Further North conference, 4-5 September
Abstracts
Thurs 4. Sept.
10.30. Plenary, Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, ‘The North is Everywhere’, Lipman
031
11.30-12.50 . Strand 1. Questioning North – Lipman 032
Ursula Troche, Artist and Writer, Triptych Grids and Unconscious Beyonds: ‘Way Up North
country’
The theme ‘Further North’ echoes a performance poetry, prose and photo project in
progress I conceived in a ‘triptych grid’ , consisting of my journeys to Ireland,
Northumberland and Finland, in which notions of ‘stretching’, ‘reaching out’ and the ‘edges’
are central threads. The work also builds on previous explorations of different parts of
England’s North (and Scotland’s South), as well as around the North Sea, from a London
location with an east-west-German experience. My threads point to borderlands’ off-centre
and hidden margins, and from this standpoint (Mead, Lacan), I seek to explore dualities:
bridges versus walls, i.e. Hadrian’s Wall; Empires versus ‘Open country’. These dualities are
challenged with breaking silences, exploring the in-between (Ricoeur), and the unconscious
(Freud, Bion), forming a ‘triptych grid’ concept.
‘Northern gloom’ is compared with industrialisation, and the implications this has for the
centre-margin duality, thereby infusing an international, and intercontinental workers’
historical angle.
Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, ‘Gates of Heaven’
In this presentation, I examine the last landscapes of the pet cemetery. Liminal sites – or to
use a regional vernacular, “thin places” – where we bury our dead companion animals, give
a design to death, and a voice to loss. The audience will be transported to the Moray coast
of northeast Scotland, paying a visit to the country’s most remarkable example, and meeting
Stevie, its founder and animal undertaker. Having buried pets for twenty-five years, retired
street-sweeper and beachcomber Stevie can justifiably claim to have seen it all. His
northerly cemetery is pitched at the sea’s very edge, close enough to be encrusted with
sand and encroached upon by storms. It is a menagerie of remembered cats, dogs,
hamsters, tortoises, budgies, mice, ferrets, guinea pigs and goldfish. Akin to Gaudi’s Sagrada
Familia, the cemetery is an endlessly unfinished achievement, and all the more arresting for
it. Faced with an intensely storied site, I’ll report on doing landscape discovery and
exploration in miniature: touring the paths and plots; studying pet paraphernalia and
commemorative gravestones; striking up conversation with pet-keepers past and present;
listening to stories of afterlives and underworlds; and, revealing my family’s own tale of
connection to the site. A powerful portrait of place, intimacy and attachment emerges, and
a final argument: that it is animals that ultimately make us human.
David Martin Jones, University of Glasgow, ‘Where is Anywhere? Ideas of North, South, East
and West’
This work in progress seeks to open a dialogue with conference delegates regarding how the
idea of North functions, by placing it in relation to ideas such as the Global South, the
Rhizomatic West and the Orientalist East.
11.30-12.50 Strand 2. Questioning North, Lip. 033
Craig Richardson, University of Northumbria, ‘Broken North’
This paper is concerned with wilderness and desolation. It asks ‘How does Northern
‘emptiness’ function as a resource in the arts?’ It considers the formative context of key
works by post-war artists, writers and film-makers, in particular the journeys which led to
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Joseph Beuys’ Loch Awe Piece , and Thomas Struth’s
Edinburgh photographs from the series Unconscious Places; each informed by their author’s
perceptions of the North as naturally barren, socially deprived or simply uninhabited. The
suggestion is that the journey to an empty northern landscape always offers the opportunity
of a further North. However the North is a place of personal pilgrimage and arrival which has
no ‘beyond’, a place one need not go beyond. While a special function of the North is as a
space of art and as a resource in the arts, offering silence and withdrawal, its continued
representation by visitors prolongs and strengthens this idea. However what emerges can
be collectively represented in many ways, including as a ‘Broken North’.
Andrew Sneddon, Sheffield Hallam University & University of Edinburgh, ‘There’s no Place
like North’
However we think of north, the opposite is probably true. Kenneth White, in his geo-poetic
trilogy of lectures (North Atlantic Investigations, A Highland Reconnaissance and A sense of
High North) that later formed the book On The Atlantic Edge (2006) offers us the exact
latitudes of North; Near North 51°, Mid North 52°, Great North 58°-69°, Far North as 70°79°. However, I believe a sense of North is best explored through a non-scientific fashion
and more through an imaginative and creative register. This paper considers the idea of
north as a form of home and explores the imaginative power within a small piece of creative
writing by Roderick Buchanan called, The History of the World according to my Father
(2010). The paper also examines some similarities and differences between White and
Buchanan around notions of origin, displacement, myth and regionalism, ‘northernism’ and
the influence of home.
