Place:

Land and 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 46th 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

Elsje van Keppel

Animal Vegetable

1996

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

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 ’ .