Edgelands & Outliers Class #3 – ‘Edgelands’

Justin Hopper - Contact info Phone: Web: jackdawshivers.com

Environment Writing Exercise (optional) Following Patrick Keiller’s lead in Robinson in Ruins, find a local patch of ‘nature’ – whether that be a wooded area full of flowers or a single weed growing in a car park Write two short passages or poems examining this ‘nature’ in the most: –Macro way possible –Micro way possible

Patrick Keiller – Robinson in Ruins Mv6jH1c

Environment Writing Exercise (optional) Following Patrick Keiller’s lead in Robinson in Ruins, find a local patch of ‘nature’ – whether that be a wooded area full of flowers or a single weed growing in a car park Write two short passages or poems examining this ‘nature’ in the most: –Macro way possible –Micro way possible

Last week’s assignment: Edgelands Writing Exercise (optional) Find a space near you, or which you encounter in your travels during the week, that one might consider an ‘edgeland’ Write two short pieces of poetry or prose describing this place: –In terms of non-visual senses –As a chalk outline; description by absence

Questions What are edgelands? Where might we find them – in our environment, and in artworks?

Questions What are edgelands? Where might we find them – in our environment, and in artworks? How can such edgelands operate to give us a different perspective on our surroundings – in our art, writing, lives?

Questions What are edgelands? Where might we find them – in our environment, and in artworks? How can such edgelands operate to give us a different perspective on our surroundings – in our art, writing, lives? How are artists tackling Edgelandia in contemporary art? Can we see signs of it in ‘classic’ landscape artworks?

Edgelands

Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts

Anyone who has spent a childhood mooching around the fringes of [our] English towns and cities, where urban and rural negotiate and renegotiate their borders, might have come up with the word "edgelands". If you know those places where overspill housing estates break into scrubland; wasteland. If you know this underdeveloped, unwatched territory, you know that they have "edge". We might have come up with it ourselves, but geographer Marion Shoard got there first. In English we have an abundance of words to account for the variety of landscapes on our doorstep; in our built environment. Hopefully, we can help introduce one more into circulation.

So much might depend on being able to see the edgelands. Giving them a name might help, because up until now they have been without any signifier, an incomprehensible swathe we pass through without regarding; untranslated landscape. And edgelands, by and large, are not meant to be seen, except perhaps as a blur from a car window, or as a backdrop to our most routine and mundane activities. Everyone knows – after a sentence or two of explanation – their local version of the territories defined by this word "edgelands".

But few people know them well, let alone appreciate them. The book we wrote together is an attempt to celebrate these places; to break out of the duality of rural and urban landscape writing; to explore these unobserved parts of our shared landscape as places of possibility, mystery, beauty.

Brian Dillon on Patrick Keiller ‘A poet of blank statistics – in person, he can talk at length about patterns of land use in suburban Oxford or the hidden flourishing of Britain's ports – and a connoisseur of built dullardry: nostalgic housing estates, defunct factories, centripetal supermarkets. (Take up an invitation to view locations from his new film, and he will drive you to the car park at his local Lidl.) But he is also a genuine, if ironised, seer: a follower of Walter Benjamin's call (in his 1929 essay "Surrealism") for a "profane illumination" of mundane existence.’

Keith Arnatt

Iain Sinclair on Robinson in Ruins “In Robinson in Ruins those moments of staring, that kind of seizure where everything stops and there is no music, no armature to hold you up, is a true challenge to conditioned cultural reflexes … you’re in there, and you’re staring at a tractor going up and down a field for quite a long time, you’re staring at spiders’ webs. And suddenly I realised that there was a connection here with J.G. Ballard … :

‘Time itself, bundling us headlong towards destinations of its own choice, had begun to loosen its grip. A day would last as long as I chose. Leaving my typewriter, I could spend an hour watching a spider build its web. On my walks by the river I stood among the elms and waited for time to calm itself, listening to its measured breath as it settled itself over the forest. I recognised the mystery and beauty of a leaf, the kindness of trees, the wisdom of light.’

On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory - George Orwell, As I stand at the lichened gate With warring worlds on either hand – To left the black and budless trees, The empty sties, the barns that stand Like tumbling skeletons – and to right The factory-towers, white and clear Like distant, glittering cities seen From a ship’s rail – as I stand here, I feel, and with a sharper pang, My mortal sickness; how I give My heart to weak and stuffless ghosts, And with the living cannot live. The acid smoke has soured the fields, And browned the few and windworn flowers; But there, where steel and concrete soar In dizzy, geometric towers – There, where the tapering cranes sweep round, And great wheels turn, and trains roar by Like strong, low-headed brutes of steel – There is my world, my home; yet why So alien still? For I can neither Dwell in that world, nor turn again To scythe and spade, but only loiter Among the trees the smoke has slain.

Jason Orton

Keith Arnatt

Zombie Landscapes

Jock McFadyen

Mekons A hornet's nest lies on the track It's half formed larvae scattered A workers cottage broken down And left in shambles … High in the ferns I find a scull I see the flashing shadows Jet fighters swooping loud and low Rehearse for Armageddon You don't have to believe in the end You have to believe this is the end (I ramble) This is the end (I ramble)

Paul Smith

George Shaw

Laura Oldfield Ford

Leah Fusco

Cyprien Gaillard

Turner