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A Little Summit in Scotland
Right now I am at Cove Park, in Scotland - www.covepark.org - to participate in this little artists symposium / get together. I'm spending four days with a group of artists to hang around, and talk about the things that are on our minds. A few of the artists do work that engages ideas of landscape specifically - Ilana Halperin www.ilanahalperin.com and also here - through geological narratives, Adam Putnam through photography and sculpture, and Dan Torop in photography, and also some computer programming (programs to simulate landscape). The other artists participating are Seth Kelly (my hisband), Juliet Jacobsen, Jesse Bransford, and Jenni Knight. But, basically I am a designer that is interfacing with a group of artists. Below is some text that I wrote before leaving:
Ok this is what I am thinking: I am thinking about landscape and walking. About bringing some wellies so that I can walk in the sea loch. The sea loch, part of the firth. I am thinking about walking in order to know the place, and thinking about figuring out how to know the place by walking is different than knowing the place by what I know now. What I know now - and probably the Scots among us can tell us more - is that Cove Park is in the Firth of Clyde. And that a firth is the same as a fjord - sea channels formed by glaciers. But the form - the geologic form looks different than the fjords of Norway (which is kind of nearby - I never thought of that of how Scotland is near Scandinavia.) In Norway you think of those crevasses - of those deep channels and high sea walls. From what I understand of the Firth of Clyde it is all much flatter. But I will walk and find out. And also the sea loch - Loch Long. Which is not like Loch Ness or Loch Lomond - they are both freshwater lochs. Loch Long, the sea loch is where the sea, the Atlantic intrudes into the continent, the island. Again, formed by glaciers. So basically it is an estuary - that mix of fresh and salt, which, from what I know, is ecologically valuable as place of diversity - where many species exist because of that transition. New York, the harbor, is in an estuary. The other thing to know is the Cove Park thing. It is set up both for artists residencies, but also as a tool of landscape conservation. And here it seems that it is following a line of continued development into green architecture - a utopian project that to me seems super british - dwellings built into the earth - from Hobbit Houses, to the Eden Project in Cornwall, to a really cool house in Wales built by the Czech London architects Future Systems. But, this futurism is one thing - something forward looking (but also kind of 70s), and the long history of land management in the UK is another - a structure of managing the landscape that allows for the sustainable development of land - the coexistence of people and agriculture without the purge the land of its resources and then move on that is the history of land development in the US. However, this system in the UK is enforced through social class. For example - generally - landed gentry / aristocracy owns and manages their estate, which has managed forests, grazing land, and plots of land that are rented to tenants. The estate fuels a whole community of people. So this is pretty archaic, and patronizing. But, on the other hand, thinking about landscape in this unit, where resources are managed, energy created efficiently, and there are responsibilities assumed for your neighbor's land, this is also forward-thinking. Cove Park used to be a farm, and probably existed in a system described above, but now its goals have more to do wit preservation and conservation of native ecologies - from what the website says. When we are there I would like to talk to the estate manager, and understand more of how the park functions - how it performs as a managed landscape. This is an interesting juxtaposition - of the natural landscape, formed by glacial activity, outside the grasp of people, and the managed landscape, formed by society and set aside for cultural desires, needs. And then at the scale of the person. I am also thinking about some DH Lawrence, which I read recently, from Lady Chatterly's Lover. Which is kind of silly, but here it is:
She opened the door and looked at the straight heavy rain, like a steel curtain, and had a sudden desire to rush out into it, to rush away. She got up, and began swiftly pulling off her stockings, then her dress and underclothing, and he held his breath. Her pointed, keen animal breasts tipped and stirred as she moved. She was ivory-colored in the greenish light. She slipped on her rubber shoes again and ran out with a wild little laugh, holding up her breasts to the heavy rain and spreading her arms, and running blurred in the rain with the eurythmic dance-movements she had learned long ago in Dresden. It was a strange pallid figure lifting and falling, bending so the rain beat and glistened on the full haunches, swaying up again and coming belly-forward through the rain, then stooping again so that only the full loins and buttocks were offered in a kind of homage towards him, repeating a wild obeisance. He laughed wryly, and threw off his clothes. it was too much. He jumped out, naked and white, with a little shiver, into the hard, slanting rain.
For me this speaks to the difference between knowing what you know about a place - know what - and how that is different from the experience of the place - the know how. The passage is almost the ultimate version of that - of lovers surrendering their physical bodies in enjoyment of landscape - of bringing their cultural knowledge (Connie's Dresden Dancing) to the landscape. So while I don't think that I will be running around naked outside, at least the idea is to go for some walks, and to gain some know-how through that process. That is the proposal: go for walks, talk to the estate manager, maybe read some literature, and this is the process to understand the place, get a sense of the landscape, and some knowledge of it.
more postings from Scotland in the Features section. Photos on flickr