Further North conference, 4-5 September

Abstracts

Thurs 4. Sept.

10.30. Plenary, Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, ‘The North is Everywhere’, Lipman 031

11.30-12.50 . Strand 1. Questioning North – Lipman 032

Ursula Troche, Artist and Writer, Triptych Grids and Unconscious Beyonds: ‘Way Up North country’

The theme ‘Further North’ echoes a performance poetry, prose and photo project in progress I conceived in a ‘triptych grid’ , consisting of my journeys to Ireland, Northumberland and Finland, in which notions of ‘stretching’, ‘reaching out’ and the ‘edges’ are central threads. The work also builds on previous explorations of different parts of England’s North (and Scotland’s South), as well as around the North Sea, from a London location with an east-west-German experience. My threads point to borderlands’ off-centre and hidden margins, and from this standpoint (Mead, Lacan), I seek to explore dualities: bridges versus walls, i.e. Hadrian’s Wall; Empires versus ‘Open country’. These dualities are challenged with breaking silences, exploring the in-between (Ricoeur), and the unconscious (Freud, Bion), forming a ‘triptych grid’ concept.

‘Northern gloom’ is compared with industrialisation, and the implications this has for the centre-margin duality, thereby infusing an international, and intercontinental workers’ historical angle.

Hayden Lorimer, University of Glasgow, ‘Gates of Heaven’

In this presentation, I examine the last landscapes of the pet cemetery. Liminal sites – or to use a regional vernacular, “thin places” – where we bury our dead companion animals, give a design to death, and a voice to loss. The audience will be transported to the Moray coast of northeast Scotland, paying a visit to the country’s most remarkable example, and meeting Stevie, its founder and animal undertaker. Having buried pets for twenty-five years, retired street-sweeper and beachcomber Stevie can justifiably claim to have seen it all. His northerly cemetery is pitched at the sea’s very edge, close enough to be encrusted with sand and encroached upon by storms. It is a menagerie of remembered cats, dogs, hamsters, tortoises, budgies, mice, ferrets, guinea pigs and goldfish. Akin to Gaudi’s Sagrada

Familia, the cemetery is an endlessly unfinished achievement, and all the more arresting for it. Faced with an intensely storied site, I’ll report on doing landscape discovery and exploration in miniature: touring the paths and plots; studying pet paraphernalia and commemorative gravestones; striking up conversation with pet-keepers past and present; listening to stories of afterlives and underworlds; and, revealing my family’s own tale of connection to the site. A powerful portrait of place, intimacy and attachment emerges, and a final argument: that it is animals that ultimately make us human.

David Martin Jones, University of Glasgow, ‘Where is Anywhere? Ideas of North, South, East and West’

This work in progress seeks to open a dialogue with conference delegates regarding how the idea of North functions, by placing it in relation to ideas such as the Global South, the Rhizomatic West and the Orientalist East.

11.30-12.50 Strand 2. Questioning North, Lip. 033

Craig Richardson, University of Northumbria, ‘Broken North’This paper is concerned with wilderness and desolation. It asks ‘How does Northern ‘emptiness’ function as a resource in the arts?’ It considers the formative context of key works by post-war artists, writers and film-makers, in particular the journeys which led to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Joseph Beuys’ Loch Awe Piece , and Thomas Struth’s Edinburgh photographs from the series Unconscious Places; each informed by their author’s perceptions of the North as naturally barren, socially deprived or simply uninhabited. The suggestion is that the journey to an empty northern landscape always offers the opportunity of a further North. However the North is a place of personal pilgrimage and arrival which has no ‘beyond’, a place one need not go beyond. While a special function of the North is as a space of art and as a resource in the arts, offering silence and withdrawal, its continued representation by visitors prolongs and strengthens this idea. However what emerges can be collectively represented in many ways, including as a ‘Broken North’.

