Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture published by Ashgate

• Edited by Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson, both at London Fieldworks, UK and Tracey Warr, Oxford Brookes University, UK
• This book explores the relationship between place and forms of thought and creative activity, relating Outlandia and the artists there to the tradition of generative thinking and making structures that have included Goethe’s Gartenhaus in Weimar, Henry Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond and Dylan Thomas’s writing shack in Laugharne.
  
  Based on a series of residencies and radio broadcasts produced by London Fieldworks in collaboration with Resonance 104.4fm, the Remote Performances project enabled twenty invited artists to consider and engage in transmissions, sound performances and dialogues on their artmaking strategies immersed in this specific rural environment of mountain, forest and river; flora and fauna. Some artists engaged in dialogue with people living and working in the area with a range of specialisms and experience in, for examples, forestry, mountain culture, wildlife, tourism, and local history. This book explores the ways in which being in the field impacts on artists and permeates through to the artworks they create. It considers the relationship between geography and contemporary art and artists’ use of maps and fieldwork. It charts these artists’ explorations of the ecological and cultural value of the natural environment, questioning our perceptions and relationships to landscape, climate and their changes. The book is an inspiring collection of ways to think differently about our relationship with the changing natural environment.
  
  The book includes essays by Jo Joelson, Francis McKee, Tracey Warr and Bruce Gilchrist, and texts, images and drawings by the artists: Bram Thomas Arnold, Ruth Barker, Ed Baxter, Johny Brown, Clair Chinnery, Kirsteen Davidson Kelly, Ben Drew, Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn, Goodiepal, Sarah Kenchington, London Fieldworks & Mark Vernon, Lisa O’Brien, Lee Patterson, Michael Pedersen, Geoff Sample, Tracey Warr and Tony White, reflecting on the notion of contemporary remoteness and creative responses to Outlandia and its wider context.
• Contents: Introduction, Jo Joelson; A survey of the terrain, Francis McKee; Kelpies, banshees and pibrochs heard in these parts, Geoff Sample; Like like, Michael Pederson; Selections from The Hut Book, Alec Finlay; From a train, Goodiepal; The sound of Lochaber, London Fieldworks and Mark Vernon; Geo graphy, Tracey Warr; There’s a monster in the nest-box, Clair Chinnery; In search of silence, Lisa O’Brien; Composing with place, Kirsteen Davidson Kelly; A sense of distance, Lee Patterson; Notes for a video, Benedict Drew; The contemporary remote, Bruce Gilchrist; Second sketch for ascent and descent, Ed Baxter; Euphonium at sea, Sarah Kenchington; Notes after a week of wandering, Bram Thomas Arnold; Echo. Genius loci, Ruth Barker; Into Outlandia, Johny Brown; High-lands, Tony White; Endnotes on remoteness, Clair Chinnery, Lisa O’Brien and Bram Thomas Arnold; Further resources; Index.
• Purchase the book from the Ashgate website with the following 50% discount code: 50DCB15N

Small Projects 2011 Shortlist

Outlandia has been shortlisted for The Architects' Journal Small Projects 2011

OUTLANDIA: PROJECT DESCRIPTION By Malcolm Fraser.

The Project Brief was nice and loose: an artists’ fieldstation in Glen Nevis, to allow and encourage creative interaction between artists and the land, its history and people. The site was even looser: somewhere in Glen Nevis. Where, exactly, grew out of a complex negotiation with partners, landowners and the local authorities, which brought to the surface some interesting tensions – a portion of the climbing fraternity, for instance, believes that hills should be for serious craggies only, and that artists should be kept away. On the ground, the choice of site grew out of long crawls through wet undergrowth and up wooded slopes, in clouds of midges and carpets of pine needles, in search of natural and human drama. The site chosen is full of it. Sitting half-way up the opposite side of the Glen to Ben Nevis, a visitor approaches Outlandia through the path we cut through the dense woods behind, descending out the musty dark of the trees into a big view which, from dark-to-light and framed by old, tall larches, opens-up across the Glen to the shoulder of the Ben. The view of great nature dazzles, but we soon start to see the multiplicity of human interaction with it: the routes threading across the view, from the main road and West Highland Way along the foot of the Glen to the tourist route up the Ben, with its strings of tiny bobbling hats working their way up the hill; the car parks, caravan parks and visitor centre, places of the modern tourist trade; the old mills and older burial mounds, traces of more ancient useage; and the great industrial aluminium smelter across the Glen and the hydro that powers it. Nothing could be further from the idea of the Highlands as “unspoilt wilderness”. We have long been part of this landscape, and it seems unlikely that any artists making work for, from or around Outlandia would fail to enjoy and illuminate the tensions around nature, industry, tourism and heritage. The building itself sits out from a 45 degree slope: a treehouse, part-built out the trees cut down to form the site, entered across a bridge from the slope behind; a simple box, leaning-out into the view with big windows opening-up to it. Part of the building of it was a low-impact, eco-friendly use of material recovered from the site; part the opposite, high-impact and hairy landings of concrete, for the foundations, from a helicopter. Construction was part-joinery, part-forestry and part-mountain rescue, with a local contractor who nicely combined all three, and an unusual set of Risk Assessments.

