-becoming-#langscape-[fold here] intra-rupting landscape, language, and the creative act

Mugridge, Stuart (2018) -becoming-#langscape-[fold here] intra-rupting landscape, language, and the creative act. Doctoral thesis, Birmingham City University.

Preview

Text PhD Thesis.pdf Download (6MB)

Abstract

This fine art practice-led research sets out amongst the terrain of upland Britain. Impelled by the spirit of British Romanticism, Ancient Cynicism and the art of tactics in a contemporary context, the research interrogates language and employs writing to offer a new approach to landscape. Coleridge, Constable, Graham, Lanyon and Turner provide an art historical context to the idea of ‘landscape’. From an initial methodological focus on Baradian diffraction, attention is shifted to the employment of her concepts of ‘cutting together-apart’ and intra-action. These latter are re-purposed as the more muscular intraruption in which an exertive tearing is both uncomfortable and beneficial. Further concepts are mobilised to explore the terrains of landscape and writing: Deleuzian becoming and Foucauldian parrhēsia are utilised to reanimate human relationships to and with landscape. As a result, this thesis disjunctively combines language and landscape to propose the new term and concept of langscape. A term that recognises the impossibility of a (human) union with nature through words and writing whilst simultaneously revelling in the possibilities that recognition of the difference provides in a form of becoming-landscape. This research further proposes exertion as a logic for the creative act by recognising and embracing the performative potential of long-distance walking and running, and their disruptive relationship to writing and thinking. The potential of writing (as both a verb and a noun) is explored in a fine art doctoral research context with specific attention paid to the strategy of ‘art writing’. Resulting from this exploration, the binaric structuring of practice/theory is short-circuited by an exertive poiēsis that emerges from the performative activities of the research. The terrain and form of this writing enacts (and reconceives) the relationship of art and writing in and as the thesis. The thesis is written by the langscape.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information:	Especial thanks to Doctor Susan May for bravely stepping in as my Director of Studies late on in the research (and for her subsequent support, advice, recommendations … and ironing out of creases) … and to Doctor Jacqueline Taylor for stepping in as a supervisor even later still, and sharing her valuable subject knowledge. I also thank them both for seasoning these thesis words with extra punctuation. Many thanks also to Professor Johnny Golding and Henry Rogers for their expertise, supervisory efforts, support and input during the first two and a half years of this research. Midlands3Cities / Birmingham City University are gratefully acknowledged for the funding of this research. And to those softened up by the Wednesday research seminars in G.07, thank you for your company and collusion. Good luck. Many thanks to Mark Goodwin for the training, conversation and support enjoyed as part of a Student Development Fund grant (and beyond). Thanks also for the loan of that last comma. Heartfelt thanks to K for being there throughout. To E and A—sorry for being grumpy and vacant. To mum, thank you for your unquestioning support. And thinking of you dad. Thanks also to those areas of the British landscape that have offered many hours of challenge, inspiration and company (in particular upland Wales, the Highlands of Scotland, The Malvern Hills, The Pennines, Norfolk and The Weald). And to the birds and trees outside the studio window: thank you for becoming- there. And for the words? … I have no words for you.
Dates:	Date Event 9 July 2018 Completed
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Landscape, Language, Becoming
Subjects:	CAH25 - design, and creative and performing arts > CAH25-01 - creative arts and design > CAH25-01-02 - art
Divisions:	Doctoral Research College > Doctoral Theses Collection
Depositing User:	Kip Darling
Date Deposited:	12 Mar 2019 16:00
Last Modified:	12 Jan 2022 16:50
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/7210

Actions (login required)

View Item