Andrew Sneddon, Sheffield Hallam University & University of Edinburgh, ‘There’s no Place like North’

However we think of north, the opposite is probably true. Kenneth White, in his geo-poetic trilogy of lectures (North Atlantic Investigations, A Highland Reconnaissance and A sense of High North) that later formed the book On The Atlantic Edge (2006) offers us the exact latitudes of North; Near North 51°, Mid North 52°, Great North 58°-69°, Far North as 70°-79°. However, I believe a sense of North is best explored through a non-scientific fashion and more through an imaginative and creative register. This paper considers the idea of north as a form of home and explores the imaginative power within a small piece of creative writing by Roderick Buchanan called, The History of the World according to my Father (2010). The paper also examines some similarities and differences between White and

Buchanan around notions of origin, displacement, myth and regionalism, ‘northernism’ and the influence of home.

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, University of Cumbria, ‘ Ecologies of Uncertainty: the Indeterminate North’

From a position of safety and familiarity there is often a longing and attraction in us, towards that which is either unknown or simply beyond our control. The fear that prompts us to protect ourselves can be seen as being one of the drivers behind the acquisition of knowledge. But the need to bring everything into the realm of what is understood and ‘known’, has led us to cut ourselves adrift from exposure to things that whilst perceived as ‘problematic’ might also otherwise be enriching. Our insulation from environments beyond our urban or agrarian control has robbed us of the know-how of how to be, not only in the world, but also in ecological terms, with the world.

The paper will draw from a series of art projects by Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson and our extensive art research activity in the north, (in Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard) in order to articulate relations and distances between polar north, imagined and metaphoric north and relative ‘UK north’ using interspecific tensions and the paradoxes of representation

Lunch 12.50-1.45

1.50-3.10 Artists, Ephemeral and Shifting North: Lip 031

John Wallace, Artist and filmmaker ‘‘Tweed-Sark Cinema’: An audio-visual study of place, ecosystems and the meaning of ‘the border’’

Tweed-Sark Cinema is a collaboration between documentary filmmaker and videoartist John Wallace and Pete Smith, Royal Society-Wolfson Professor of Soils &Global Change at the University of Aberdeen and member of the IntergovernmentalPanel on Climate Change (IPCC). Tweed-Sark Cinema explore the explores the living connections between people and the environment of the English-Scottish border along two stretches where rivers form partof its length: In the west,the Sark; in the east,the Tweed

Alec Finlay, Artist and Poet, A reading from the artist’s ‘Out of books’

Sian Bowen, University of Northumbria, ‘Suspending the Ephemeral: Materiality and Transience Through Drawing Practice’

The Nova Zembla collection of prints at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, extraordinary for having lain frozen in the Arctic for three centuries, were used by Sian Bowen as a stimulus for the investigation of the relationship between the materiality of drawing and the ephemerality of museum objects on paper.

The prints were carried as merchandise on a 1596 failed Dutch expedition to the Far East via the Northeast Passage. An over-wintering refuge was built on Nova Zembla in which the prints lay in stacks until their discovery: the refuge had filled with ice, transforming the stacks into frozen papier-maché blocks. In 1977 methods were devised to separate the layers and reassemble the thousands of fragments. The physicality of the prints thus underwent metamorphic change: from two-dimensional paper sheets to three-dimensional hardened, blackened blocks and back again to paper. The Nova Zembla Prints played a pivotal role for the artist in addressing the following: As paradigms of ephemeral objects on paper, what models can the Nova Zembla prints provide for innovative modes of making drawings in respect of the: distortion and fragmentation of their imagery; material transformation of their paper supports; the impact of their conservation. In what ways can these modes of drawing be developed to capture the ephemeral nature of museum objects on paper?

This research project is being further developed through a number of visits Bowen has made to Arkhangelsk Museum, Northern Russia, which houses several thousand objects found at the site of Barents’ refuge. The paper will extend to consider the Northern (Arctic) Federal University’s cooperation with the Northern Branch of Russian Federation Agency for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (ROSHYDROMET) and the establishment of marine research and education expeditions aboard what has been called the “The Arctic Floating University.” The aims of these expeditions which carry researchers, professors and students to remote areas of the Arctic are to carry out complex interdisciplinary research of the Arctic environment and to train young specialists in Arctic region. “The Arctic Floating University” combines research and educational expeditions and opens a new sphere of international cooperation.

