Research as Correspondence - celebrating nature

Hello all,I need to apologise as when I previously posted a finished blog post the other day I accidentally deleted it again, and no amount of checking internet cache files has saved it. So this is an attempt at re-writing it, hopefully with more clarity.Lesson learned - always back up your blog posts.Enjoy.


This summer has been a fairly quiet one. After finishing my BA, I have spent the majority of it working in a part-time job that seemed to become full time, with short breaks for exploring the wilds of Britain with my family and going on walks with myself and my friends. But I've been feeling restless creatively.I have just moved in to a new studio on the Barbican in Plymouth and I've been so excited to get stuck in with creating new work. So far I have spent the majority of my time cleaning the place out from dust and repainting the walls since the last artist moved to elsewhere in the studio, but I have managed a couple of sessions in there working on some monoprints and large works with ink on canvas based on preparatory drawings.But I have been trying to think about what it is that I am going to aim towards with my postgraduate research. I know what I find interesting in terms of subject matter - domes, lines in architecture, lines in nature, insects in flight, the shape of branches, the texture of rocks, water in any form and long grasses breaking the stillness of the surface. Natural environments and finding those shapes recreated in the urban environment. The juxtaposition of those elements and combining them into a pallimpsest of imagery that allows the viewer to discover their own place in this strange landscape. What I have been struggling with is how this can be seen as research? When I go out in to nature or the city, armed with a camera, a sketchbook and some charcoal, what am I doing to try and find an answer for what conclusion? The pressure of enrolling on a postgraduate course for me is to think that I now need to have a complete set of criteria for my research and I must know exactly what I plan to do with it once I've got it.One thing that has really helped to clarify my thinking was the summer project given for the MA in Drawing, part a being to read an article written by Tim Ingold entitled 'Anthropology Between Art and Science: An Essay on the Meaning of Research'. In this text, Ingold is talking about anthropology as a bridge between art and science based on the styles of research - scientific being conducting tests repeatedly to confirm an answer you thought you already had, and artistic being the act of re-searching for something, going and studying your subject again and again in the knowledge that things will not be the same twice. This is of course a simplification of what he was saying and if you have the time, I really encourage you to go and read it for yourself.I am going to attach some snippets from the essay that I feel were most influential as I read through it all, and hopefully this should illustrate how research could be done or at least how it could be thought about for my artistic practice. Where the ellipses appears (...) I have omitted certain sections of the paragraph, and this is simply to avoid over-saturating the reader's experience and to keep key parts that best illustrate my thinking.

"A few years ago I attended a symposium on perception and exploration, held in a small town in the Scottish Highlands... The hillwalkers and the artists spoke with enthusiasm about their exploration of the highlands, following familiar tracks and trails. Immersed as they were in the landscape, they found in it a source of perpetual astonishment... There was always something to catch one's attention, and to pursue further."But when it was the  mountaineer's turn to speak, it was with a tone of unmistakeable regret... How could it be, I wondered as I listened to his speech, that while the hillwalkers and artists could keep on exploring, without end, the mountaineer was convinced that it was all over?""Evidently, they were relating to their environment in very different ways. To the mountaineer, the world presents itself as a terra incognito, already laid out in perpetuity and awaiting the footprint of man. With that final step on the summit, the previously unknown peak is converted into one that is known: it is "discovered" and placed on the map ... of course, the same peak could be climbed again and again, but in the mountaineer's book, every climb is a repeat performance that adds nothing to the original discovery." "This, however, is to assume that the mountain remains forever as it was... For artists and hillwalkers, however, the landscape of exploration is anything but constant. ...every walk is different – a particular going along together of human lives with the lives of plants and animals, with the formation of rocks and stones, with the weather and with the hills themselves. For walkers immersed in this ever-changing landscape, the idea that a hill climbed once is climbed forever is simply absurd."

