-becoming-#langscape-[fold here] intra-rupting landscape, language, and the creative act

This fine art practice-led research sets out amongst the terrain of upland Britain. Impelled by the spirit of British Romanticism, Ancient Cynicism and the art of tactics in a contemporary context, the research interrogates language and employs writing to offer a new approach to landscape. Coleridge, Constable, Graham, Lanyon and Turner provide an art historical context to the idea of ‘landscape’. From an initial methodological focus on Baradian diffraction, attention is shifted to the employment of her concepts of ‘cutting together-apart’ and intra-action. These latter are re-purposed as the more muscular intraruption in which an exertive tearing is both uncomfortable and beneficial. Further concepts are mobilised to explore the terrains of landscape and writing: Deleuzian becoming and Foucauldian parrhēsia are utilised to reanimate human relationships to and with landscape. As a result, this thesis disjunctively combines language and landscape to propose the new term and concept of langscape. A term that recognises the impossibility of a (human) union with nature through words and writing whilst simultaneously revelling in the possibilities that recognition of the difference provides in a form of becoming-landscape. This research further proposes exertion as a logic for the creative act by recognising and embracing the performative potential of long-distance walking and running, and their disruptive relationship to writing and thinking. The potential of writing (as both a verb and a noun) is explored in a fine art doctoral research context with specific attention paid to the strategy of ‘art writing’. Resulting from this exploration, the binaric structuring of practice/theory is short-circuited by an exertive poiēsis that emerges from the performative activities of the research. The terrain and form of this writing enacts (and reconceives) the relationship of art and writing in and as the thesis. The thesis is written by the langscape