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, University of Cumbria, ‘ Ecologies of Uncertainty: the
Indeterminate North’
From a position of safety and familiarity there is often a longing and attraction in us,
towards that which is either unknown or simply beyond our control. The fear that prompts
us to protect ourselves can be seen as being one of the drivers behind the acquisition of
knowledge. But the need to bring everything into the realm of what is understood and
‘known’, has led us to cut ourselves adrift from exposure to things that whilst perceived as
‘problematic’ might also otherwise be enriching. Our insulation from environments beyond
our urban or agrarian control has robbed us of the know-how of how to be, not only in the
world, but also in ecological terms, with the world.
The paper will draw from a series of art projects by Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson and our
extensive art research activity in the north, (in Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard) in order to
articulate relations and distances between polar north, imagined and metaphoric north and
relative ‘UK north’ using interspecific tensions and the paradoxes of representation
Lunch 12.50-1.45
1.50-3.10 Artists, Ephemeral and Shifting North: Lip 031
John Wallace, Artist and filmmaker ‘‘Tweed-Sark Cinema’: An audio-visual study of place,
ecosystems and the meaning of ‘the border’’
Tweed-Sark Cinema is a collaboration between documentary filmmaker and video
artist John Wallace and Pete Smith, Royal Society-Wolfson Professor of Soils &
Global Change at the University of Aberdeen and member of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Tweed-Sark Cinema explore the explores the living
connections between people and the environment of the English-Scottish border along two
stretches where rivers form partof its length: In the west,the Sark; in the east,the Tweed
Alec Finlay, Artist and Poet, A reading from the artist’s ‘Out of books’
Sian Bowen, University of Northumbria, ‘Suspending the Ephemeral: Materiality and
Transience Through Drawing Practice’
The Nova Zembla collection of prints at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, extraordinary for
having lain frozen in the Arctic for three centuries, were used by Sian Bowen as a stimulus
for the investigation of the relationship between the materiality of drawing and the
ephemerality of museum objects on paper.
The prints were carried as merchandise on a 1596 failed Dutch expedition to the Far East via
the Northeast Passage. An over-wintering refuge was built on Nova Zembla in which the
prints lay in stacks until their discovery: the refuge had filled with ice, transforming the
stacks into frozen papier-maché blocks. In 1977 methods were devised to separate the
layers and reassemble the thousands of fragments. The physicality of the prints thus
underwent metamorphic change: from two-dimensional paper sheets to three-dimensional
hardened, blackened blocks and back again to paper. The Nova Zembla Prints played a
pivotal role for the artist in addressing the following: As paradigms of ephemeral objects on
paper, what models can the Nova Zembla prints provide for innovative modes of making
drawings in respect of the: distortion and fragmentation of their imagery; material
transformation of their paper supports; the impact of their conservation. In what ways can
these modes of drawing be developed to capture the ephemeral nature of museum objects
on paper?
This research project is being further developed through a number of visits Bowen has made
to Arkhangelsk Museum, Northern Russia, which houses several thousand objects found at
the site of Barents’ refuge. The paper will extend to consider the Northern (Arctic) Federal
University’s cooperation with the Northern Branch of Russian Federation Agency for
Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (ROSHYDROMET) and the establishment
of marine research and education expeditions aboard what has been called the “The Arctic
Floating University.” The aims of these expeditions which carry researchers, professors and
students to remote areas of the Arctic are to carry out complex interdisciplinary research of
the Arctic environment and to train young specialists in Arctic region. “The Arctic Floating
University” combines research and educational expeditions and opens a new sphere of
international cooperation.
