Words for Climbing Landscapes single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Words for Climbing Landscapes
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Rock climbers attribute qualities to a landscape, and claim ownership of their climbs by writing about their experiences. Climbing discourses mediate the exploration of the landscape and its written and pictorial representation. This paper examines how I as a climber know and experience landscape through the verbal and written word. As British academic Robert Macfarlane suggests, I began to learn to read and interpret the surface of the rock face before me through the shared cultural memory of a climber. Words render the formerly invisible nuances of a rock face, visible and real, and present the promise of an unexplored climbing route. The language of climbing associated with Mt Arapiles in Western Victoria informs both my studio practice and my engagement with a specific place. My art practice researches specific texts, guide books, climbing magazines, and club newsletters that reference the language, systems and structures through which the climbing fraternity constructs its vernacular landscape. These materials provide evidence that climbers share a common understanding and a particular reading of the landscape. Rock climbing publications affirm and reaffirm what climbers know and experience and will experience in the landscape. They demonstrate how language can create landscapes that suit a specific purpose and in turn influence our subjective experience of it.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Axon : Creative Explorations Materiality, Creativity, Material Poetics vol. 8 no. 1 May 2018 14093085 2018 periodical issue

    'Material poetics is not a new concept. The last century has seen the boundaries between creative genres dissolve, allowing attentiveness to materiality — once the exclusive concern of sculpture and craft — to pervade and tantalise less tangible practices. The development of a digital realm has not destroyed materiality, as originally feared, but served to foreground it; and the collaboration that can take place between digital and analogue, verbal and visual, is what drives this issue.

    'Writers such as Kristen Kreider (Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subject and Site, 2014), Lyn Hejinian (The Language of Inquiry), James Stuart (The Material Poem), Astrid Lorange (On Language as Material), and others deal with language, its material properties, its affinitive qualities. Where creative practitioners in general work with physical, tangible materials – everything from paper and paint through to the body – writers typically have nothing but language as their material. However, words, phrases, sentences and lines have their own tactility and affordances, and this is explored in the special section in this issue – ‘The Poetic Line’, edited by Owen Bullock. His introduction provides a context to the line, its property and its potential; and the contributions to that section, as well as contributions by poets Geoff Page and Jackson to the main section, exemplify the material practices of poets.'  (Editorial introduction)

    2018
Last amended 22 Jun 2018 10:57:53
http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-14/words-climbing-landscapes Words for Climbing Landscapessmall AustLit logo Axon : Creative Explorations
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