Producing Artworks in the Studio in Response to Experiential Walking
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
University of Plymouth PEARL https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk 04 University of Plymouth Research Theses 01 Research Theses Main Collection 2019 Ways of making: producing artworks in the studio in response to experiential walking Billinghurst, Helen http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/13656 University of Plymouth All content in PEARL is protected by copyright law. Author manuscripts are made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the details provided on the item record or document. In the absence of an open licence (e.g. Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher or author. Copyright Statement This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the author’s prior consent. 1 WAYS OF MAKING: PRODUCING ARTWORKS IN THE STUDIO IN RESPONSE TO EXPERIENTIAL WALKING by HELEN BILLINGHURST A thesis submitted to the University of Plymouth in partial fulfilment for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of Humanities and Performing Arts September 2018 2 UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH DRAKE CIRCUS, PLYMOUTH PL4 8AA Doctoral College October 2018 3 Helen Billinghurst Ways of making: producing artworks in the studio in response to experiential walking. Abstract This thesis includes a body of paintings, drawings and assembled objects that have been made in response to the Crossing England walks (2014 - 2018). This body of work is entitled The English Diagrams (2018). The research draws upon the varied perspectives of Fine Art, Performance Studies and Cultural Geographies, to examine the relationship between the activities of walking as art, and making in the studio. Drawing from experiential phenomenology, I set out a model for rigorous, reflexive, creative practice and map the looping affiliations between the embodied world of the walked landscape, the subjective terrain of the practitioner, and the fabrication of paintings, drawings and assemblage within the studio. This interdisciplinary study takes a neo-vitalist approach, tracking a series of walks on a single route across England. Artist and terrain are explored as integrated, the boundaries between them fluid or porous, Autobiographical story, personal mythology, and sediments of collective memory interred within the earth are drawn out by the sensory, somatic rhythms of walking, and through selection of specific materials found along the way. Through studying bodily, psychical and material fluxes and flows within the studio, the thesis considers optimal conditions for flow in practice, and scrutinizes interrelations between the space of the studio and the body/mind of the practitioner, during the production of drawings, paintings and assemblage. It explores how the fields, gaps, lines and folds of the landscape can be translated into a bricolage of visual and painterly languages that is as heterogeneous as the terrain it refers to. The research shows how a sustained and looping threefold process of walking, reflective writing and making can lead not just to new ways of fabricating, but of surveying and plotting human experience. This renewed, unified sensibility, is subsequently conveyed back outside to the landscape during new walks, offering altered perceptions and new readings of the landscape. This is a study with potential to be of interest for creative practitioners from a variety of disciplines, and to theorists and scholars of artistic process. 4 5 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………………..7 AUTHOR’S DECLARATION……………………………………………………………….8 PREFACE…………………………………………………………………………………...10 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...…14 Research trajectory…………………………………………………………………...32 CHAPTER ONE: WALKING AS GROUNDING FOR CREATIVE PROCESS…………..34 1.1 Walking…………………………………………………………………………..34 CHAPTER TWO: WAYS TO CONNECT LANDSCAPE AND STUDIO………………...58 2.1 The walked lexicon………………………………………………………………59 2.2 The lexicon in the studio…………………………………………………………75 2.3 On drawing……………………………………………………………………….93 CHAPTER THREE: MAPPING THE DYNAMICS OF STUDIO SPACE……………….108 3.1 The space of the studio………………………………………………………….108 CHAPTER FOUR: EXPLORING LANDSCAPE THROUGH MAKING………………..129 4.1 The painted space……………………………………………………………….129 CHAPTER FIVE: MID-RESEARCH EXHIBITION CROSSING ENGLAND, 2016……..164 5.1 Crossing England images………………………………………………………164 5.2 Crossing England reflection & findings………………………………………..178 CHAPTER SIX: REVISED APPROACHES TO WALKING & LANDSCAPE………….185 6.1 Returning, reviewing, revising………………………………………………….186 6.2 A bestiary for the Anthropocene……………………………………………......193 6 CHAPTER SEVEN: REVISED APPROACHES TO MAKING & LANDSCAPE……….206 7.1 Back to the studio……………………………………………………………….206 7.2 Shifting subjectivities…………………………………………………………...215 7.3 On Diagrammatics………………………………………………………………223 CHAPTER EIGHT: ABOUT TIME & ARTISTIC PROCESS…………………………….238 8.1 Past and futurepresent…………………………………………………………..238 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………..254 9.1 Methodological shifts and innovations………………………………………….255 9.2 Key outcomes…………………………………………………………………...261 BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES……………………………………………………………...283 APPENDIX I……………………………………………………………………………………………..303 APPENDIX II……………………………………………………………………………….304 APPENDIX III……………………………………………………………………………...306 APPENDIX IV……………………………………………………………………………...310 7 In memory of my father, Tony, who showed me the way. To my mother, Jeannine, with gratitude for her unfailing love and support. To my son, Murray. Acknowledgements I would like to thank everyone that has sustained me throughout this process. In particular, I thank my supervisors Phil Smith, Roberta Mock and Jeremy Diggle for their expert guidance, critical acumen and good humour; Phil for the walks and the books, and for encouraging me to take the side-roads. I thank Gareth Burr for reading nearly everything as it emerged; for his insightfulness, and for years of interesting conversation. I would like to express gratitude to all my artist friends and colleagues for their feedback and support, in particular Matt Thomas, Sarah Scaife, Martin French, Bill Wroath, and to all the members of Smooth Space for their integrity and sustenance. I thank my sister and her family for their encouragement, and for our regular gatherings that are always fun. 8 Author’s Declaration At no time during the registration for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy has the author been registered for any other University award without prior agreement of the Doctoral College Quality Sub-Committee. Work submitted for this research degree at the University of Plymouth has not formed part of any other degree either at the University of Plymouth or at another establishment. A programme of advanced study was undertaken, which included taught modules taken: Public presentation of creative research outputs: Crossing England exhibition, Ariel Centre, Totnes, April 2016. Crossing England Drawings, Embodied Cartographies exhibition, Walcot Chapel, Bath Fringe Festival, Bath, May 2017. Commissioned documentary photographs and artworks published in GeoHumanities article ‘Wild performatives: experiments in rewilding at the Knepp Wildland Project’, by David Overend & Jamie Lorimer, June 2018. Workshop presentation: ‘Joining the dots: diagramatics on Dartmoor (walking as drawing as storytelling)’. Performance, Experience, Presence postgraduate conference, Harford, Devon, 2017. Presentations at conferences: ‘Moving, methods and materials: translating the walking experience through studio practice to exhibition’. Theatre, Dance & Performing Arts research seminar, University of Plymouth, May 2014. ‘Crossing England’. Performance. Experience. Presence. seminar, University of Plymouth, March 2015. ‘Fluxes within the studio space: exploring the rhythms and cycles of art-making and domesticity’, Performance. Experience. Presence. seminar, University of Plymouth, March 2016. ‘How to navigate unstable signs, shifting meanings and fluid landscapes’, Traffic: Movement/ Flow/Mobility, Land2 symposium, Plymouth College of Art and University of Plymouth, April, 2016. ‘Making paintings in response to walking’. Pecha-kucha presentation, Walking Women weekend of events, Somerset House, London, July 2016. 9 ‘Crossing the Gap; examining the boundary between art practice and everyday life during illness, bereavement, and immobility’. Performance. Experience. Presence. seminar, University of Plymouth, March 2017. ‘A bestiary for the Anthropocene’. Cross, Multi, Inter, Trans. Land2/ASLE UKI conference, Sheffield Hallam University, 2017. ‘A Cabinet of English Medicine’. Performed paper, PEP seminar, University of Plymouth, March 2018. Word count of main body of thesis: 71, 907 words. Signed…………………………… Date……………………………… 10 PREFACE ENGLISH DAGRAMS: A SUMMATIVE EXHIBITION Figure 8.1: Poster for final exhibition of artist research, Royal William Yard, Plymouth 2018. During the summer of 2018 I held an exhibition of drawings, paintings and assemblage for examination as the practical culmination of this doctoral research. The exhibition was held in the ground floor project space of the Fine Art studios, in the Mills Bakery building, Royal William Yard, University of Plymouth. The exhibition was intended to express my research findings in material form, and to present them in a coherent way to a third-party audience. 11 When curating the exhibition, I used the notion of ‘one