1.50-3.10 Artists and Islands, Lipman 032
Murdo Macdonald, University of Dundee, 'A hesitation of the tide'; notes on islandness and
art’
My title comes from a poem by Gael Turnbull, 'An Irish Monk on Lindisfarne' in which he
meditates on islands, mainlands and cultures. This paper is an effort to do likewise. I note
here that island artists whether of our own day or earlier - like those who created the Book
of Kells on Iona or the gospels on Lindisfarne, or indeed like the prehistoric builders of the
Ring of Brodgar in Orkney or Calanais in Lewis - owe a signficant debt to their island
environment. Their art can be thought of as deeply ecological, to some degree with respect
to a bounded, sometimes literally cloistered sense of place, but just as importantly as key
parts of a wider global network of island defined connections. And not just a network of
islands, but of islands helping to define mainlands.
Tess Denman Cleaver, Newcastle University, Project R-hythm: Multiple centres of gravity in
performance practice and practice-led research
Working with residents of a small island community in the UK, Tess Denman Cleaver is using
performance making to interrogate notions of marginality in research practice and the
conceptions of knowledge and exchange that pervade current thinking around ‘knowledge
exchange’ and the study of the so called ‘collaborative turn’. Presentation of the
performance making process will aim to initiate a dialogue around how we articulate
situated knowing and the transience in this type of research when discussing the value of
participatory performance or the dynamics of collaboration across sectors, communities and
cultures. The purpose of presenting this research and project is to (re)claim and de-centre
the language and territory of knowledge exchange and consider an identified need to
acknowledge the agency of landscapes and people working in ‘marginal’ or ‘at edge’ spaces,
in order to redefine those spaces as anchored in their own unique centres of gravity. The
presentation will share aspects of the aforementioned island project, which is ongoing, as
well as thoughts on how practice-based research embedded in the work, contributes to the
development of new conceptions of knowledge and value, as emergent and embodied, that
have the potential to expand the borders of the current, narrowly conceived language of
knowledge exchange.
Fionagh Thomson, University of St Andrews, Starry Skies, Bengal Tigers & Saddam Hussein:
everyday land as experienced by young citizens in the Outer Hebrides at the beginning of the
21st Century.
This paper presents a methodological piece of work that developed an artist-in-residence
project with young citizens, framed within a wider ethnographic study, in the Outer
Hebrides. The young artists-in-residents began with the words ‘everyday land’ and were
invited to develop their own concept over five weekly workshops, mediated through
photography, walking the land, poetry, music and soundscapes. Most importantly the series
of workshops were framed by theories of critical and creative thinking (Lipman 1995 and
Bruner, 2001), with participants producing a final work of art in a medium of their choice.
Participants’ work moved across time and space, merging land, sea and sky (Ingold, Massey,
2001), incorporating war monuments and more contemporary aspects of culture and
politics. As one participant mused in the final workshop, elbow-deep in paint: ‘you know
when I started I thought it would be trees and stuff, but it’s much, much … more…”
3.10-3.30 Tea
3.30 – 4.50 Liminal Practices. Lip. 031
Daniel Lee & Antonia Thomas, Orkney College, University of the Highlands and Islands,
‘A journey through time and space on Papa Westray: experimental mapping and placemarking at the northern edge of Orkney’
Over the past two years, we have been archaeologists-in-residence at Papay Gyro Nights, an
international contemporary arts festival held annually on the island of Papa Westray,
Orkney. Our fieldwork has focussed upon walking and journeying to explore the dynamic
between past and present in the landscape and our own role in creating place and space.
This has involved an interactive GPS mapping and walkover project, and collaborative work
with artist Tonje Boe Birkeland. We have also been investigating the movement of materials
which make up art installation pieces and considering the more ephemeral and intangible
residues of the island’s heritage. By linking contemporary archaeology and contemporary
art through an experimental geography, our project subverts the usual methods and
processes of archaeological survey. Through our mapping practices, different timescales
become entangled, blurring the boundary between archaeologist and artist, real and
imaginary, and past and present. The project has questioned the nature of a residency for
archaeologists and highlighted the expectations and tensions inherent within such an
engagement. This has caused us to challenge our own preconceptions of archaeological field
practice and develop new ways of ‘doing’ contemporary landscape archaeology. This paper
discusses our activities during the residency and reflects upon some of the emerging themes
from this work-in-progress.
