Walking Among the Dead Amongst the Living

Abstract

In this article, I describe the making of a piece of artwork entitled Dead Amongst the Living, which is about a small area of Caledonia pine forest in the Abernethy region of Scotland, and, in particular, its standing deadwood. I describe and reflect on the work as it has evolved over a period of years: work that constitutes a record of a particular place. The work considers the often overlooked, and attempts to map and record the standing deadwood that continues to support the living ecosystem long after these trees have fallen, decayed and disappeared. The making of this work contains the implicit hidden performances of my repeated walks through a particular piece of woodland and my attempts to re-find and document these dead trees. John Burnside talks about how “on foot, we become ecologists because, walking, we have the potential to see the world as it is, ….as the here and now, the immediate, the intimate ground of our being,” and it is those close connections, and the inherent poetics and metaphors of place which I'm interested in exploring. My walks are part discovery and re-discovery, part reflection, part observation, listening and encounter; within which lie processes of re-thinking, re-contextualising and comparison, and the outcomes include photographs, etchings, books, soundpieces, GPS drawings and video. Time, familiarity, state of mind, changes of seasons and different weathers all change the way we can experience and be in a place. My walks, photographs, sketchbooks and outputs constitute a subtle recording of change, in terms of both place and self. They contain the palimpsests of my journeys through this space, my own evolving history and evolving arts practice.

Notes

¹ Dead Amongst the Living has become one element of an arts practice-led, interdisciplinary PhD investigating place and ideas of becoming familiar, in the context of some of the forests and landscapes of the North of Scotland.

² See also Edensor (2000, 2010), Solnit (2001), Pink et al. (2010), Wylie (2005), Merriman et al. (2008), Bender (2001), Ingold and Vergunst (2008) for writing on aspects of walking, movement and mobility.