Abstract
This chapter looks at the way writers, poets and walking artists such as Andrew Greig, Thomas A. Clark and Hamish Fulton work the concepts of trace, archive and evocation with a view to forging new relations between art and space. It suggests that these relations are aimed at relocating the readers and audience at the core of an experience designed to be aesthetic, personal and communal, as well as environmentally and politically conscious, most specifically as regards the ownership and distribution of land in yesterday’s and today’s Scotland.
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- 1.
‘Human into the non-human, with sweat our connection to the world, we felt ourselves the right size’ (Greig 2010, p. 210).
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Simone Kenyon likened this practice to the Feldenkrais method during her workshop ‘Walking out of the body and into the Mountain: Dancing, Mountaineering and Embodied Ways of Knowing’, University of Dundee, 30 April 2016. On Greig’s engagement with Buddhism, see Simon Dentith, ‘Harnessing Plurality: Andrew Greig and Modernism’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.) (2007) The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 184–193, p. 189.
- 3.
As theorised by Michel Serres in The Natural Contract (Serres 1990).
- 4.
http://www.oxfordpoetry.co.uk/interviews.php?int=vii3_thomasaclark. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 5.
‘When the people are gone, and the house is a ruin, for long afterwards there may flourish a garden of daffodils’ (‘Riasg Buidhe’, 1987, Clark 2000, p. 104).
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‘The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement’ (‘In Praise of Walking’, Clark 2000, p. 19).
- 7.
As Tim Ingold argues in Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, ‘to tell, in short, is not to represent the world but to trace a path through it that others can follow’ (Ingold 2011, p. 162).
- 8.
Hamish Fulton co-authored a volume on Long’s walking art: Anne Seymour and Hamish Fulton (1991) Richard Long: Walking in Circles (New York: George Braziller).
- 9.
The use of the metrical system is arbitrary, as was the duration of the walk and the distance to be covered by the walkers, all in silence .
- 10.
See Fulton’s essay ‘Into a Walk into Nature’, in Kastner 1998, pp. 242–245.
- 11.
‘I think walking is sacred. It is sacred because it binds land, mind, and body. Humans bind with nature in the activity of walking’ (Fulton, in Grande 2004, p. 135).
- 12.
‘Hamish Fulton: Walking as knowing as making’ University of Illinois, 5 March to 31 July 2005.
- 13.
See Nick Kaye on site-specifics: ‘After the “substantive” notion of site, such site-specific work might even assert a “proper” relationship with its location, claiming an “original and fixed position” associated with what it is. […] To move the site-specific work is to re-place it, to make it something else’ (Kaye 2000, pp. 1–2).
- 14.
Interview ‘21 Days in the Cairngorms —Hamish Fulton’, https://vimeo.com/12406073. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 15.
‘I only “use” commercial materials. I don’t “use” found natural objects taken directly from the landscape. This is merely a symbolic gesture, so as not to receive money from something formed entirely by nature. Finally, when I’m in a “wild” area like the Cairngorms I can see so graphically the impact of my presence—so I attempt to “LEAVE NO TRACE” (which is scientifically impossible). This means making sure the ground where my tent was looks “natural” again. Not making fires with dead wood, or building cairns (“cairn-bashing”)’ (Fulton 2000, pp. 201–202).
- 16.
‘Space, as frequentation of places rather than a place, stems in effect from a double movement: the traveller’s movement, of course, but also a parallel movement of the landscapes which he catches only in partial glimpses, a series of “snapshots” piled hurriedly into his memory and, literally, recomposed in the account he gives of them, the sequencing of slides in the commentary he imposes on his entourage when he returns. Travel […] constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape. And while we use the word “space” to describe the frequentation of places which specifically defines the journey, we should still remember that there are spaces in which the individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle. As if the position of the spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of a spectator were his own spectacle. A lot of tourism leaflets suggest this deflection, this reversal of the gaze, by offering the would-be traveller advance images of curious or contemplative faces, solitary or in groups, gazing across infinite oceans, scanning ranges of snow-capped mountains or wondrous urban skylines: his own image in a word, his anticipated image, which speaks only about him but carries another name (Tahiti, Alpe d’Huez, New York). The traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place’ (Augé 1992, pp. 85–86).
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Manfredi, C. (2019). Land Made by Walking: Andrew Greig, Thomas A. Clark, Hamish Fulton, or, the Art of Passing Through. 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_3
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