Robert Jefferson and Ian Cottage, University of Northumbria, ‘Filming the liminal, uncanny
atmosphere on screen’
Two filmmakers whose recent work has explored the notion of haunted film and uncanny
auras through the explicit foregrounding of location as a liminal space into which narrative
merges with atmosphere here present and articulate the ideas underpinning their work. Ian
Cottage’s films KEEL and THE FERNS are ‘ghost’ stories in that nature itself is haunting us as
a sea of ferns or the sea itself. Robert Jefferson’s animation THE DEVIL’S NIGHT GLASS
indicated the return of the repressed through the James Hogg folktale THE LONG PACK, and
his new work derives its power from relics of the industrial past; the Blue Streak site at
Spadeadam and the inside of the Tyne Bridge, investigating the temenos with in-screen
cameras and a laser mapper. Here, architecture becomes the site of the threshold.
As colleagues in film production, the pair have collaborated on soundtracks that explore
similar aural themes.
Gina Wall, University of Highlands and Islands, ‘Spectral traces: Photography, futurity and
landscape’
My recent publication ‘Ghost writing: photographing (the) spectral north’ (2013) is a
practice-led enquiry into specific wartime sites in Scotland (Hoxa Head in Orkney and Lossie
Forest in Moray), unregulated northern spaces in which the past irrupts the present,
challenging our experience of the present as cohesive. It is my contention that photography
is a kind of ghost writing which, following Derrida, is essentially spectral. This writing figured
as a disruption of self-identity and self-presence is a hauntology par excellence. Fieldwork
and reading has led me to think quite differently about photographic practice. Accounting
for photography as a kind of ghost writing has required consideration of the possible futures
of the images that I make, and, ultimately, to regard photography as an anticipatory
practice. Here photography is a practice in search of futures which hover in the landscape
around us, only to be inscribed as images of the past which come back and come back again
to freely haunt the present. Questions for this paper include: Does photography’s peculiar
relation to time make it a particularly appropriate medium to capture the spectrality of
particular landscapes? Does photography give landscape a mechanism through which to
declare its layered self? How might we begin to theorise the way in which latencies of the
future are articulated by photographic images?
3.30-4.50 Climate, atmosphere and affect, Lipman 032
Oliver Moss, University of Northumbria, "Meteorological Imaginations: Towards
geographies of affective practices of weather, atmospherics and landscapes"
Mostly unaccounted for in philosophical treatises on the natural environment - largely on
account of its enmity to the notion of life as grounded and emergent upon a pre formed
static surface - weather exerts a nevertheless profound influence on the way we perceive
and understand the world; affecting our bodies, our moods, our behaviours – even the
structure of our environments. This paper, drawing on fieldwork carried out with more than
fifty landscape artists living and operating in the North East of England and the Scottish
Borders, aims to highlight weather’s particular profile within the field of arts practice. First,
it considers the ways in which weather is anticipated and sensed by landscape artists –
visually, haptically and intersensorally. Second, it explores the ways in which weather is
leveraged and harnessed for artistic ends. And third, it sets out to trace weather’s suffusion
through and between materials, bodies and spaces.
Judy Spark, Robert Gordon University, ‘Seeing without Light: Considering Darkness’
The tendency of the contemporary western human on encountering darkness, is to banish it
with light. Indeed, in the northern latitudes, the long hours of darkness can have a severe
impact on humans who need sunlight in order to maintain physical and mental health. This
paper takes the form of a phenomenological exploration of northern light and its receding
levels, seeking to explore other potential understandings of darkness. Drawing upon
Maurice Merleau Ponty’s concept of the Flesh as well as the Buddhist notion of emptiness,
the work will reveal darkness as a vital part of experience beyond the simple absence of
light that it is generally and negatively taken to be. It will be shown that any shift towards a
position of cultural responsiveness and acceptance, in terms of environmental conditions
and/or constraints such as darkness, could create opportunity for alternative ways of
knowing and, it follows, seeing.
Kaisa Schmidt-Thomé & Jenni Kuoppa Aalto University, Finland, ’Inhabiting waterscapes –
’Knowing from inside’ accessed by triangulation of place-based methods?’
As Tim Ingold puts it, environment becomes part of us through the practice of habitation. In
the in-habited world there are no objects of perception but continuous formation of both
environment and us. John Wylie has written about the unfolding of landscapes as something
we see with, and, in this spirit, we wish to share our work on waterscapes. One source is an
ongoing project on geobiographies, taking a life-course perspective on habitation. Another
source is a project addressing access to water elements (sea, lake and river shores) in
Helsinki region, Finland. In a country of thousands of lakes and islands the population might
have a developed sensibility in this respect. On the other hand, the habituality of relating
with the water might hide the allurement, which reveals itself only when the access to
shores becomes questioned. We will discuss some findings derived from triangulation
between interviews (on lifecourse perspective) and ’softGIS’-data (map-based information
collected from citizens with an online questionnaire). We will also consider the potential of
walking interviews to approach the continuous unfolding of waterscapes in the context of
people’s water-related habits.
