Edgelands & Outliers
Class #3 – ‘Edgelands’
Justin Hopper - Contact info
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Email: justin.p.hopper@gmail.com
Phone: 07860 677 007
Twitter: @oldweirdalbion
Web: jackdawshivers.com
Environment Writing Exercise
(optional)
• Following Patrick Keiller’s lead in
Robinson in Ruins, find a local patch of
‘nature’ – whether that be a wooded area
full of flowers or a single weed growing in
a car park
• Write two short passages or poems
examining this ‘nature’ in the most:
– Macro way possible
– Micro way possible
Patrick Keiller – Robinson in Ruins
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgCb
Mv6jH1c
Environment Writing Exercise
(optional)
• Following Patrick Keiller’s lead in
Robinson in Ruins, find a local patch of
‘nature’ – whether that be a wooded area
full of flowers or a single weed growing in
a car park
• Write two short passages or poems
examining this ‘nature’ in the most:
– Macro way possible
– Micro way possible
Last week’s assignment:
Edgelands Writing Exercise
(optional)
• Find a space near you, or which you
encounter in your travels during the week,
that one might consider an ‘edgeland’
• Write two short pieces of poetry or prose
describing this place:
– In terms of non-visual senses
– As a chalk outline; description by absence
Questions
• What are edgelands? Where might we find
them – in our environment, and in
artworks?
Questions
• What are edgelands? Where might we find
them – in our environment, and in
artworks?
• How can such edgelands operate to give
us a different perspective on our
surroundings – in our art, writing, lives?
Questions
• What are edgelands? Where might we find
them – in our environment, and in artworks?
• How can such edgelands operate to give us a
different perspective on our surroundings – in
our art, writing, lives?
• How are artists tackling Edgelandia in
contemporary art? Can we see signs of it in
‘classic’ landscape artworks?
Edgelands
Paul Farley &
Michael Symmons Roberts
Anyone who has spent a childhood mooching around the
fringes of [our] English towns and cities, where urban
and rural negotiate and renegotiate their borders, might
have come up with the word "edgelands".
If you know those places where overspill housing estates
break into scrubland; wasteland. If you know this
underdeveloped, unwatched territory, you know that they
have "edge". We might have come up with it ourselves,
but geographer Marion Shoard got there first.
In English we have an abundance of words to account
for the variety of landscapes on our doorstep; in our built
environment. Hopefully, we can help introduce one more
into circulation.
So much might depend on being able to see the
edgelands. Giving them a name might help, because
up until now they have been without any signifier, an
incomprehensible swathe we pass through without
regarding; untranslated landscape.
And edgelands, by and large, are not meant to be
seen, except perhaps as a blur from a car window, or
as a backdrop to our most routine and mundane
activities.
Everyone knows – after a sentence or two of
explanation – their local version of the territories
defined by this word "edgelands".
But few people know them well, let alone
appreciate them.
The book we wrote together is an attempt to
celebrate these places; to break out of the
duality of rural and urban landscape writing;
to explore these unobserved parts of our
shared landscape as places of possibility,
mystery, beauty.
Brian Dillon on Patrick Keiller
‘A poet of blank statistics – in person, he can talk at
length about patterns of land use in suburban Oxford or
the hidden flourishing of Britain's ports – and a
connoisseur of built dullardry: nostalgic housing estates,
defunct factories, centripetal supermarkets.
(Take up an invitation to view locations from his new film,
and he will drive you to the car park at his local Lidl.) But
he is also a genuine, if ironised, seer: a follower of Walter
Benjamin's call (in his 1929 essay "Surrealism") for a
"profane illumination" of mundane existence.’
Keith Arnatt
Keith Arnatt
Keith Arnatt
Iain Sinclair on Robinson in Ruins
“In Robinson in Ruins those moments of
staring, that kind of seizure where everything
stops and there is no music, no armature to
hold you up, is a true challenge to conditioned
cultural reflexes … you’re in there, and you’re
staring at a tractor going up and down a field
for quite a long time, you’re staring at spiders’
webs. And suddenly I realised that there was a
connection here with J.G. Ballard … :
‘Time itself, bundling us headlong towards
destinations of its own choice, had begun to
loosen its grip. A day would last as long as I
chose. Leaving my typewriter, I could spend an
hour watching a spider build its web. On my
walks by the river I stood among the elms and
waited for time to calm itself, listening to its
measured breath as it settled itself over the
forest. I recognised the mystery and beauty of a
leaf, the kindness of trees, the wisdom of light.’
On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s
Voice Gramophone Factory
- George Orwell, 1934.
As I stand at the lichened gate
With warring worlds on either hand –
To left the black and budless trees,
The empty sties, the barns that stand
Like tumbling skeletons – and to right
The factory-towers, white and clear
Like distant, glittering cities seen
From a ship’s rail – as I stand here,
I feel, and with a sharper pang,
My mortal sickness; how I give
My heart to weak and stuffless ghosts,
And with the living cannot live.
The acid smoke has soured the fields,
And browned the few and windworn
flowers;
But there, where steel and concrete soar
In dizzy, geometric towers –
There, where the tapering cranes sweep
round,
And great wheels turn, and trains roar by
Like strong, low-headed brutes of steel –
There is my world, my home; yet why
So alien still? For I can neither
Dwell in that world, nor turn again
To scythe and spade, but only loiter
Among the trees the smoke has slain.
Jason Orton
Keith Arnatt
Keith Arnatt
Keith Arnatt
Zombie Landscapes
Jock McFadyen
Jock McFadyen
Mekons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH-gDKwD1kU
A hornet's nest lies on the track
It's half formed larvae scattered
A workers cottage broken down
And left in shambles
…
High in the ferns I find a scull
I see the flashing shadows
Jet fighters swooping loud and low
Rehearse for Armageddon
You don't have to believe in the end
You have to believe this is the end
(I ramble)
This is the end
(I ramble)
Paul Smith
George Shaw
George Shaw
Laura Oldfield Ford
Leah Fusco
Leah Fusco
Cyprien Gaillard
Cyprien Gaillard
Turner