2.4 Place

Landscape has been extensively written about as an idea, a thing, a process by such authors, amongst many others, as Hoskins (2013), Stilgoe (2015) and Crane (2016). I hold with Tilley’s view of landscape; for him the term ‘landscape’ refers to ‘the physical and visual form of the earth as an environment and as a setting in which locales occur and in dialectical relation to which meanings are created, reproduced and transformed … A landscape has ontological import because it is lived in and through, mediated, worked on and altered, replete with cultural meaning and symbolism—and not just something looked at or thought about, an object merely for contemplation, depiction, representation and aestheticization’ (Tilley, 1994, p. 25). This is a nuanced definition of landscape. It suggests landscape as a partner in, or a location for, emplacement; one that allows for what was and what will be as well as what is and what can be seen.

Landscape implies a breadth, a large scale, a multiplicity of locations; this can be focused by considering ‘place’. Places are made by the experiences of individuals; in the case of Neolithic man these were experiences such as food supply, family history and safety (Crane, 2016, pp. 16-19).

Progressively more settled communities saw the emergence of social rules (both explicit and tacit) and the beliefs, myths and ceremonies by which groups sought to make sense of, and understand, the world in which they lived. Tilley suggests that places, defined as ‘a centre for action, intention and meaningful concerns’ are usefully considered as locales—‘places known through common experiences, symbols and meanings’ that are located within a cultural and natural landscape (Tilley, 1994, p. 18). He goes on to assert that ‘Familiarity with the land, being able to read and decode its signs allows individuals to know “how to go on” at a practical level of consciousness or one that may be discursively formulated’ (1994, p. 26). This is highlighted in the context of oral cultures, steeped both in the content of the stories of place but also the knowledge and prodigious acts of memory to be able to remember and retell them. In the act of telling, people would speak of past visits to important places but also speak of visits to come—hunting trips to be made in the coming season, passing by relatives’ graves—and in speaking would be the act of walking. The shift, the movement between places was imagined or re-told as walking—walking brought places into being. Thus, walking is simultaneously an act of ‘consciousness, habit and practice, that is both constrained by place and landscape and constitutive of them. Walking is the medium and outcome of a spatial practice, a mode of existence in the world’ (Tilley, 1994, p. 29). First Nations Australians understand and navigate their world along routes created by mythical beings, routes that incorporate ‘all topographical features that are topographically and economically significant … landscape is the fundamental reference system in which individual consciousness of the world and social identities are anchored’ (Tilley, 1994, p. 40). In a strongly oral culture moving along the routes is associated with speaking the route, both as a means of navigation but also as a means of linking to mythical ancestors; this assumes moving at walking pace. In Songlines Bruce Chatwin describes his experience of being in a vehicle driving through the central Australian outback with Limpy, a First Nations Australian who, with the vehicle moving at 25 mph speaks his way across the land to himself as a pressurised rush of utterances; once the vehicle is slowed to walking pace his recitation can continue at an intelligible rate (Chatwin, 1988, p. 324).

Marking the land with the repeated act of walking, of repeated footfall, produced paths, (aestheticized by Richard Long with A Line Made by Walking) and paths met and split as they formed, at one level a network of communication, a sequential narrative of locations, but also a network of the imagination, a network of the present, the past and the future, ‘a narrative understanding involving a presencing of previous experiences in present contexts’ (Tilley, 1994, p. 31). In this lived landscape the way between past and future experiences was along paths marked by past events or remembered features, the topography of the land, ‘paths as offering not only means of traversing space, but also ways of feeling, being and knowing’ (Macfarlane, 2012, p. 24). This is the lived landscape that is lost to the short-stay, air travel tourist.

Given that my practice reflects movement and uses the method of walking in the landscape, in place, then moving air—wind—is a feature within my practice and an engagement with wind is an inevitable reality of my practice—my moving in moving air. I move on the ground and in the air; I touch the air and the air, and what moves in it—rain, snow and sound—touches me; my haptic engagement with the atmosphere. Ingold approaches a wider, multi-sensate contact with the world in his writings on the optic and the haptic in the landscape (Ingold, 2011, pp. 126-135). He argues that, in considering landscape, a pre-occupation with the seen, the optic, emphasizes the distant and the surfaces of the world at the expense of the haptic—the close, the touched, the immersed. This is, he asserts, a view typified by landscape painting (and photography) which offers a visual, static, view of a place ‘over there’, a view which, most of the time, views air (the atmosphere, the weather) as something to be looked through to see a subject of interest. He sets up two ways to think about these ideas within ‘landscape’—the optic and the haptic. He typifies the optic as visual, distant (as in away from a sensing human) and emphasizing surfaces. The haptic involves (many sorts of) touching and movement, is hands-on, close and places centrally the movement of air and the objects that move in it—drops of rain, flakes of snow. He also acknowledges the graduations between apparent solids, liquids and gasses that imperceptibly merge at their various interfaces. Such consideration of landscape prompts Ingold to ask ‘is the sky a part of the landscape or is it not?’ (Ingold, 2011, p. 127) and in concluding that it is, he suggests the term weather world for the experienced place, and that sensory experiences are phenomena of the weather world belonging to ‘fluxes of the medium rather than the confirmation of the surfaces.’ This is the place in which I walk.

In this chapter I have reviewed theory and practice relevant to my method, walking, my principal research tools, sound and text, and discussed ideas of place in which I move. In the next chapter I move on to 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 impairing, overwhelming or functionally removing one or more of my senses in ways that elucidate my embodiment.

On to Chapter 3. Walking Through My Senses 

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