5.00 Plenary, Tim Edensor, Manchester Metropolitan University, ‘Experiencing Light and
Dark in Northern Landscapes’, Lipman 031
Friday 5th Sept
9.30 Plenary, Jane Downes, University of the Highlands and Islands; ‘Does the sea snake
have agency: Pondering seascape as assemblage in Orkney’, Lipman 031
10.20-12.00 Mapping practices 1, Lipman 031
Christopher Donaldson, University of Birmingham, ‘Write off the Map: Literature at Margins
of the English Lakes’.
Tourist maps of the Lake District rarely feature the region’s maritime terrain. Yet the
network of estuaries, inlets and marshes that girts half the district forms one of its most
dynamic, and economically significant, environs. For centuries these intertidal waterways
and sand-ways have served not only as natural lines of defence, but also as lines of
communication linking the Lakes with Lancashire to the south and Dumfries and Galloway to
the north. The liminality of this littoral zone is reinforced by its literary heritage, which
comprises an array of 19c and 20c writers whose works stand at variance with many of our
received ideas about the literature and culture of the Lakes region. Drawing on research
done under the ERC-funded Spatial Humanities project, this paper makes the case for the
significance of this alternative Lakeland canon, focusing on writing about three key
locations: the Solway, the Duddon Sands and Barrow-in-Furness.
Lesley Harrison, Writer, ‘Middle ice’: borders and border zones’.
In my poetry I experiment with the language of place, exploring how language creates place
and how people build and furnish their world through language. On the east coast of
Scotland we are subject to the cold, dry winds coming down from the north. This dictates
settlement and movement, the colour of the skies and our habits of thought. I am reading
archived documents from the whaling industry, using elements to make poems which I hope
reflect our subconscious awareness that we live at the farthest edges of a much larger,
colder world, and our sense of apprehensiveness in looking north.
Our local landscape is definitively shape by the last Ice Age and the aquifiers and waterways
left by the retreating ice. Walking the course of these waterways is enabling me to recreate
the various ‘word-worlds’ of these rivers. In this paper I discuss walking methodology, and
the presence and impact of the northern climate in creating our particular sense of place.
Clare Money, University of Northumbria, ‘Mapping the Liminal: Post-Industrial Landscapes
of the North East’
Shafts (dis), Drift, Chimney (track of), Mine Workings (Disused), Drift, Dismantled Railway,
Quarries (dis), Lime Kilns (Disused), Drift, Settlement (site of), Airshaft, Drift, Tower (remains
of), Drift.
Perhaps more than any other region of England, the North East embraces the memory of an
industrial past, yet, the abandoned post-industrial site is arguably the least valued and most
transient of all landscapes. Whilst lingering remnants (dis)are evidenced by the Ordnance
Survey, attaching a recorded date to a trace of history, the meaning of these sites becomes
opaque over time. If we acknowledge that places exist in multiple realities, that the past
continually informs the present and that the present is incessantly overwritten, then how
might we tell of these liminal places? As Shanks and Pearson say, ‘There never was a then
for this place: it is now, was then and all points in between,’ (Shanks and Pearson 2001:167).
10.20-12.00 Remaking Places: through representations, Lipman 032
Lee Barron, University of Northumbria, ‘The Prose Edda, Heavy Metal Style:
Amon Amarth and the Musical Representation of Norse Culture’
This paper argues that a consistent contemporary cultural evocation of historical
and mythological northerness is evocatively manifested within the Extreme
Metal music and imagery of the Swedish band, Amon Amarth. Formed in Tumba,
Sweden, in 1992, through a series of album releases such as Once Sent from the
Golden Hall (1998), Fate of Norns (2004), With Oden on Our Side (2006), Twilight
of the Thunder God (2008), Surtur Rising (2011), and Deceiver of the Gods (2013)
the band have consistently explored and articulated Norse heritage through
their lyrics and imagery. The paper explores the ways in which the band have
chronicled and represented northern culture, producing a body of work based
exclusively upon representations of Viking tradition, custom, myth, and
cosmology, and often retelling key events from Snorri Sturluson’s The Prose Edda
(produced in 1220 AD) within the idiom of contemporary heavy metal music. The
paper will thus argue that in the emphasis upon historic and mythic northern
traditions, Amon Amarth represent a potent Northern cultural example of Yi-Fu
Tuan’s now-classic conception of topophilia, that emotive conception of the
“affective bond between people and place or setting”.
