PhD Archive

Meeting with Adriaan Luijk about european networking of artists involved with landscape and rural development.Interesting research in the Netherlands – J.F.Coeterier – about how people both categorise and value landscape.

Photographic journey to the River Severn at Purton with Helen Keating, Alison and Roger Arnold. Each visit reveals new layers of how much this place is about resilience and thankfully, alongside the attempts to safeguard the land, the tidal Severn continues to provide a unique habitat for a wide selection of species.

Filming Walking the Land walk on Rodborough Common with director Mark Scott, presenter Ellie Harrison and crew, plus Kel Portman, Tom Keating, Chris Smith, Jilly Cobbe, Nik Taylor and Lucy Guenot. If used (we think 4th March), it will be interesting as it raises my concerns about art as entertainment and yet would be a good way of broadcasting the message. Not that there is a problem with art being entertaining – so long as it doesn’t stop there.

meeting with Sue Porter, Alison Parfitt and Glenn Hall to plan for people’s input to the journey and to develop “the offer” to transition towns. Route confirmed, clearer idea of who is doing what and strengthened concept of us all weaving our threads and what those threads might be.

updating website

Helen and I decided that the ground was too hard to lift the trees so instead cleared an area for future planting.I’m enjoying the pace and feel of making work on the ground rather than on a computer.

No one else came – interesting the effect of snow. Personally I love being out in it.

Met local people; young teenage lads out taking photos – nice chat. There has been a lot of national and local coverage of ‘Big Cat’ sitings lately and they were hoping to get photos of one. This appetite for a more wild aesthetic is interesting.

Sad news about friend and colleague who died last week – Chris was the leader of a team of landscape architects in Swindon who came up with this daffodil planting scheme in 1980/81

Snow – but the WtL meeting to develop River Project still goes ahead – see attachment one

Attachments

river-draft-1.2-1330019279.doc

Continued writing the Watery Landscapes paper and forwarded to Kel and Iain. Mainly a question of reformatting into our desired column structure – this was a very interesting way of interrogating our ideas. In particular it became clear that our observations were both about the WtL process and outcomes from the process as we experienced it. This seems to reflect the issues raised at the Swansea post graduate forum about research methodologies.

Afternoon spent with Kel and BBC researchers, Mark Scott and Leila Finikarides looking at the potential for art walking as a possible article on “Countryfile”. Message to give is about experiential learning. Photographs reflect the gradual journey from in to out.

a day administrating most of the various projects, preparing and a bit of re-writing the academic paper about the Drawing Symposium.

Particularly welcome positive response from Seb Buckton about the links between the Derby Walk and Transition Towns. Water seems to be a theme that we have in common.

Circulated ‘River’ project proposals from Ffin, Suze, Lucy and me.

Attachments

rk-river-severn-project-proposals-1329133511.doc

Tutorial with Dr. Rob Newell and Prof. Andrea Liggins. Agreed temporary change of supervision; while Rob is on sabbatical for the summer term, Catrin Webster will take his place.

Also post graduate forum with presentations by Amanda Roberts and Paul Woodland about the proposed Swansea Met. Conference in September with a provisional theme of: Methodologies in Visual Research – Practice Based and Practice led Research Models

Photo in the context of the paper Dr, Sue Porter and I are presenting at the Derby Conference.

Weekend at Center Parcs, Longleat. Interesting illusions of inside and outside created by “sub-tropical paradise”, with “inside” places opening onto another layer of inside space. Similarly, the design and location of chalets makes the outside very apparent from within and landscape dominant over built form, increased by traffic free cycling for much of the time… and the snow