At this point,  I realised that the artist is constantly researching as they are literally re searching for something. I am always re searching. Simply by going over the same pathway, for example walking along the estuary by Saltram House, I have been re looking, re seeing, re drawing, re experiencing the same space, and it has indeed changed each time. This is the basis for a series of art works in itself. 

"In its literal sense, research is a second search, an act of searching again. To search again is not to repeat, exactly, what you did before, under identical conditions. For every search not only doubles up on your previous intervention, but also makes an original intervention that invites a double in its turn. Between one search and the next there is always a differential. It’s like walking the same path, or climbing the same hill, over and over. ... The mountain, as we have seen, is never the same twice. But you press on undeterred, driven by a desire that seems as insatiable, and indeed as imperative, as the will to live. You call it curiosity." "Research, then, is not a technical operation, a particular thing you do in life, for so many hours each day. It is rather a way of living curiously – that is, with care and attention. As such, it pervades everything you do. But what are you looking for, that so evades your grasp? "At this point, Ingold refers to truth as the object of what all research aims to discover or find. The scientific style of research seems to find the facts and say that there is no more to discover, in the same way that the mountaineer would climb to the peak and once he'd come down, never feel the need to climb it again as it has already been done. But this does not necessarily find truth, as you can categorise something but not completely find the true essence of what it is.What I found very comforting to read however was the section of the essay in which Ingold discusses the way that a rambler's or an artist's way of researching -can- find truth through complete understanding."It is as though the fact rotated by ninety degrees, like a door on opening, so that it no longer confronts us face-on but aligns itself longitudinally with our own movements. ... What had once put an end to our search then reappears, in re-search, as a new beginning, a way into a world that is not already formed, but itself undergoing formation. ...as the doors of perception open, and as we join with things in the relations and processes of their formation, the surface itself vanishes. The truth of this world, then, is not to be found “out there,” established by reference to the objective facts, but is disclosed from within. It is indeed the very matrix of our existence as worldly beings. We can have no knowledge of this truth save by being in it."This, for example, is how the veteran Scottish hillwalker, Nan Shepherd, came to know the truth of her beloved Cairngorms, as celebrated in her now classic book The Living Mountain. ...From a distance the mountain might look like a peak, with its summit pointing determinedly heavenwards, pronouncing as fact its height above sea level. That is what goes down on the map. But it no longer looks like a peak once one is embarked on the slopes, nor does the summit look like a summit when we eventually reach it. It is more a plateau that happens to be of higher elevation than its immediate environs. Shepherd writes of lying outstretched on the plateau, “under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling, grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, rain and snow – the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.”"Shepherd is not on top of the mountain but enveloped by it – by its overwhelming and indeed unfathomable truth. She is knowing the truth of the mountain from her being-inside it. This kind of knowing-in-being, I contend, is of the essence of research.""We are right to insist that there can be no proper facts without observation. But we are wrong, I believe, to suppose that observation stops at objectivity. For to observe, it is not enough merely to look at things. We have to join with them, and to follow. And it is precisely as observation goes beyond objectivity that truth goes beyond the facts."

Having taken a large portion of Ingold's essay, I hope this makes sense to the reader. What I am trying to explain here is that I am conducting research already simply by being in the space, in the landscape, and being completely open to discover each new detail that I hadn't noticed before. This way of thinking, I hope, will underline at least the initial first few parts of my research for the coming year as a postgraduate student. My recent work has been created with underlying key words or themes in mind such as palimpsest, space, real and imagined, ambiguous, natural, signs, markers, waypoints, collecting, and I think that all of these can be applied to the way one moves through a landscape, be that real or in the mind, noticing each little detail and drawing it in a sketchbook or capturing it with a camera. With this way of working, I hope that the place I am in will lead me to the next, and so on into my studio. That's the plan, anyway.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this blog post. If you would like to see more of them and would like to help to support my practice and development as an artist, please follow this link to my Patreon page. Thanks!