Vickery, V., 2015. 'Beyond painting, beyond landscape: working beyond the frame to unsettle representations of landscape'. GeoHumanities, 1(2), pp.321-344.
In this article I reflect on an art practice-based project that I have been working on in response to a particular landscape in the far west of Cornwall that was subject to a violent storm and flash flood in 2009. Landscape studies in geographical discourse have a long history of engaging with critiques of representation that focus on the power of the frame to conflate the culturally and politically constructed image of landscape with a substantive material and embodied form of knowing. Parallel developments within art discourse have shifted from a consideration of the form and essence of the art object to thinking about the troubled, uncomfortable operations of images and the generative work that art does. As such, both landscape and image could be described as provisional and generative, involving troubled subjectivities; both could be said to operate through processes of dissemblance, instability, and ambiguity that perform across and between frames. In light of such critiques, how might a visually orientated arts practice (understood in a materialist, embodied, and emergent sense) function amidst the aporetic hauntings and dissonant conditions found in this landscape?
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