Peregrinations With Maps And Landscapes: Narrating the Spaces of Practice in Fine Art

For some art historians the notion of geography has never had as much importance in art as in recent years. At the same time numerous geographers have been engaged in a diverse range of artistic practices from installation to new genre public art. Often engagements between geographic theory and contemporary art practices are rooted in the peripatetic activities of the mid-century urban avant-garde. Recently, however, artists have been grappling with a number of problems that are distinctly geographic, from studies of place, location and situation to counter-cartographic excursions aimed at reframing our understandings of the world. Yet few of these engagements reflect on the geographies of the studio, or on the constructed situations in which work is created.

Whilst this study begins with an intention to map a series of subject-environment relations in various urban and rural locations, it quickly turns to the complex geographies of the space that is determined as a ‘studio’ and on the processes of constructing an environment for creating works. The research is rooted in what has been variously termed practice-led, practice-based or simply artistic research. As such research is conducted principally in and through a personal creative practice, but in the course of navigating art-geography relations the research draws on a number of post-representational theoretical strands. In doing so the study navigates between the studio and location, event and representation, in order to show how artworks are implicated in, and co-productive of, nebulous spatial relations that are not enclosed by the surface of the image, the frame of the studio wall or the site of exhibition. Central to this thesis is the argument that artworks remain fundamentally ontogenic—both acting on future works and continuously remade in each reflective revisit.