OUTLANDIA LAUNCH

The Outlandia project was finally launched on September 19th 2010 as part of The Great Glen Artists Airshow, an event organised by The Arts Catalyst in partnership with HICA (Highland Institute of Contemporary Art) and London Fieldworks. London Fieldworks worked with Edinburgh based Malcolm Fraser Architects to design a multi-purpose platform for the use of local and invited artists in Glen Nevis. The original proposal was in response to an invitation from the Highland Council to create a lasting contemporary art legacy for the Year of Highland Culture. Click on images below to enlarge.

The studio was constructed by local builder Norman Clark and is accessible from the Peat Track to Fort William via a 1/4 mile larch boardwalk built by Dave John and his students from the Environmental Conservation group at Lochaber College.

The Artist, Adam Dant was commissioned to make an aerial map (A Journey Through the Great Glen to the Library of Outlandia) charting the journey from The Highland Institute of Contemporary Arts (HICA) near Inverness, to Outlandia near Fort William. Complimentary to the map, the interior of Outlandia has been transformed by Dant into a place for the "categorisation of knowledge and observations" in the style of the Scottish Enlightenment, a trompe l'oeil library dubbed the "Bibliotheque Outlandia". Visitors to the library can inscribe their own titles onto the spines of the books. 

All photos by Kristian Buus

Tracey Warr AIR 2010

 Notes on Beginning a Residency in Outlandia, Glen Nevis

  
[D]amp seeps into my clothes after a while of sitting. The completely waterproof swim-hike bag would be useful here to keep your papers and dry clothes dry. I want to design a writer’s toolbelt to walk with – customised clinches for pens, pencils, pencil sharpener, small notepad, spare ink cartridges, map, reading glasses, camera. Outlandia makes me think of other dramatic writers’ shacks like Dylan Thomas’ shed at Laugharne overlooking the stupendous blues and birds of the estuary. I like the discipline of coming up here each day. When I walk across the room the structure sways with me and the metal window-hook hanging on the wall knocks against the wood shadowing my footsteps, so that momentarily I think I am not alone. The wooden space is empty except for a log to sit on, a makeshift table and the astonishing view out the window across to Meall-an-t and the tourists’ path up to the Ben Nevis summit. Outlandia is a concentration space, a no distraction space, a get on with it space.

Outlandia is off-grid. Even when there is the urge to be ascetic and minimal, to abstain from the stuff of consumer culture, how we need things. At Outlandia we are already needing a key, a chair, a table, a ladder to clean the pine cones from the skylight, a kettle powered by battery, sun, wind or water. But, writes Elaine Scarry (whose book I have carried up here with me), ‘the general phenomenon of invention could not possibly originate in the perception of need, for the vast and unanticipatable benefits of the object bear no resemblance to anything conjured up by the narrow word “need”’. In Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe ‘his reconstruction of civilization, is from a very early moment characterized by surfeit. [He] wilfully “makes” merely to make.’ Imagination, Scarry argues, has generosity and largesse. Luxury attempts to announce a distance from fear, death and failure. ‘Imagination has an inherent tendency toward excess, amplitude and abundance, it is a shameless exponent of surfeit’, because it is motivated by the deprivations of physical and psychological vulnerability and eventually mortality.

According to Scarry ‘the made object is a projection of the human body’. Bandages and clothes mimick the protective work of skin; glasses, telescopes, microscopes, cameras, mime the lens of the eye; sheaths and shelters mime the womb; the pump imitates the heart; the electrical nervous system of the body is mimicked by the computer. Mechanomorphic objects all around us mime our teeth, our skeleton, hinge joints and ear. The printing press, written history, photographs, libraries, films, Xerox machines, materialise the elusive embodied capacity of memory. When John Fitch first imagined the steam engine he was limping.