1.50-3.10 Artists and Islands, Lipman 032

Murdo Macdonald, University of Dundee, 'A hesitation of the tide'; notes on islandness and art’My title comes from a poem by Gael Turnbull, 'An Irish Monk on Lindisfarne' in which he meditates on islands, mainlands and cultures. This paper is an effort to do likewise. I note here that island artists whether of our own day or earlier - like those who created the Book of Kells on Iona or the gospels on Lindisfarne, or indeed like the prehistoric builders of the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney or Calanais in Lewis - owe a signficant debt to their island environment. Their art can be thought of as deeply ecological, to some degree with respect to a bounded, sometimes literally cloistered sense of place, but just as importantly as key parts of a wider global network of island defined connections. And not just a network of islands, but of islands helping to define mainlands.

Tess Denman Cleaver, Newcastle University, Project R-hythm: Multiple centres of gravity in performance practice and practice-led research

Working with residents of a small island community in the UK, Tess Denman Cleaver is using performance making to interrogate notions of marginality in research practice and the conceptions of knowledge and exchange that pervade current thinking around ‘knowledge exchange’ and the study of the so called ‘collaborative turn’. Presentation of the performance making process will aim to initiate a dialogue around how we articulate situated knowing and the transience in this type of research when discussing the value of participatory performance or the dynamics of collaboration across sectors, communities and cultures. The purpose of presenting this research and project is to (re)claim and de-centre the language and territory of knowledge exchange and consider an identified need to acknowledge the agency of landscapes and people working in ‘marginal’ or ‘at edge’ spaces, in order to redefine those spaces as anchored in their own unique centres of gravity. The presentation will share aspects of the aforementioned island project, which is ongoing, as well as thoughts on how practice-based research embedded in the work, contributes to the development of new conceptions of knowledge and value, as emergent and embodied, that have the potential to expand the borders of the current, narrowly conceived language of knowledge exchange.

Fionagh Thomson, University of St Andrews, Starry Skies, Bengal Tigers & Saddam Hussein: everyday land as experienced by young citizens in the Outer Hebrides at the beginning of the 21st Century.

This paper presents a methodological piece of work that developed an artist-in-residence project with young citizens, framed within a wider ethnographic study, in the Outer Hebrides. The young artists-in-residents began with the words ‘everyday land’ and were invited to develop their own concept over five weekly workshops, mediated through photography, walking the land, poetry, music and soundscapes. Most importantly the series of workshops were framed by theories of critical and creative thinking (Lipman 1995 and Bruner, 2001), with participants producing a final work of art in a medium of their choice. Participants’ work moved across time and space, merging land, sea and sky (Ingold, Massey, 2001), incorporating war monuments and more contemporary aspects of culture and politics. As one participant mused in the final workshop, elbow-deep in paint: ‘you know when I started I thought it would be trees and stuff, but it’s much, much … more…”

3.10-3.30 Tea

3.30 – 4.50 Liminal Practices. Lip. 031

Daniel Lee & Antonia Thomas, Orkney College, University of the Highlands and Islands, ‘A journey through time and space on Papa Westray: experimental mapping and place-marking at the northern edge of Orkney’

Over the past two years, we have been archaeologists-in-residence at Papay Gyro Nights, an international contemporary arts festival held annually on the island of Papa Westray, Orkney. Our fieldwork has focussed upon walking and journeying to explore the dynamic

between past and present in the landscape and our own role in creating place and space. This has involved an interactive GPS mapping and walkover project, and collaborative work with artist Tonje Boe Birkeland. We have also been investigating the movement of materials which make up art installation pieces and considering the more ephemeral and intangible residues of the island’s heritage. By linking contemporary archaeology and contemporary art through an experimental geography, our project subverts the usual methods and processes of archaeological survey. Through our mapping practices, different timescales become entangled, blurring the boundary between archaeologist and artist, real and imaginary, and past and present. The project has questioned the nature of a residency for archaeologists and highlighted the expectations and tensions inherent within such an engagement. This has caused us to challenge our own preconceptions of archaeological field practice and develop new ways of ‘doing’ contemporary landscape archaeology. This paper discusses our activities during the residency and reflects upon some of the emerging themes from this work-in-progress.

