Abstract
The opening chapter examines what Henri Lefebvre famously termed ‘the production of space’ in devolved Scotland, in a context characterised not just by its vibrant cultural production, but also by the artists’ engagement with pressing political and environmental issues. It contends a form of collective re-thinking, re-imagining and re-claiming of nature and seeks to find out if and how the specificities of devolved Scotland may shape the way contemporary artists represent themselves and their community as part of, or estranged from, ‘their’ land. In particular, it looks at the calls for a debunking of the myth of a ‘wild’ or ‘Natural’ Scotland and, in either case, of the dream of primeval vacancy and imagery of emptiness that have become Scotland’s trademarks.
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Notes
- 1.
George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2 July 2013, quoted by James Hunter, Peter Peacock, Andy Wightman and Michael Foxley in ‘432:50—Towards a comprehensive land reform agenda for Scotland. A briefing paper for the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee’ (2013), p. 6.https://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/scottish-affairs/432-Land-Reform-Paper.pdf. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 2.
‘Getting the best from our land—A land use strategy for Scotland’, presented before Parliament in March 2011; ‘This Land is Our Land’, the fourth episode of a series of historical documentaries produced by the Open University in 2009 as part of Neil Oliver’s ‘A History of Scotland’ series, produced by Richard Downes; the documentary titled Nar Lamhan Fhin / In Our Own Hands, aired on BBC Alba on 13 August 2018. At the SNP conference in Aberdeen on 9 June 2018, Heather Anderson, SNP Councillor for Tweeddale West, gave a speech on land ownership in which she argued that ‘Land has been somebody else’s business for a long time’, and that one of the challenges ahead is to restore the long-lost ‘connection between our land and us’ through what she called ‘stewardship’, not ‘ownership’ of land. Kathleen Jamie’s commissioned poem ‘Here Lies Our Land’ is now displayed on the rotunda monument at the Battle of Bannockburn site.
- 3.
Magnus Jamieson, ‘The Bones of a Nation’, in Bella Caledonia, 29 June 2017, http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2017/06/29/the-bones-of-a-nation. Accessed 9 January 2019. This article features Murray Robertson’s digital pigment print map of those same Core Areas of Wild Land, titled Core Areas of Wild Land II—Prìomh Sgìrean na Talmhainn Fiadhaich II, which he developed during a visual arts residency on the Isle of Skye in 2015.
- 4.
See Gold and Gold, 1995.
- 5.
See the official gateway to the Scotland.org website: http://www.scotland.org/whats-on/year-of-natural-scotland/about-the-year-of-natural-scotland/ (my emphasis). Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 6.
http://www.scottishlandactionmovement.org/s/Our-Land-Info-Pack-w-cover.pdf, website now expired.
- 7.
The six chapter headings in Andrew Brown (2014) Art & Ecology Now (London: Thames and Hudson).
- 8.
See Alan Riach’s article ‘Not Burns—Duncan Ban MacIntyre and his Gaelic manifesto for land reform’ (Riach 2016).
- 9.
‘The Lie of the Land: Scottish Landscape and Culture’ international conference, at the University of Stirling in 2006; the ‘Imagining Natural Scotland’ conference, in St Andrews in 2013; also in 2013, ‘The Environment and the (Post)Human in Scotland. Representing Nature and the Living’ international conference of Besançon, whose proceedings were later published under the title Environmental and ecological readings: Nature, human and posthuman dimensions in Scottish literature and arts (XVIII-XXI c) (Laplace 2015); the ‘Place and Space in Scottish Literature and Culture’ conference of 2015 in Sopot; the third international St Magnus conference, titled ‘Visualising the North’, held in Orkney in April 2016; the trans-disciplinary conference titled ‘Expressing the Earth’ conference on the Isle of Seil in June 2017; the ‘Creative Archipelagos. Explorations of Islands in Scottish Literature and Culture’ international conference that was held in Skye in June 2018; the biennial Environmental Art Festival Scotland, launched in 2013; Glasgow’s Ecocultures Festival of Environmental Research, Policy and Practice of October 2015; ‘Traversing the Field: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Walking and Thinking in Scottish Landscapes’, at the University of Dundee in April 2016; the ‘Geopoetics Highland Stravaig’, in Abriachan on 16 May 2018; and ‘Wild Women. Whose land is it anyway?’ subtitled ‘A day exploring women’s connection to the land’, held in Aberfeldy on 16 June 2018.
- 10.
On the dialogue between the two approaches, see Prieto 2016.
- 11.
There are many gifted artists whose influence not just on contemporary Scottish arts but on the very perception of the Scottish landscape is undeniable, including Ian Stephen, Valerie Gillies, Jackie Kay, Meg Bateman, Angus Peter Campbell, Maiolios Caimbeul, Aonghas MacNeacail, Robin Robertson, Katie Paterson, Gill Russell and Will Maclean.
- 12.
‘Walking as knowing as making’ was the title of an exhibition and ‘protracted symposium’ held in the spring of 2005 at the University of Illinois, with Hamish Fulton participating as a keynote speaker.
- 13.
In Ecological Aesthetics. Artful Tactics for Humans, Nature, and Politics Nathaniel Stern contends that ‘[t]he virtual is not yet, but still present as a force. It is the potential of what might become. And of course what might be impacts what is, just as much as what is impacts what might be—a very present force, despite its orientation toward the future’ (Stern 2018, p. 11).
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Websites
Scottish Community Alliance. http://www.scottishcommunityalliance.org.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
The Land is Ours. http://tlio.org.uk/scottish-land-action-movement. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Wightman, Andy. http://www.andywightman.com. Accessed 16 March 2019.
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Manfredi, C. (2019). ‘Our Land’: An Introduction. In: Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_1
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