Chris Dorsett, University of Northumbria, ‘Re-situating the gallery farther south’
Julian Rosefeldt’s installation Asylum projects nine films of diasporic Berlin (e.g. museum
cleaners and hospital catering staff, apparently of southern origin) onto free-hanging
screens in a single darkened gallery. When hosted by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
(2004), the viewer’s cinematic immersion was punctuated by built-in pauses in the
projections that drew attention away from the aesthetic cohesion of Rosefeldt’s filmmaking
to the physical space in which Asylum was installed. During each pause visitors to Baltic
momentarily found themselves in an environment that was, for all they knew, cleaned each
night by migrant workers with a southern ‘otherness’ that contrasted starkly with the
emblematic northernness of their location. Re-situating the gallery farther south, the
second in a series of conference interventions organised by Dorsett, interrupts audience
reception, and breaks down the coherence of concepts such as north and south, in order to
explore the relationship between political complicity and contemporary art practice.
Lisa Taylor, Leeds Metropolitan University, “I’m so overjoyed he’s come back”: painting and
affective engagements with place in David Hockney’s landscape painting ‘A Bigger Picture’
David Hockney has been described as, ‘the most famous British living painter’. His exhibition
‘A Bigger Picture’ shown at the RCA in Spring 2012 was comprised mostly of landscapes of
his native East Yorkshire. Critics testified to an especially emotional reaction to the work:
Paul Morley, an avowedly Northern cultural commentator described feeling ‘moved to
tears’ as he entered the gallery.
In this paper I explore how a group of people from Yorkshire respond to his recent
landscape work. Based on a small-scale empirical study of 15 people who know and feel a
sense of engagement with ‘Bigger Picture’ pieces, and drawing on writers working within
‘emotional geographies’ (Bondi et. al., 2007), I argue that specific places summon or evoke
particular affective responses (Smith, 2007). ‘To experience place,’ Duff (2010) asserts, ‘is to
be affected by place’ (881). Here I attend to the ‘felt and affective dimensions’ (Duff, 881)
encased in people’s responses to Hockney’s paintings. Drawing on the voices of my
respondents the paper has two concerns. The first, the importance of Hockney’s prodigal
return to East Yorkshire which I argue has had a powerful emotional impetus for my
respondents: it values the north - a place that several people of the study believe has been
denigrated in the popular national imaginary (Kohl, 2007; Rawnsley, 2000; Russell, 2004).
Secondly, using Casey’s (2010) notion of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places, which attempts to account
for the depth of affective investment the self makes in encounters with places of the
everyday. ‘Thin’ locales lack memory or substance; while ‘thick’ places are richly meaningladen and heavily imbued with affect, recollection, a sense of belonging and are made by
the recursive need to re-visit. I ask how far practices of art engagement become a form of
place-making. I found that for some respondents certain works act as particularly resonant
sites of emotional pull. In this way, Hockney’s works offer an especially fecund engagement
with art and its relationship to the north, giving my respondents a particular sense of the
purchase of place.
10.20-12.00 Remaking Places: through planning and heritage, Lipman 033
Leanne Philpott, University of Cambridge, ‘Narratives of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in
North West England: Museums, heritage and docklands tourism’
During the eighteenth century, maritime trades such as the transatlantic slave trade led to
the tremendous growth of port towns in North West England. Liverpool, Whitehaven and
Lancaster became vastly wealthy as a result of their involvement with the trade in enslaved
peoples. Yet, the decline of this mercantile period and the subsequent decline of industrial
investment during the twentieth century has left these ports quite literally ‘high and dry’.
Heritage is increasingly seen as a way to regenerate these ailing Northern dockland areas.