Robert Jefferson and Ian Cottage, University of Northumbria, ‘Filming the liminal, uncanny atmosphere on screen’

Two filmmakers whose recent work has explored the notion of haunted film and uncanny auras through the explicit foregrounding of location as a liminal space into which narrative merges with atmosphere here present and articulate the ideas underpinning their work. Ian Cottage’s films KEEL and THE FERNS are ‘ghost’ stories in that nature itself is haunting us as a sea of ferns or the sea itself. Robert Jefferson’s animation THE DEVIL’S NIGHT GLASS indicated the return of the repressed through the James Hogg folktale THE LONG PACK, and his new work derives its power from relics of the industrial past; the Blue Streak site at Spadeadam and the inside of the Tyne Bridge, investigating the temenos with in-screen cameras and a laser mapper. Here, architecture becomes the site of the threshold.

As colleagues in film production, the pair have collaborated on soundtracks that explore similar aural themes.

Gina Wall, University of Highlands and Islands, ‘Spectral traces: Photography, futurity and landscape’

My recent publication ‘Ghost writing: photographing (the) spectral north’ (2013) is a practice-led enquiry into specific wartime sites in Scotland (Hoxa Head in Orkney and Lossie Forest in Moray), unregulated northern spaces in which the past irrupts the present, challenging our experience of the present as cohesive. It is my contention that photography is a kind of ghost writing which, following Derrida, is essentially spectral. This writing figured as a disruption of self-identity and self-presence is a hauntology par excellence. Fieldwork and reading has led me to think quite differently about photographic practice. Accounting for photography as a kind of ghost writing has required consideration of the possible futures of the images that I make, and, ultimately, to regard photography as an anticipatory practice. Here photography is a practice in search of futures which hover in the landscape around us, only to be inscribed as images of the past which come back and come back again

to freely haunt the present. Questions for this paper include: Does photography’s peculiar relation to time make it a particularly appropriate medium to capture the spectrality of particular landscapes? Does photography give landscape a mechanism through which to declare its layered self? How might we begin to theorise the way in which latencies of the future are articulated by photographic images?

3.30-4.50 Climate, atmosphere and affect, Lipman 032

Oliver Moss, University of Northumbria, "Meteorological Imaginations: Towards geographies of affective practices of weather, atmospherics and landscapes"

Mostly unaccounted for in philosophical treatises on the natural environment - largely on account of its enmity to the notion of life as grounded and emergent upon a pre formed static surface - weather exerts a nevertheless profound influence on the way we perceive and understand the world; affecting our bodies, our moods, our behaviours – even the structure of our environments. This paper, drawing on fieldwork carried out with more than fifty landscape artists living and operating in the North East of England and the Scottish Borders, aims to highlight weather’s particular profile within the field of arts practice. First, it considers the ways in which weather is anticipated and sensed by landscape artists – visually, haptically and intersensorally. Second, it explores the ways in which weather is leveraged and harnessed for artistic ends. And third, it sets out to trace weather’s suffusion through and between materials, bodies and spaces.

Judy Spark, Robert Gordon University, ‘Seeing without Light: Considering Darkness’

The tendency of the contemporary western human on encountering darkness, is to banish it with light. Indeed, in the northern latitudes, the long hours of darkness can have a severe impact on humans who need sunlight in order to maintain physical and mental health. This paper takes the form of a phenomenological exploration of northern light and its receding levels, seeking to explore other potential understandings of darkness. Drawing upon Maurice Merleau Ponty’s concept of the Flesh as well as the Buddhist notion of emptiness, the work will reveal darkness as a vital part of experience beyond the simple absence of light that it is generally and negatively taken to be. It will be shown that any shift towards a position of cultural responsiveness and acceptance, in terms of environmental conditions and/or constraints such as darkness, could create opportunity for alternative ways of knowing and, it follows, seeing.

Kaisa Schmidt-Thomé & Jenni Kuoppa Aalto University, Finland, ’Inhabiting waterscapes – ’Knowing from inside’ accessed by triangulation of place-based methods?’

As Tim Ingold puts it, environment becomes part of us through the practice of habitation. In the in-habited world there are no objects of perception but continuous formation of both environment and us. John Wylie has written about the unfolding of landscapes as something we see with, and, in this spirit, we wish to share our work on waterscapes. One source is an ongoing project on geobiographies, taking a life-course perspective on habitation. Another

source is a project addressing access to water elements (sea, lake and river shores) in Helsinki region, Finland. In a country of thousands of lakes and islands the population might have a developed sensibility in this respect. On the other hand, the habituality of relating with the water might hide the allurement, which reveals itself only when the access to shores becomes questioned. We will discuss some findings derived from triangulation between interviews (on lifecourse perspective) and ’softGIS’-data (map-based information collected from citizens with an online questionnaire). We will also consider the potential of walking interviews to approach the continuous unfolding of waterscapes in the context of people’s water-related habits.

