Place Land Nature A Sense of Place Lecture

Place: Land Nature A Sense of Place Lecture 2 Andrea Peach

Wittgenstein’s Cottage, Lake Eidsvatnet, Norway The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation Our life is frittered away by detail … simplify, simplify Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

The spirit of place lies in its landscape E. Relph Place and Placelessness

Land is a natural phenomenon ‘Landscape’ is a cultural construct

Casper David Friedrich Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818

Thomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews 1818

Little Sparta, Stoneypath (Ian Hamilton Finlay) Stourhead Wiltshire (Henry Hoare 1720)

Karen Knorr Pleasures of the Imagination: Connoisseurs 1986

Timothy O’Sullivan Witches Rocks, Utah 1869 Rick Dingus Witches Rocks, Utah 1978

Ansel Adams Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, Yosemite Valley, California, 1927

Joel Meyerowitz Broadway and West 46 th Street, New York, 1976

Guiseppe Penone The Tree will Continue to Grow except at this Point, 1968 -78

Andy Goldsworthy Things are continuously in a state of change or flow and everything, even stone, has a sense of movement about it.

Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah 1969 -70 One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing Robert Smithson

Christo and Jean Claude Surrounded Islands Biscayne Bay, Miami 1980 -1983

Richard Long I like the idea of using the land without possessing it A Circle in Alaska 1977

Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifier and a signified. WJT Mitchell

Jim Partridge Gray’s Seat Lancaster 2000

The processes I use are often metaphors for nature’s processes, one which naturally weather and create a surface. This object is not specifically about the landscape. . . But is was stimulated by the experience of being in a particular place at a particular time. It is about an almost indescribable feeling of fragility and ever vulnerability Elsje van Keppel Animal Vegetable 1996

Iceland taught me that each place is a unique location of change. No place is a fixed or concluded thing. Roni Horn Becoming a Landscape, Iceland, 1999 -2001

Dalziel and Scullion Modern Nature Tyrebagger Hill, Aberdeenshire 2000

The view is not separate from the viewer Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project Tate Modern, London 2003

Simon Starling Island for Weeds (Prototype) 2003

Simon Starling Tabernas Desert Run Turner Prize 2005 -06

The real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes Marcel Proust

For the Seminar: Bring an object, text or image, which you feel is either directly or indirectly influenced by either ‘land’ or ‘nature’. Come prepared to discuss how this contributes to our programme theme of ‘a sense of place’.