Archipelagos of Interstitial Ground: A Filmic Investigation of the Thames Gateway’s Edgelands. How Can a Multimodal (Auto)ethnographic Methodology Be Deployed to Shape Geographic Imaginations of The Thames Gateway?

This thesis explores and documents the development of an adapted ethnographic methodology that is defined through its orientation towards the representation and production of landscape. As a result of this methodology, I document the shift within my practice from a topographic photography tradition to a filmic, ‘more-than-visual’ (Jacobs, 2013: 714) mode of production, in response to ideas of creative ethnography as an immersive methodology. The resulting movement of films forms a ‘landscape ethnography’ (Ogden, 2011) that acts as both survey and auto-biogeography. Informed by the diversity of registers, and voices within landscape ethnography, and contemporary psychogeographic practice, the thesis and films shift tone to reflect this. To clarify, this work will inform a cross-disciplinary reading of place and landscape through an experiential methodology of both ethnographic and auto ethnographic methods.

This practice-led body of research investigates the multi-layered interstitial spaces that occur in the areas between infrastructure and planned development known as edgelands in the Thames Gateway. My multimodal creative practice will be informed by existing literature relating to marginal/liminal landscapes in and beyond geography and landscape writing.

The written thesis explores the contemporary landscape photography and new nature writing traditions, which I believe to be closely interconnected, through critique and production of new bodies of practice. Through a consideration of my own practice and others, I demonstrate a web of connections: between landscapes; between practitioners past and present; and, significantly, between theory and practice.

Through examining both landscape theory and my own experience of an embodied approach to landscape, this research examines not only the potential of lens based practices to act as a portal to read and experience the landscape as a whole, but also the practice and process of making work. viii These sites will be seen and discussed as interconnected phenomena, stitching together ‘archipelagos of interstitial ground’. This along with the idea of landscape ethnography can then be adopted as a methodology to develop an immersive form of virtual exploration that can utilise developing forms of media dissemination to explore the audiences’ relationship to remote locations.