5.00 Plenary, Tim Edensor, Manchester Metropolitan University, ‘Experiencing Light and Dark in Northern Landscapes’, Lipman 031

Friday 5th Sept

9.30 Plenary, Jane Downes, University of the Highlands and Islands; ‘Does the sea snake have agency: Pondering seascape as assemblage in Orkney’, Lipman 031

10.20-12.00 Mapping practices 1, Lipman 031

Christopher Donaldson, University of Birmingham, ‘Write off the Map: Literature at Margins of the English Lakes’.

Tourist maps of the Lake District rarely feature the region’s maritime terrain. Yet the network of estuaries, inlets and marshes that girts half the district forms one of its most dynamic, and economically significant, environs. For centuries these intertidal waterways and sand-ways have served not only as natural lines of defence, but also as lines of communication linking the Lakes with Lancashire to the south and Dumfries and Galloway to the north. The liminality of this littoral zone is reinforced by its literary heritage, which comprises an array of 19c and 20c writers whose works stand at variance with many of our received ideas about the literature and culture of the Lakes region. Drawing on research done under the ERC-funded Spatial Humanities project, this paper makes the case for the significance of this alternative Lakeland canon, focusing on writing about three key locations: the Solway, the Duddon Sands and Barrow-in-Furness.

Lesley Harrison, Writer, ‘Middle ice’: borders and border zones’.

In my poetry I experiment with the language of place, exploring how language creates place and how people build and furnish their world through language. On the east coast of Scotland we are subject to the cold, dry winds coming down from the north. This dictates settlement and movement, the colour of the skies and our habits of thought. I am reading archived documents from the whaling industry, using elements to make poems which I hope

reflect our subconscious awareness that we live at the farthest edges of a much larger, colder world, and our sense of apprehensiveness in looking north.

Our local landscape is definitively shape by the last Ice Age and the aquifiers and waterways left by the retreating ice. Walking the course of these waterways is enabling me to recreate the various ‘word-worlds’ of these rivers. In this paper I discuss walking methodology, and the presence and impact of the northern climate in creating our particular sense of place.

Clare Money, University of Northumbria, ‘Mapping the Liminal: Post-Industrial Landscapes of the North East’

Shafts (dis), Drift, Chimney (track of), Mine Workings (Disused), Drift, Dismantled Railway, Quarries (dis), Lime Kilns (Disused), Drift, Settlement (site of), Airshaft, Drift, Tower (remains of), Drift.

Perhaps more than any other region of England, the North East embraces the memory of an industrial past, yet, the abandoned post-industrial site is arguably the least valued and most transient of all landscapes. Whilst lingering remnants (dis)are evidenced by the Ordnance Survey, attaching a recorded date to a trace of history, the meaning of these sites becomes opaque over time. If we acknowledge that places exist in multiple realities, that the past continually informs the present and that the present is incessantly overwritten, then how might we tell of these liminal places? As Shanks and Pearson say, ‘There never was a then for this place: it is now, was then and all points in between,’ (Shanks and Pearson 2001:167).

10.20-12.00 Remaking Places: through representations, Lipman 032

Lee Barron, University of Northumbria, ‘The Prose Edda, Heavy Metal Style: Amon Amarth and the Musical Representation of Norse Culture’

This paper argues that a consistent contemporary cultural evocation of historical and mythological northerness is evocatively manifested within the Extreme Metal music and imagery of the Swedish band, Amon Amarth. Formed in Tumba, Sweden, in 1992, through a series of album releases such as Once Sent from the Golden Hall (1998), Fate of Norns (2004), With Oden on Our Side (2006), Twilight of the Thunder God (2008), Surtur Rising (2011), and Deceiver of the Gods (2013) the band have consistently explored and articulated Norse heritage through their lyrics and imagery. The paper explores the ways in which the band have chronicled and represented northern culture, producing a body of work based exclusively upon representations of Viking tradition, custom, myth, and cosmology, and often retelling key events from Snorri Sturluson’s The Prose Edda (produced in 1220 AD) within the idiom of contemporary heavy metal music. The paper will thus argue that in the emphasis upon historic and mythic northern traditions, Amon Amarth represent a potent Northern cultural example of Yi-Fu Tuan’s now-classic conception of topophilia, that emotive conception of the “affective bond between people and place or setting”.