This regeneration often utilizes ‘mercantile’ heritage (such as warehouses, dry-docks and
customs buildings) to create waterside cultural environments which appeal to tourists
through complex sets of semiotic resources (for example, nautical paraphernalia). However,
this historic-economic relationship becomes problematic when the transatlantic slave trade
is recognised as being an unavoidable part of this heritage narrative. This paper will examine
two North West ports (Liverpool and Whitehaven) to establish the complex ways in which
narratives of the slave trade are utilized during the ‘heritagization’ process of dockland
areas. To do this, I will analyse the ways in which narratives of the slave trade are
reciprocally constructed between museums and the wider heritagescape of the dockland
areas. I will discuss the difficult negotiations which take place between museum agents,
communities and tourism chiefs, and analyse the dissonance which can occur between
discursive museum narratives and non-discursive narratives of the wider heritagescape of
the port. On a more theoretical level, I will draw upon discussions of narrative as a dialogical
‘tool’ (Wertsch 2002) for constructing networks of meanings in museums and heritage sites.
Ultimately, this paper will highlight the complexity of the relationship between tourism,
museums and heritage-led regeneration, and will discuss the complex web of narratives that
weave together the dissonant threads of docklands heritage in the North West.
Louise Thody, Edinburgh College of Art, ‘‘Broon Dog’ in Space: Future Re-imaginings of
Newcastle upon Tyne embodied in Newcastle Brown Ale’.
This paper speculates on cultural, economic and physical futures of Newcastle upon
Tyne embodied in a material artifact Newcastle Brown Ale (NBA). Today, NBA is a
leading beer brand in America. Its current US advertising campaign uses Newcastle's
heritage as an industrialised city to promote the beer to 'hipsters'. Drawing on Future
Studies and Material Culture Studies, future cultural constructions of Newcastle
and cultural appropriations of NBA are forecasted and considered.
Looking 'further' north, questions of the growth of global capitalism and climate change
become unavoidable. NBA’s production may shift to emerging capitalist countries, such
as China, and Newcastle's identity will become embedded in the global cultural
imagination and its flagship beer an international super brand.
A preferable future for NBA could end negative representations of Newcastle and we
may celebrate its new status as an economic and cultural superpower. With the coming
of the 'Great Floods' and the sinking of London, Newcastle could even become the
capital of England.
Robert Davies, Edinburgh College of Art, ‘Development’
My paper is based on two bodies of photographic work, which has been mapping two
northern landscapes over the past three years.
Development is the mapping of the regeneration of Edinburgh’s coastal communities, which
are replacing historical industries such as fishing and freight with new coastal villages, which
have stalled due to the economic global crash.
This is juxtaposed with a photographic work on the coastal region of Teesside entitled
Carbon Coast, which maps the unique peninsular of South Gare where traditional industries
such as steel making are seen alongside the new technologies of wind farms.
Lunch 12.00-12.40
12.45 Plenary: Owain Jones, Bath Spa University: ‘Northern Isles as alternative narratives
of becoming modern’, Lipman 031
1.30 – 3.00 Mapping Practices 2, Lipman 032
Mike Collier, University of Sunderland, ‘Mapping the North: Collaborative and
conversational meanders’.
Over the last three years I have embarked on a series of collaborative art-walking projects
with natural historians, photographers, writers, sound artists and members of the public
across a range of landscapes of the North of England (Field Notes – A Walk up the Tyne and
the North Tyne – From Sea to Source; in Temperley’s Tread – a 45 mile walk across the
Durham Uplands in the footsteps of renowned natural historian George Temperley; Street
Flowers – Urban Survivors of the Privileged Land – a series of walks around the Edgelands of
Sunderland and Walking through the Sands of Time: A Walk Along the Sefton Coastal
Footpath. All these projects linked science and art to local issues, exploring new, embodied,
ways of engaging with, and creating a sharper understanding of, the impact of change on
the fragile eco-systems of our landscapes. They aim to help us to explore and rethink our
approaches to the environment in the 21st century in ways that address the emotional as
well as the scientific approach to perceiving and understanding the landscape. It is my belief
that we need to encourage both the scientific and the emotional responses to a locality to
properly engage people in a positive understanding of their environment. I aim, therefore,
to take participants in these walks on a learning journey towards a deeper understanding of,
and a more active involvement in, the land (urban and rural), from a landscape, cultural and
biodiversity perspective. My paper draws together the ‘findings’ of these projects and
evaluates their successes and failures.
Kieran Baxter, Dr John Was, Dr Aaron Watson and Alice Watterson, University of Dundee,
‘Approaching Links of Noltland: Using analogies of travel and arrival to visualise a remote
prehistoric settlement’.
