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:
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.
