Galleries and Drift: Mapping Undermined Landscapes
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Galleries and Drift: Mapping Undermined Landscapes Galleries & Drift Mapping Undermined Landscapes Submitted by Pauline Liu-Devereux to the University of Exeter as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, January 2011. This dissertation is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement.I certify that all material in this dissertation which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Pauline Liu-Devereux. 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful thanks to Dr. Margaretta Jolly, for being there in the beginning and to my supervisors, Dr. Adeline Johns-Putra and Sam North for their enthusiasm and support. Thanks also to: Joan Johns, for the keys to her house and a room of my own; Jo Esra for her encouragement and trips to the library; Pauline Rowland for years of listening and brilliant IT skills; Andrew Lanyon for the interview. I would also like to thank my husband Bob Devereux for his patience and fortitude. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................................ 5 GALLERIES & DRIFT Mapping Undermined Landscapes. ......................................................................................................... 6 MAPPING/NAVIGATING/KNOWING.............................................................................................. 43 LONG: Walking Anti-Clockwise. ........................................................................................................ 49 TO THE OCCUPIER ............................................................................................................................ 72 IT‘S SO SAD TO WATCH A SWEET THING DIE. ........................................................................ 102 If Everybody had an Ocean.. ........................................................................................................... 102 We Get Around. .............................................................................................................................. 106 It‘s So Sad to Watch a Sweet Thing Die. ........................................................................................ 108 ARCADIANS. .................................................................................................................................... 114 IMAGINARY JOURNEYS ................................................................................................................ 137 STALAG HAPPY .............................................................................................................................. 142 NO THEM. ONLY US ................................................................................................................... 143 THE DARK MONARCH ............................................................................................................... 148 SKITTERINGS ............................................................................................................................... 153 TURKEY FEATHERS ................................................................................................................... 155 ANGER AT ART EXHIBITION ................................................................................................... 156 DRIFT ................................................................................................................................................. 160 ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORDS. ....................................................................................... 178 WORKS CITED......................................................................................................198 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Wheal Charlotte ..................................................................................................................... 52 Figure 2: Nancekuke.............................................................................................................................. 55 Figure 3: What are Cornish boys to do? ............................................................................................... 72 Figure 4: To the Occupier. ..................................................................................................................... 73 Figure 5: Detail of the sketch of Porthleven ........................................................................................ 74 Figure 6: The Abolition of Work in progress at the Exchange Gallery, Penzance ................................. 80 Figure 7: "If Words Came First", invitation to Andrew Lanyon's exhibition at the Goldfish Gallery, Penzance. .............................................................................................................................................. 92 Figure 8: "Mespat" by Alan Micheson, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC. ................................ 156 Figure 9: Salthouse Gallery, September 2010 ..................................................................................... 179 All photographs by Pauline Liu-Devereux. 4 ABSTRACT This is a creative/critical project, a collection of narratives inspired by critical discourse that map a local landscape and chart a personal topography. As a result of interdisciplinary study, particularly in the area of cultural geography and map making, I found new ways to explore ideas about Cornwall‘s heritage, her undermined landscape and expand upon issues raised in my MA dissertation. Recognising the instability and partiality of maps provided insight and mapping became method as newly revealed pathways and subtly shifting perspectives inspired fresh narratives which challenge stereotypical images of Cornwall and reveal the sometimes dark realities of rurality. The more personal narratives in this collection reveal a different undermined landscape: ideas about romantic constructions and inheritance led to explorations of nostalgia, memory and identity. Life events became life writing and many of these narratives reflect a search for direction and for a missing person: the artist I once was. But there are other disappearances in these narratives and the final chapter gives an account of family events that had to be recorded but which raise ethical questions that life writers cannot ignore. We must take responsibility for the way we write about vulnerable subjects and recognise what this writing tells us about ourselves: that, as Nancy K. Miller has suggested, by exposing our lives to others through life writing, we too become vulnerable subjects. The essay accompanying these narratives reflects upon process and finds ways of giving an account of the writer writing. It uncovers contemporary theories that are embedded in the narratives and I describe it as an orouboros, a creature that continuously eats its own tail. Like the text it subjects to scrutiny, the essay is a life narrative, an autobiographical act that merges creative and critical thinking and this amalgamation has been my aim since my studies began. 5 GALLERIES & DRIFT Mapping Undermined Landscapes. In 1963, I was twelve and my grandfather was sixty-two and under-manager of a coal mine on the Lancashire moors. He helped to sink the mine shaft when he was thirteen and now his job was to close the mine, to remove the pumps and flood it. He took a small party, which included my mother and me, underground to show us where he had spent his working life. We could only visit the upper levels because the lower levels of the mine were already filling with water. The thing I remember most about that day, apart from the walk into the blackness down the sloping drift, is dark water. I remember a heavy steel door in a wall and I remember standing on tip toe to see through a spyhole; I remember the light on my helmet illuminating a path across an expanse of dark water. This image returns to me in dreams but I don‘t believe my memories any more. I don‘t think that tiny light could shine so brightly and I don‘t believe any door could have held back the weight of water. Now there is no-one left alive to ask, I think I might have conjured this image from my imagination and it has become part of my personal mythology. I have chosen to begin this critical essay with an autobiographical account of a trip to a mine because, as a life writer, I recognise that the essay, like the text it reflects upon, is autobiographical. On the visit to the mine, I travelled backwards, on a journey with family into family history, via a way of work dating from the beginning of the twentieth century and deeper, through geological time to arrive at a landscape which may or may not be fictional. This journey into the heart of things is a metaphor for the experience of the life writer writing and mirrors the process of memory mining and myth making which provide the foundations for creating life narratives. The essay explores the ways memories are retrieved and how, in these juxtaposed fragments of experience, the creative imagination identifies patterns and creates new mythologies. It considers the difficulties of giving an account of this process and turns to other disciplines to provide a method. While mining provides a metaphor for memory work, cultural geography and contemporary theories about map making provide a framework for describing the