Chris Dorsett, University of Northumbria, ‘Re-situating the gallery farther south’

Julian Rosefeldt’s installation Asylum projects nine films of diasporic Berlin (e.g. museum cleaners and hospital catering staff, apparently of southern origin) onto free-hanging screens in a single darkened gallery. When hosted by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2004), the viewer’s cinematic immersion was punctuated by built-in pauses in the projections that drew attention away from the aesthetic cohesion of Rosefeldt’s filmmaking to the physical space in which Asylum was installed. During each pause visitors to Baltic momentarily found themselves in an environment that was, for all they knew, cleaned each night by migrant workers with a southern ‘otherness’ that contrasted starkly with the emblematic northernness of their location. Re-situating the gallery farther south, the second in a series of conference interventions organised by Dorsett, interrupts audience reception, and breaks down the coherence of concepts such as north and south, in order to explore the relationship between political complicity and contemporary art practice.

Lisa Taylor, Leeds Metropolitan University, “I’m so overjoyed he’s come back”: painting and affective engagements with place in David Hockney’s landscape painting ‘A Bigger Picture’

David Hockney has been described as, ‘the most famous British living painter’. His exhibition ‘A Bigger Picture’ shown at the RCA in Spring 2012 was comprised mostly of landscapes of his native East Yorkshire. Critics testified to an especially emotional reaction to the work: Paul Morley, an avowedly Northern cultural commentator described feeling ‘moved to tears’ as he entered the gallery. In this paper I explore how a group of people from Yorkshire respond to his recent landscape work. Based on a small-scale empirical study of 15 people who know and feel a sense of engagement with ‘Bigger Picture’ pieces, and drawing on writers working within ‘emotional geographies’ (Bondi et. al., 2007), I argue that specific places summon or evoke particular affective responses (Smith, 2007). ‘To experience place,’ Duff (2010) asserts, ‘is to be affected by place’ (881). Here I attend to the ‘felt and affective dimensions’ (Duff, 881) encased in people’s responses to Hockney’s paintings. Drawing on the voices of my respondents the paper has two concerns. The first, the importance of Hockney’s prodigal return to East Yorkshire which I argue has had a powerful emotional impetus for my respondents: it values the north - a place that several people of the study believe has been denigrated in the popular national imaginary (Kohl, 2007; Rawnsley, 2000; Russell, 2004). Secondly, using Casey’s (2010) notion of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ places, which attempts to account for the depth of affective investment the self makes in encounters with places of the everyday. ‘Thin’ locales lack memory or substance; while ‘thick’ places are richly meaning-laden and heavily imbued with affect, recollection, a sense of belonging and are made by the recursive need to re-visit. I ask how far practices of art engagement become a form of place-making. I found that for some respondents certain works act as particularly resonant sites of emotional pull. In this way, Hockney’s works offer an especially fecund engagement with art and its relationship to the north, giving my respondents a particular sense of the purchase of place.

10.20-12.00 Remaking Places: through planning and heritage, Lipman 033

Leanne Philpott, University of Cambridge, ‘Narratives of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in North West England: Museums, heritage and docklands tourism’

During the eighteenth century, maritime trades such as the transatlantic slave trade led to the tremendous growth of port towns in North West England. Liverpool, Whitehaven and Lancaster became vastly wealthy as a result of their involvement with the trade in enslaved peoples. Yet, the decline of this mercantile period and the subsequent decline of industrial investment during the twentieth century has left these ports quite literally ‘high and dry’.

