Chapter 1. Introduction

 

In this thesis I will describe a body of work that presents my embodied act of walking—movement, time and distance in the landscape. My works have been created using walking and sound recording and text and have been presented using a mixture of composed sound, text and image. My works come from a phenomenological view of myself as a sensate embodied walker, of place, tangible or intangible, and my embodied scale of movement within it. Within my works I am ever present, an embodied walker, a complex set of rhythms, audible as I move, breath, cough and occasionally talk. My works blend sound and text (each to varying degrees) to offer a multi-faceted mediation of movement through place across time. I have made use of indeterminacy to choose sites in the landscape, to reflect ‘the world as it is’ and have taken place from a geographical location to an island imagined on my embodied scale. Time, as a unique and personal phenomenon, plays out in multiple ways that offer the evocative opportunity to walk along with me, to remember a walk made or imagine a walk to come. I work with a range of ‘sites of playing’. My use of sound in gallery installations offers an immersive environment within which a listener can make their own walk along the various and several paths. I write haibun and mesostics, poetic forms from the differing traditions of ancient Japan and the modernism of 20th century USA. In presentation they transcend their content. Their physical arrangement on paper, as concertina-fold books and scrolls, invites the walk, reflects time and distance and the whole becomes a metonym. Physically co-located within the same paper forms as the poetry, blended photo-images offer movement and a seamless, sometimes dream-like, trace across the work.

 

In presenting this work I am following the ideas of a practitioner researcher as presented by Batty.

‘Firstly, there are those who use the research environment to better understand their practice, explicating what they know tacitly about the work they create. Secondly, there are those who use research to generate new ideas and concepts that either changes the way they practice (process), or that changes the fabric of their practice (content).’ (Batty et al., 2015)

While the whole of my practice fits under Batty’s first category of using the research environment to better understand my practice, explicating what I tacitly know, the bodies of work described in this exposition are my enactment of his second category of practice-led research—my use of research to generate new ideas and concepts that change the way I have practiced and changed the content of my work.

1.1 Research Questions

 

At the outset of this thesis I posed three Research Questions:

 

  1. How can two analytic tools (sound and text) and personal experience re-present movement, time and distance in the landscape?

  2. Why might each be an appropriate tool for investigating the relationships between personal experience and movement in the landscape in the context of complex and shifting societal views of landscape?

  3. What are the important acoustic, textual, and physical configurations in location and exhibition to convey/portray the mediated affective encounter with landscape?

     

These questions are the framework for my research but in the process of working with them it became apparent that I was also working with a complementary set of questions that were emerging out of my research. My emergent questions were:

 

  1. How do I know I am a sensate embodied walker; how do my senses shape my experience and understanding of movement, time, and distance in the landscape?
  2. How can I re-imagine my walking to explore movement, the passage of time and distance in place?
  3. How does my human scale shape my movement, time, and distance in place?

 

In Chapter 2, I review theory and practice relevant to my method—walking—and my principal research tools—sound and text. I also discuss the context in which I move—the land and ideas of place. My acts of creative experimentation and exploration, documented in Chapters 3 to 5, are my path to answering my research (and emergent) questions. In Chapter 3, I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. Each work offers a configuration of overwhelming, impairing or functionally removing one or more of my senses. In Chapter 4, I develop what I come to call replicated walks, walks made more than once in the same place. I began these walks in order to consider time, looking to re-imagine it. However, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. The ideas of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 come together in Chapter 5, as I consider the interplay of my embodiment and place, and think of ideas of scale. Initially I worked on real islands and walked circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the scale of my embodied walking this led to my enactment of my final work in the thesis, an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made by the traces of my embodied walking. This final work drew on, and extended, all the ideas that went before and, in that sense, is a literal and aesthetic culmination of this PhD.

 

My ideas and the associated works are written of in a manner that might appear to suggest a chapter by chapter, linear progression, with each work a sequenced, systematic exploration of a discrete idea. The reality was that, not infrequently, a piece of work was exploring more than one idea—for instance the two works that together comprise ‘trace no trace’ (p. 53) were an exploration of the role and function of my senses whilst walking (presented and discussed in Chapter 3), but they were also both examples of replicated walks (Chapter 4) that grew out of their predecessor replicated walks and contributed to subsequent replicated walks. It is also the case that a single work led to hitherto unrealized insights on previous works, that then fed forward into subsequent work and ideas. An example of this is Four Northumbrian Rants that shaped subsequent works and changed my understanding of the earlier works. Finally, within the artifice of a thesis chapter structure, the chapter sequence does not necessarily present the works in the order in which they were created; some works described in Chapter 5 are amongst the earliest that I created within this PhD.

1.2 Details of contributing works, sound files and technologies

 

My works are presented across three chapters, each containing a series of works exploring a common theme. Each chapter forms a coherent set of works and together they form the ‘whole’ that is this creative-practice PhD. I view this written thesis as a commentary on these artworks and not as a substitute for them. Whilst accepting that documentation will inevitably be partial, I offer access to the artworks through the descriptions in the chapters and the accompanying digital sound archive.

 

All the works that are discussed in this thesis are listed in Appendix A by ‘type’—installation, radio work etc.—in date order of presentation with details of where and when they were presented. Whilst all of the sound files contributing to works described in this thesis are available to be listened to through my website (https://martinpeccles.com) or Soundcloud pages (https://soundcloud.com/mpeccles) I have selected five works (and six sound files) as exemplars of my work for examination.1

 

From Chapter 3, Walking Through My Senses, I have selected the 59 minute radio version of No. 2: ‘no trace’, and from Chapter 4, Walking time: Replicated Walking, I have selected the 120 minute work seven days in June Radiophrenia. Both contain field recordings and spoken poetry. Chapter 5, A Pattern of Islands, has three sub-sections and I have chosen one work from each. From (A)Round Islands, I have chosen two of the constituent 60 minute recordings from the 24 hour work Beàrnaraigh; I have chosen the 60 minute recordings that run from 02:00h and 14:00h. From Random (Islands), I have chosen the longest of the selected works, the four-hour version of Back Up The Long Wall: four midsummer dances for an imaginary island. Finally, from Imagined Islands Walking Contención Island, I have selected the 60 minute work A very random lockdown. Sound files from these six works, playable in any media player, are permanently archived at https://doi.org/10.25405/data.ncl.c.6260262 .2

 

There is a facet of my practice that underpins all my works yet remains undescribed within the main body of this thesis. It is one that has come about as a direct result of my ‘learning by doing’ creative practice. In creating the works that I have described across Chapters 3 to 5, I have iteratively created a practical method of making extended field recordings whilst walking—a methodological practice that expands the current field of artistic research in walking art and sound art. With thesis chapters that focus on the content of my art practice, a description of the development of this method is absent. To avoid it existing only as a shadow, I describe its evolution in Appendix C. Details of the various pieces of technology that I have used throughout the works described are provided at the end of Appendix C. On the occasions that I have used a piece of software solely for a single work it is detailed in a footnote in the relevant chapter.

On to Chapter 2. A Background for my Practice


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