Links of Noltland is a prehistoric settlement site located in Westray, on the northern
periphery of the Orkney archipelago. Exposed and endangered by wind-blown sands, the
site has been the focus of rescue excavations since 2006. The location of Links of Noltland is
key to both its current day character and its archaeological interpretation. This poses
significant challenges for the interpretative visualisation of the site for a public audience.
A multi-disciplinary collaboration between four practitioners has combined approaches
from archaeology, digital media art, low altitude aerial photography and sound design to
address these challenges through the creative application of visualisation tools. The
resulting time-based outcome will use analogies of travel and arrival to explore how the
visitor's experience is received through movement, and to follow a transition from the
macrocosm as seen by an outsider, to an insider's view of the site's microcosm.
Paul Smith, Glasgow School of Art, ‘The Meaning in Making’
This research explores what being able to make things means to people in remote or edge
communities and the role new digital fabrication technologies could have in geographically
isolated areas. Looking at specific places, it documents the history of making in forming
identity, the role it plays in creating sustainable communities and how the future of making
could be shaped by new digital technologies.
This project takes a documentary crew and a mobile digital fabrication lab (digi-lab) to the
north of Scotland, documenting what making means to people in remote communities and
their reaction to a pop up digi-lab. The project elucidates the meaning in making and how
new technologies could unlock creativity in extreme locations and be a resource for a
sustainable community.
1.30-3.00 ‘Lab North’, Lipman 033
Michael Mulvihill, artist, ‘The gaze of the ultra-city: the military territorialisation of northern
peripheries’.
Had the Cuban Missile Crisis triggered World War III the North Sea would have been one of
the first domains to enter action. Hundreds of RAF Vulcan and Soviet strategic bombers may
have become embroiled as they massed over the North Sea to begin their nuclear bomb
runs. Even today Russian nuclear armed Blackjack bombers test the United Kingdom’s
defensive response over that sea, which remains geopolitically contested (despite
economically friendly neighbours) after centuries of international conflict. I present a survey
of my recent art work making visible the hidden, but intensively active geo-military domains
across the Northern landscape. These domains, from the vast and permanently locked
airspace over RAF Spadeadam to the space-bound gaze of RAF Fylingdale under supervision
of the USAF 21st Space Wing challenge our perceptions of the everyday as well as notions of
the remote and empty.
Louise Senior, University of Aberdeen, ‘Flows of Influence: Exploring the ‘place’ of Caithness
through the lens of renewable energy’.
Caithness is becoming central to a burgeoning Scottish renewables industry. As electricity
transmission networks are transformed to carry energy towards areas of high population,
people note the imposition of technology designed to take power away from the north, and
ask ‘what benefit for us?’ Some see an opportunity for autonomy; others see control over
local decision-making flowing away south, along with the energy and profits. This draws our
attention to people’s sense of place within a globalised energy environment. Are they
central to this process, or peripheral? Are they donors, or recipients? How do they
(dis)connect themselves with others implicated in the project of renewable energy? What
notions of time, space, aesthetics and identity do people draw on to legitimise their
position? As people become entangled in this process, creating networks of influence that
extend beyond county boundaries, it seems inadequate to conceptualise a place as either
central or marginal. Following Ingold, I illustrate that they are better understood as part of a
relational process, a point to which flows of influence are directed towards AND emerge
from.
Laura Harrington, artist, ‘Uplands – as higher points of consciousness – out of sight out of
mind’.
How can we change people’s thinking and relationship to higher grounds –to
appreciate that their own life is directly connected to and affected by these
solitary, often bleak but important landscapes? How can creative practices in the widest
sense provide or assist in better understanding these important places and the challenges
we now face in understanding their significance in the mitigation of climate change?
Uplands or moorlands are usually the source; a place to start where nature is typically
working on a simple and basic level. We have learnt a lot by observing their mechanics.
These seemingly remote or ‘natural’ places have been altered and affected naturally and
from human influence for the last 10,000 years. As we face new environmental challenges
having a better understanding of these elevated lands from a scientific and cultural angle
will assist in the challenges we now face.
This paper will bring together current research from a Leverhulme Artist Residency where I
workalongside physical geographer Dr Jeff Warburton at Durham University and his
research around eroded peatlands in the North Pennines.
CLOSING RECEPTION