Heritage is increasingly seen as a way to regenerate these ailing Northern dockland areas. This regeneration often utilizes ‘mercantile’ heritage (such as warehouses, dry-docks and customs buildings) to create waterside cultural environments which appeal to tourists through complex sets of semiotic resources (for example, nautical paraphernalia). However, this historic-economic relationship becomes problematic when the transatlantic slave trade is recognised as being an unavoidable part of this heritage narrative. This paper will examine two North West ports (Liverpool and Whitehaven) to establish the complex ways in which narratives of the slave trade are utilized during the ‘heritagization’ process of dockland areas. To do this, I will analyse the ways in which narratives of the slave trade are reciprocally constructed between museums and the wider heritagescape of the dockland areas. I will discuss the difficult negotiations which take place between museum agents, communities and tourism chiefs, and analyse the dissonance which can occur between discursive museum narratives and non-discursive narratives of the wider heritagescape of the port. On a more theoretical level, I will draw upon discussions of narrative as a dialogical ‘tool’ (Wertsch 2002) for constructing networks of meanings in museums and heritage sites. Ultimately, this paper will highlight the complexity of the relationship between tourism, museums and heritage-led regeneration, and will discuss the complex web of narratives that weave together the dissonant threads of docklands heritage in the North West.

Louise Thody, Edinburgh College of Art, ‘‘Broon Dog’ in Space: Future Re-imaginings of Newcastle upon Tyne embodied in Newcastle Brown Ale’.

This paper speculates on cultural, economic and physical futures of Newcastle upon Tyne embodied in a material artifact Newcastle Brown Ale (NBA). Today, NBA is a leading beer brand in America. Its current US advertising campaign uses Newcastle's heritage as an industrialised city to promote the beer to 'hipsters'. Drawing on Future Studies and Material Culture Studies, future cultural constructions of Newcastle and cultural appropriations of NBA are forecasted and considered.

Looking 'further' north, questions of the growth of global capitalism and climate change become unavoidable. NBA’s production may shift to emerging capitalist countries, such as China, and Newcastle's identity will become embedded in the global cultural imagination and its flagship beer an international super brand.

A preferable future for NBA could end negative representations of Newcastle and we may celebrate its new status as an economic and cultural superpower. With the coming of the 'Great Floods' and the sinking of London, Newcastle could even become the capital of England.

Robert Davies, Edinburgh College of Art, ‘Development’

My paper is based on two bodies of photographic work, which has been mapping two northern landscapes over the past three years.

Development is the mapping of the regeneration of Edinburgh’s coastal communities, which are replacing historical industries such as fishing and freight with new coastal villages, which have stalled due to the economic global crash.This is juxtaposed with a photographic work on the coastal region of Teesside entitled Carbon Coast, which maps the unique peninsular of South Gare where traditional industries such as steel making are seen alongside the new technologies of wind farms.

Lunch 12.00-12.40

12.45 Plenary: Owain Jones, Bath Spa University: ‘Northern Isles as alternative narratives of becoming modern’, Lipman 031

1.30 – 3.00 Mapping Practices 2, Lipman 032

Mike Collier, University of Sunderland, ‘Mapping the North: Collaborative and conversational meanders’.

Over the last three years I have embarked on a series of collaborative art-walking projects with natural historians, photographers, writers, sound artists and members of the public across a range of landscapes of the North of England (Field Notes – A Walk up the Tyne and the North Tyne – From Sea to Source; in Temperley’s Tread – a 45 mile walk across the Durham Uplands in the footsteps of renowned natural historian George Temperley; Street Flowers – Urban Survivors of the Privileged Land – a series of walks around the Edgelands of Sunderland and Walking through the Sands of Time: A Walk Along the Sefton Coastal Footpath. All these projects linked science and art to local issues, exploring new, embodied, ways of engaging with, and creating a sharper understanding of, the impact of change on the fragile eco-systems of our landscapes. They aim to help us to explore and rethink our approaches to the environment in the 21st century in ways that address the emotional as well as the scientific approach to perceiving and understanding the landscape. It is my belief that we need to encourage both the scientific and the emotional responses to a locality to properly engage people in a positive understanding of their environment. I aim, therefore, to take participants in these walks on a learning journey towards a deeper understanding of, and a more active involvement in, the land (urban and rural), from a landscape, cultural and

biodiversity perspective. My paper draws together the ‘findings’ of these projects and evaluates their successes and failures.

Kieran Baxter, Dr John Was, Dr Aaron Watson and Alice Watterson, University of Dundee, ‘Approaching Links of Noltland: Using analogies of travel and arrival to visualise a remote prehistoric settlement’.

