Through my progression of this course, I have been picking up threads of interest, which I have previously been unable to hold together on my own.
These threads have appeared in my mai 120/30/40/50 and I hope to coalesce them, to an appropriate extent, within my 170.
My recognised themes are:
| 120 | 130 | 140 | 150 |
| memory | memory | memory | |
| regionality | regionality | regionality | |
| unreliability | |||
| sense of place | sense of place | sense of place | sense of place |
| folkloric | folklore | folklore | |
| young person audience | |||
| play | |||
| identity | identity | ||
| material | material | ||
| transition | |||
| liminality | liminality | ||
| permeability | permeability | ||
| light and shadow | light and shadow | ||
| person/place – place/person | |||
| creative writing | creative writing | writing | |
| navigation | navigation | ||
| territory | territory |
PRACTICE
I would like to combine my attempts at creative writing and image making into a series of short stories, with personal or semi-autobiographical influences. They would work both singularly and as a cohesive piece. I am wondering about the potential ways these stories could connect – maybe conversing with each other, arguing – perhaps the connected thread is a puzzle in itself.
I aim to continue reading a psycho-geographic/ mytho-geographic text to inform my ideas around territory and the capabilities of the concept of reality in a place.
So far, The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald seems an informative text for my practice. His tangential style of language: stringing together non-linear moments, creating an atmosphere which rotates rather than points, is similar to what I found most interesting about mytho-geography. It is also of regional interest to be, being set in East Anglia. I keep thinking about what I would have been doing at the time of writing, and this is making me further invested in what could be described at times as a confusing narrative.
As a direct result of my practical ambitions, I would like to address the weight of authorship. A lot of my ideas come from visual memory, or perhaps a developed memory – sometimes this is hard to separate. They deal with real people, and I am aware of personal thoughts being subjective. I see the practices of Lynda Barry and Dominique Goblet being informative here.
CRITICAL PUBLICATION
This will be a continuation from my mai 150, where I spoke about mytho-geography in storytelling, as well as threads of inquiry from previous modules. I would like to look more broadly at geographically-informed/ inspired practices, where a site is informing the artwork (whether in real time or retrospectively) and how this contributes to that artist, or they have created for others, a sense of place.
I plan to point out the dominance of site-based walking being a pre-requisite to Situationist approaches, and furthermore, my inclination that there is more to place than this specification. If a broader version of the terms would be used, I can see this benefiting many types of audiences. For example, incorporating play to help young people and children who are experiencing transitional moments. I have come across several organisations who use psychogeographic techniques to encourage stability within people’s displaced lives.
I have looked briefly into the artist Adolf Wölfli who falls into the category of Art Brut and I am interested in how he created a whole world of his own despite living in a psychiatric hospital for most of his adult life.
