Touching Topography: Negotiating Landscape Encounters with ‘Several Parts’ of the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

This collaborative research project explores the significance of the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty as a meaningful site for contemporary society and especially for a small selection of artists who reside there, some of them, for over thirty years. The research has enquired as to the possible agency of the landscape in expressive media and the artist’s part as catalyst in the creative process. Over the last four hundred years, many representations of landscape in Western Europe, including those of the Wye Valley, have reduced human experience of topography to a vertical, flat and oblong plane. By being framed, drawings, prints and paintings have hedged in foliage, cordoned vistas and fenced off panoramas. Such depictions have arguably reduced a comprehensive, corporeally centred encounter to an ‘ocularcentric’ one. Subsequently, due to the continued nature of framing, photography, and more recently, smartphone photography has done little to dissolve the frame placed between us and the world we witness. Such photography repeatedly reinstates the visual values of others and continues to centre on the visual account of reality. A botanically abundant setting such as the Lower Wye Valley is arguably a sensorially stimulating site; a place within which to be near living (and dying) matter; investigations were therefore situated within the predominantly arboreal landscape along the Wye, roughly between Ross and Chepstow and through the implementation of a broad range of intentionally immersive research methodologies. By using auto-ethnography, observation, ambulatory interviews, researcher-led group walks and making pilotstudies, it was hoped that any resulting data would be informed by actual encounters with the material nature of the location. By adopting a physically centred approach to the study, it was the intention to elicit primary responses from participants as part of iv endorsing a more multi-modal approach to experiencing landscape with the intended result being a more ecologically and empathetic relationship with place