In June and July 2002 two display cases in the foyer of the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, were filled with the results of eight collaborations between artists and geographers. This exhibition entitled Landing was one moment in a longer creative research project Visualising Geography. This publication is not only a catalogue of that exhibition but a documentation of that longer project. It is also, in some senses, a report on a research. Visualising Geography was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Board Innovation Award and like all research council funded projects the research grant must be accounted for at the end of the period of award. While writing this introduction, the request for this formal report has arrived asking the award holder to reflect on the achievements of the research, inviting responses to questions that include: What impact has your research had in advancing creativity, insights, knowledge or understanding in your subject area and how is this of interest and value to the research community and wider audiences? If your research was a collaborative project, what has been its impact on wider collaboration in its subject area(s) both in the academic community and beyond? These are hard questions to answer and in some respects cannot be answered in any final or definitive sense, as the project's afterlife continues beyond the exhibition and our attempt to document the project here. As this has been a collaborative project twinning artists and geographers, and collaboratively undertaken by the project team - a curator, two academics and an artist - these questions of collaboration and of what constitutes our 'research community' have been central to our discussions over the past ten months. Though the arrival of the Arts and Humanities Research Board report form signals the academic context of this text, working within, around and beyond the conventions of academic research has been a continuous part of this project.
Its origins lie in our wish to explore further what has been for some the unexpected role of the visual artist, Kathy Prendergast, as a research fellow in a university geography department (or to give her her full title, Arts and Humanities Research Board Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts), and before her the artistic presence of Perdita Phillips whose installation transformed a decommissioned laboratory into a reflection on the practices and poetics of fieldwork. To do so we developed a project which brought more artists into the department and into contact with more colleagues across the range of the department's research interests. The project's origins also lie in a newly-established research funding scheme whose unusual openness to the uncertainties of research suited the goals of our experiment. In a welcome contrast to most research council funding schemes, the Arts and Humanities Research Board Innovation Award was established to fund exploratory research "where the concepts may be speculative or the outcomes uncertain" and "in an environment which allows the possibility of 'failure' or negative outcomes". Visualising Geography has been a tentative and adventurous experiment in exploring the relationships between intellectual, research-based and creative practice in geography and the visual arts; adventurous in terms of the time-scale we set for completing the formal outcomes of exhibition and this text, and tentative in terms of what we hoped might emerge. Our experiment had a structure but also a fluidity which we hoped might facilitate fruitful encounters and conversations across the categories of academic and artistic work without being prescriptive. Its structure was based on eight working projects involving artists and geographers, three project workshops represented by the extracts that feature here as fragments of those conversations, the preparation and display of the art work for Landing the exhibition, and the continued collaborative work that followed for the Landing publication.
Visualising Geography also stretched the familiar structure of research projects led by academics and supported by research assistants. Our 'research assistant' in this case was our guest curator Ingrid Swenson whose role was to select and invite artists, initiate the pairings and manage the process. This meant relinquishing some control as well as enjoying our confidence in her expertise and efficiency. Though we realised that our title, Visualising Geography, might imply that the role of the artists was to visualise in the sense of 'illustrate' the academic work of geographers, from the beginning the project sought to explore but also push against disciplinary traditions and the categories of the 'academic' and 'creative', the 'geographer' and the 'artist'. This has involved considering the multiple connections as well as differences between these categories and traditions. One key point of intersection between academic geography and the visual arts is geography's own tradition of visual representation through mapping and modelling. Another is the shared interests of geographers and artists in natural environments and natural processes, the spaces and methods of scientific knowledge production and the traditions of natural science, geographical imaginations, the political geographies of state borders and boundaries, the social and cultural geographies of migration, belonging, displacement and border crossing cultural flows. Thematically there is much common currency between artists and geographers. This has meant that the work of artists has been a resource for cultural geographers just as the spatial turn in cultural theory over the last two decades has marked both arenas.
At the same time there are significance differences in the methods and media of academic geography and visual art. With one, research output is conventionally defined as texts in the form of books and journal articles and performances in the form of conferences, papers and teaching lectures; with the other, practitioners are in principle open to a range of forms and processes. At least conventionally, one is associated with objectivity, authority, truth and rigour; the other allowing for imaginative indeterminacy. But this attention to differences and intersections is also complicated by the diversity within the categories of academic geography and contemporary visual art. Geography - a heterogenous field of knowledge comprised of natural science, social science and humanities traditions - is characterised by a spectrum of philosophies and spaces of knowledge production: the archive, library, laboratory, lecture theatre. Its 'field' can encompass a range of natural environments or a range of social contexts. There can be as much difficulty communicating across these widely varying research areas, methodologies and theoretical approaches within geography and amongst geographers as across disciplines. To complicate things further, academic geography and the visual arts can also only be crudely distinguished in terms of a division between intellectual and research-based work and creative and practice-based endeavours. One of our initial aims, after all, was to consider the creative and aesthetic dimensions of academic work. The limits of such an easy division are perhaps most evident in the research that underpins or is in effect the process of much contemporary art but, as our workshop discussions continued, the categories of the 'artist' and 'research/scientist' began to shift, realign, dissolve and sometimes re-crystalise as people talked about what they did and how and why. A description of ethnographic research at one point was redefined as art by artists. In other instances academics interested in more imaginative or inventive research methods encountered artists committed to rigorous empirical research.
More widely, Visualising Geography posed a series of overlapping questions: What sorts of imaginative, creative and reflective practices are involved in the production of academic text and works of visual art? How do the conventional forms of academic and artistic output shape different kinds of knowledge and understanding? What is meant by collaboration and how do different models of this relationship work? What might result from the encounter between shared and distinctive approaches? What are the similarities and differences between notions of individual autonomy and achievement in the academic and artistic domains, and to what extent are they disturbed by new forms of collaboration between them? Visualising Geography was not about artists depicting the work of geographers, nor about geographers utilising an artist's work as source material for analysis. We hoped for more productive and challenging exchanges, despite being to some degree sceptical or at least not absolutely assured of the ease or benefits of these relationships. This 'experiment' involved all the sensitivities of any social relationship. It brought together individuals with different sorts of expectations, interests and amounts of time. For many participants these collaborations have led to unexpected new directions in their work, to thoughtful conversations and rewarding exchanges, and to relationships that will continue beyond this project's formal ending. Each collaboration has its own dynamic, depth and character. Those that were halting or hesitant, that stalled or faltered, or were marked by senses of diffidence, insecurity, defensiveness, resistance or assumptions of authority are by their nature difficult to document - the collaborative enquiry rather than expose is more appropriate here. These discoveries of limits of interest, time or understanding are as significant as the meeting points across different ways of thinking and working. Landing reflects the varied nature and diverse dynamics of these relationships. True to the project's inter/cross-disciplinary nature and collaborative character, it sits between the conventions of research report and exhibition catalogue, between academic writing and artistic work, posing explicit questions and offering suggestive reflections.
Felix Driver, Catherine Nash, Kathy Prendergast