Oxfordshire village of Garsington when he kept his diary. As a working-class lad, he experienced the landscape less through the views and more by what he could grow. His detailed observations of the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and what would sell, as well as the habits and quirks of his neighbours, customers, family and girlfriend, reflect a very different experience of life and locality from contemporary diarists such as Francis Kilvert in Clyro, or earlier natural historians such as Gilbert White in Selborne, let alone his neighbour in Garsington Manor, Lady Ottoline Morrell and the galaxy of literary stars that she entertained there. Whether it is the progress of a row of beans, gathering walnuts for pickling, or gardening by moonlight (’the parish lantern’) after a late shift in his mother’s pub, the diaries shed a fascinating and distinctive light on a much written about locality.

Diary of Joseph Turill

William Cowper, Art and Afterlife

Jessica Fay on 13/05/2021

William Cowper lived in and around Olney in Buckinghamshire from 1768 to 1795. It was here that he wrote Olney Hymns (1779) (with John Newton), Poems (1782), The Task (1785), and his translations of Homer. The poet’s experience of his immediate surroundings, his close attention to the natural world, and the importance he attached to domestic life gave particular energy and vision to his poetry.

On 3rd and 4th of September 2021, Arts of Place members Andrew Hodgson and Will Bowers hosted a conference at The Olney Centre, focused on Cowper’s career in verse. The event included a visit to the Cowper and Newton Museum where attendees toured Cowper’s home and the beautiful garden in which he worked.

‘William Cowper’ by George Romney (1792)

A range of papers explored formal and stylistic elements of Cowper’s writing (Gregory Leadbetter discussed the ‘exploded couplets’ of the blank verse of The Task; Samuel Diener examined warring lyric and narrative impulses in ‘The Cast-away’; Jessica Fay looked at Cowper’s handling of movement and stillness in the closed stanzas of the Hymns). There were also papers focused on Cowper’s critical heritage (Tim Fulford traced an association of ideas about church-bells from Cowper to Coleridge and the Wedgwood family; Alexandra Harris explored Virginia Woolf’s appreciation of Cowper’s ‘white fire’, while Andrew Hodgson read Cowper’s fear and dread through Donald Davie). Meanwhile, Will Bowers offered a paper on Cowper’s conception of time, Andrew Newell introduced Cowper’s ‘exegetical poetics’, and Tess Somervell presented Cowper as a key poet of the anthropocene.

The highlight of the conference was Fiona Stafford’s lecture on ‘Cowper’s Hare Care’. Cowper owned a number of pet hares but alongside an exploration of his personal attachment to these characterful animals, Stafford showed that a close reading of Cowper’s poetry can open up the extended literary heritage of the hare — a heritage that stretches from John Gay to Seamus Heaney.

The conference also included an informal discussion of the value of teaching Cowper’s poetry at a time when many of his preoccupations have renewed pertinence in the classroom.

Featured image: ‘William Cowper’ by George Romney (1792), National Portrait Gallery

The conference was supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies, British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Queen Mary University of London

Listen to Alex Harris and Kate McLoughlin talking about Cowper’s poetry here.

The Lives of Naturalists

Alexandra Harris on 16/03/2021

Richard Mabey on Gilbert White of Selborne, in conversation with Alexandra Harris

The Summer 2021 Weinrebe Lecture, presented as part of a new collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Available to listen here now.

Richard Mabey, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year, has been bringing people closer to the natural world since his first books Food for Free and The Unofficial Countryside delighted readers with their subversive outings to the hedgerows in the early 1970s. He is on the side of the weeds that refuse to be tidied; he takes his cues from the playfulness and conviviality of swifts; he gives us all a ticket to join the exuberant ‘cabaret’ of plants.

In this conversation, Mabey reflects on his work as a biographer, and particularly on his long relationship with the great eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White of Selborne.

“White is talking about the possibility of birds being parallel citizens”

“I was able to find specific colonies of plants at the precise addresses where White had seen them”

Arts of Place is extremely grateful to OCLW for hosting and producing this lecture recording.

Edward Thomas: Out of Place

Alexandra Harris on 28/02/2021

Monday Conversation, 19 April 2021, with Andrew Hodgson and Ralph Pite

“He handles the name Adelstrop as if he’s jiggling a key in a lock, expecting it to open up a feeling of connectedness”

Dr Andrew Hodgson (Birmingham) argued that, though Thomas is firmly associated with certain kinds of English landscape, his relationship to places is often deeply unsettled. Andrew read poems including Adelstrop and The Ash Grove as the work of a poet ‘out of place’, restlessly seeking forms for disconnection and doubt.

Professor Ralph Pite (Bristol) explored Thomas’s ‘terrestrial’ and ‘extra-terrestrial’ qualities – and the unpredictable relationship between them. Thomas emerged as a radical thinker, interested in non-proprietorial ways of belonging to the land.

“Thomas leads the conversation from a fanciful dream of escape, to disillusionment and world weariness, and after that pleasure in the everyday and he becomes therefore as perplexing a figure as the woman he meets…”

Collected Poems, 1956-2001

Jessica Fay on 24/02/2021

Thomas Kinsella (Wake Forest University Press, 2006)

Recommended by Trish Halligan

Thomas Kinsella (born 1928, Inchicore, Dublin) is a poet of the random and of restoration: ‘order’ is one of his most-used words, though he uses it in the sense of reconciliation rather than of restriction.

Kinsella came from a family of stone cutters and this inheritance somehow comes across in his writing: he puts shape to the stone but doesn’t always dress it. Similarly, his explorations of nature and his recollections of his native Dublin are neither bucolic nor nostalgic, and even more rarely are they consolatory. Kinsella often savagely satirises contemporary Dublin city planning, especially with reference to Ireland’s frequently catastrophic lack of conservation.

His other great recurring interest is the exploration of the physical similarities and differences across generations of his family. While his thoughts are often rooted in the sensuous and tactile (‘His Father’s Hands’, for example), he frequently describes hands which stroke, twist, clench and work, but which also touch to communicate when words fall short or as a silent assurance of trust. These poems are vivid fragments: they possess the quality of memories bursting upon the mind, like light cast into a room by a door suddenly thrown open.

Kinsella is not interested in tidiness or pat conclusions: there is rarely a sense of an ending in his work; even his later (much shorter) poems end by creating ripples of thoughts and evoke other times and places.