Links of Noltland is a prehistoric settlement site located in Westray, on the northern periphery of the Orkney archipelago. Exposed and endangered by wind-blown sands, the site has been the focus of rescue excavations since 2006. The location of Links of Noltland is key to both its current day character and its archaeological interpretation. This poses significant challenges for the interpretative visualisation of the site for a public audience.

A multi-disciplinary collaboration between four practitioners has combined approaches from archaeology, digital media art, low altitude aerial photography and sound design to address these challenges through the creative application of visualisation tools. The resulting time-based outcome will use analogies of travel and arrival to explore how the visitor's experience is received through movement, and to follow a transition from the macrocosm as seen by an outsider, to an insider's view of the site's microcosm.

Paul Smith, Glasgow School of Art, ‘The Meaning in Making’

This research explores what being able to make things means to people in remote or edge communities and the role new digital fabrication technologies could have in geographically isolated areas. Looking at specific places, it documents the history of making in forming identity, the role it plays in creating sustainable communities and how the future of making could be shaped by new digital technologies.

This project takes a documentary crew and a mobile digital fabrication lab (digi-lab) to the north of Scotland, documenting what making means to people in remote communities and their reaction to a pop up digi-lab. The project elucidates the meaning in making and how new technologies could unlock creativity in extreme locations and be a resource for a sustainable community.

1.30-3.00 ‘Lab North’, Lipman 033

Michael Mulvihill, artist, ‘The gaze of the ultra-city: the military territorialisation of northern peripheries’.

Had the Cuban Missile Crisis triggered World War III the North Sea would have been one of the first domains to enter action. Hundreds of RAF Vulcan and Soviet strategic bombers may have become embroiled as they massed over the North Sea to begin their nuclear bomb runs. Even today Russian nuclear armed Blackjack bombers test the United Kingdom’s defensive response over that sea, which remains geopolitically contested (despite

economically friendly neighbours) after centuries of international conflict. I present a survey of my recent art work making visible the hidden, but intensively active geo-military domains across the Northern landscape. These domains, from the vast and permanently locked airspace over RAF Spadeadam to the space-bound gaze of RAF Fylingdale under supervision of the USAF 21st Space Wing challenge our perceptions of the everyday as well as notions of the remote and empty.

Louise Senior, University of Aberdeen, ‘Flows of Influence: Exploring the ‘place’ of Caithness through the lens of renewable energy’.

Caithness is becoming central to a burgeoning Scottish renewables industry. As electricity transmission networks are transformed to carry energy towards areas of high population, people note the imposition of technology designed to take power away from the north, and ask ‘what benefit for us?’ Some see an opportunity for autonomy; others see control over local decision-making flowing away south, along with the energy and profits. This draws our attention to people’s sense of place within a globalised energy environment. Are they central to this process, or peripheral? Are they donors, or recipients? How do they (dis)connect themselves with others implicated in the project of renewable energy? What notions of time, space, aesthetics and identity do people draw on to legitimise their position? As people become entangled in this process, creating networks of influence that extend beyond county boundaries, it seems inadequate to conceptualise a place as either central or marginal. Following Ingold, I illustrate that they are better understood as part of a relational process, a point to which flows of influence are directed towards AND emerge from.

Laura Harrington, artist, ‘Uplands – as higher points of consciousness – out of sight out of mind’.

How can we change people’s thinking and relationship to higher grounds –toappreciate that their own life is directly connected to and affected by thesesolitary, often bleak but important landscapes? How can creative practices in the widest sense provide or assist in better understanding these important places and the challenges we now face in understanding their significance in the mitigation of climate change?

Uplands or moorlands are usually the source; a place to start where nature is typically working on a simple and basic level. We have learnt a lot by observing their mechanics. These seemingly remote or ‘natural’ places have been altered and affected naturally and from human influence for the last 10,000 years. As we face new environmental challenges having a better understanding of these elevated lands from a scientific and cultural angle will assist in the challenges we now face.

This paper will bring together current research from a Leverhulme Artist Residency where I workalongside physical geographer Dr Jeff Warburton at Durham University and his research around eroded peatlands in the North Pennines.

CLOSING RECEPTION