Katie Hart Potapoff
With an Attentiveness Towards Intimacy and Texture: Exploring a Sense of Land and Place Through Creative Practices
Kathleen Jamie, A Lone Enraptured Male
This research project began on the Isle of Iona with expansive philosophical questions about human entanglements with land and place. At the end of my place based residency these questions had shifted toward more intimate and textural considerations, what might a Scottish sense of land and place be?
My practice-led research takes a non-hierarchical approach, attempting to interweave multiple perspectives, materials, and theories together. These acts of multiplicity contrast with what Le Guin warns as the perils and violence of the singular ‘hero’ in narrative.
Utilising a framework which follows from Benjamin’s proposal that “ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars”, this project proposes to draw, and redraw again, constellations of connection and resonance among distinct perspectives and materials, exploring the many ways one might interact with land and place. My artistic practice draws on textural responses rather than mimetic representations and invites the viewer to consider their own distinct responses.
The purpose of this research is to explore the more abstract and conceptual spaces within a land, place and people, that has the effect of producing new space, in a liminal insertion between that which is tangible, sensed and material, and that which is discerned, glimpsed or apperceived in richly nuanced experience.
Names of Supervisors: First Supervisor: Professor Mary Modeen, Second Supervisor: Dr Heather Yeung
