MA Week 36 - Discussion of "Migration and Sense of Place" - Annemarie Murland

Migration and Sense of Place : re-contextualising felt experience through creative practice.

Annemarie Murland

Summary

 

The premise of this paper is that personal experience is a legitimate source and subject matter for visual art practice.

Murland is a native of Glasgow who moved to Australia with her Australian husband. She has a deep connection to Glasgow and the tension between this and her migration to a distant country informs her work. She argues that her “felt experience” of being a stranger in the country where she now lives constitutes legitimate subject matter and source material for her visual art practice. She states she has “never truly left” Glasgow, and “after twenty years [in Australia, her] attachment to [Glasgow] is probably stronger”. And expressed in very strong words. She effectively retreats to Glasgow when engaged in creative practice.

Heritage, identity and felt experience commingle to drive her practice. The deep connection with Glasgow is pulled through to her present situation. The identity and characteristics produced in her work reflect her past and present; “in temporal space Memory and Reality embrace” (Murland, 2009, n.p.). She draws on place as a “conduit for creativity, that when examined from an embodied point of view translates into works of art” via a “visual grammar of felt experience”. Her migration affected her practice and she shifted towards abstraction: “the vehicle of abstraction illustrates my visual concerns”.

Murland acknowledges the role of process in her work; the choice of picture plane, the support, the camera lens. She argues that “chance fuses with the material characteristics of the medium” to reveal “new visual conversations”. She describes her work as layered, “weaving paint” including “soft bands of colour” and undergoing a process of marking and erasure. This means her work covers and reveals, and she describes it as “capturing tactility” – “felt” experience of a different kind,

She also articulates the relationship between life history and visual outcomes: “re-telling one’s story within the context of personal experience has developed a methodological art practice that recognises the role of the artist as individual”. She uses “the line as language” and the investigation of materials to transfer felt experience to canvas via mark making so that her experience is expressed.

Discussion

 

There is much in Murland’s article that I understand, some of it intuitively rather than analytically, and little wonder: .“Born in 1962, my cultural heritage is Irish Catholic”. Yep, me too. Her family migrating from Ireland shaped her family history and personal identity in the same way as my family’s Yorkshire lineage and work in Engineering shaped mine. Her sense of dislocation and longing for Glasgow is profound and almost saddening. Yorkshire is deeply ingrained in me. We are intertwined. However, this gives rise to the question -what is place? Yorkshire was fragmented and its boundaries were redefined in 1974 via the Local Government Act (Local Government Act, 1972), yet Yorkshire still exists – for example, the success of “le Grand Départ” of the 2014 Tour de France attests to this.  From this I imply that “place” is a physical phenomenon, but also a felt/personal/emotional one. So the “sense of place” to which Murland refers in the title might be:

• inspiration
• memory
• site where art is made
• site where art is installed
• effect upon emotions/body

and I’m sure others that I have yet to add to this list which is an immediate response to Murland’s paper.

A further thought on using place as a driver for a visual practice: production of work happens in a (or many) places – how does this affect the end result? An outdoor sketch might of necessity be free-er and less detailed than a final piece – but is it different in other ways, because of where it is made? How does the experience of being in a place (seeing the subject directly rather than via a sketch or photo, being in Yorkshire rather than Lancashire or wherever) – rather than the physical conditions (light, weather, indoors/outdoors) – affect the outcome? I’m not entirely sure here. Another project for me to work on at some point.

Murland’s use of the term “felt experience” is very interesting. It implies a deep, personal sensory experience as opposed to “embodied experience”, which has a less personal implication.  “Felt” could imply the sense of touch only, which would imply less of a holistic experience than “embodied”, but it also encompasses emotional feelings. I prefer the term “lived experience” as implying the sense of being alive in all senses during a particular series of moments.

Murland’s description of process and methodology particularly resonate with me. Her idea of “chance” playing a part in the production of a visual work has repeatedly appeared both creatively and theoretically over the course of my studies so far. Playful action research and “happy accidents” often move the work onto an unexpected pathway and the outcomes arrived at are often the most creative. Other agents which immediately spring to mind and which affect any particular work are my choice of medium, my experience with that medium, my mood and my level of energy.  The layering which she states characterises her work is also another concern of mine. The need to mask and to reveal, ever-changing, is a reflection of our interactions with one another, and another way of depicting one’s identity and story.

Her recognition that telling her story – her felt/lived/embodied experience - via visual means has helped her develop a visual language was also a point of recognition for me. Around the time I read this article, I also had a conversation with a colleague which helped me to understand that which I knew intuitively but was struggling to express verbally, namely the articulation of my holistic experience of a moment of time in visual form. The term “embodied experience” suddenly meant something to me, as did its ability to be articulated in a language other than the spoken – i.e. a visual language.  This has been key to me starting to develop my visual language, or “visual grammar” as Murland terms it. She uses “the line as language” – harking back to the question in one of my tutorials “are the marks saying what you want to say?”. Now, at last, they are, and Murland’s article has helped me to articulate in text some of the sources, methodology and outcomes of my work.