‘The created object,’ Scarry goes on, ‘itself takes two different forms, the imagined object and the materialized object: that is, “making” entails the two conceptually distinct stages of “making-up” and “making real”’. The imagination first ‘makes a fictional object’ and then ‘makes a fictional object into a non-fictional object’. Outlandia is a made-real object – a shelter and an imagination generator. But it also continues as a fiction – generating imagination in longing, in absence from it, at the bottom of the hill, in the city.

Outlandia is the new echo of the ruined, rimed, Victorian weather observatory on the summit of Ben Nevis. The speed of weather coming up the Glen and moving fast across the face of Meall-an-t. Wispy white clouds love the mountain, flow into its gullies. They are like slow smoke on the hill. Now they swirl grey, clothing the mountain, draping it, shrouding it. Rain comes down hard. Suddenly the black clouds lift like a striptease, like a theatre-curtain, revealing a green mountainside streaked with white boulders, a veiny network of burns, brown heather, sun-lit circles. The colour of everything is subtly altered after its rain-washing, the green refreshed, the white more vivid. Now the cloud is horizontal, skirting the tops, scudding.

Looking through treetops, across and below to moss and fern. Immersed in a green world. Earth’s colour swatch. Emerald, lime, grass green, bottle green, lizard green, grasshopper green, jade, verdant, greenwood, viridescent, malachite, beryl, jungle green, Lincoln green, pea green, sea green, sage, celadon, viridian, bice, chlorophyll, leaf green, olive, chartreuse, jealous green, salad-days, greenhorn, apple green, green fingers, greengrocer, Green Man. Green is the colour that the human eye is most acutely tuned to because of our heritage as hunter-gatherers, woodlanders.

Scarry writes of ‘the tyranny of green things’. She says that the natural world is immune, inanimate, inhuman, indifferent, dispassionate, and that we build cities shutting out the green world to soothe our distress at the reminder of mortality visible in greenness – the process of organic growth and decay which we are also, irretrievably, implicated in. She writes that the objects we make are compassion-bearing. ‘Objects exist to remake human beings to be warm, healthy, rested, acutely conscious, large-minded’. Yes the rotting brown mush of old mushrooms, the fallen trees, the age of the rocks and the landscape compared to me, are a memento mori, but being here is also Joy. Some things you don’t want to write about or photograph, just look, just be. A month-long residency in Outlandia as a journal of continuous thought. Could you think and write your way past Romanticism and if so where would you get to? 

Tracey Warr
https://traceywarrwriting.com/home/ 

CONTEXT

Outlandia, originally conceived by London Fieldworks for the Year of Highland Culture is situated within a highland landscape with distinctive views of Glen Nevis and Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain, looming directly opposite. Outlandia has been inspired by legends of forest outlaws and outsiders, both an off-ground place of imagination and fantasy and a real place of inspiration. 
London Fieldworks have made a series of ambitious art works in remote, rural locations, two previously in Scotland: the telematic artwork, Syzygy linked the ICA, London with Sanda Island in 1999, and Little Earth (funded by SAC, ACE, Highland Council & Lochaber Enterprise), which involved the formal twinning of two historic mountain-top observatories: the former Ben Nevis Observatory and Haldde northern lights observatory in the Norwegian Arctic. Little Earth also included the creation of a touring audio-visual installation and a publication and was presented at the Nevis Centre as part of the Fort William Mountain Film Festival in January 2005. The exhibition at Fort William involved the participation of 13 rural Lochaber schools in an outreach programme hosted by the Nevis Centre and the West Highland Museum. 
Following the Little Earth project London Fieldworks were invited by the Highland Council to make a proposal to celebrate the Year of Highland Culture that would create a lasting contemporary art legacy for the Fort William area. Outlandia is the outcome, a platform from which to consider creative responses to the environment. The proposal was inspired by London Fieldworks' previous experience working in Lochaber: whilst there is an abundance of artistic talent and creativity in the Highlands there are few dedicated contemporary arts facilities in Fort William or in the surrounding area. Many visitors to Little Earth expressed their interest in experiencing more contemporary art projects by visiting artists in the future; at the same time they lamented the lack of facilities, studios and galleries that could help to bring contemporary artists to the region. 
The history of Glen Nevis describes an ever-changing relationship between people and land. The manner in which the landscape is worked and lived on changes from generation to generation. Throughout the length of Glen Nevis are many clearly visible ruins of crofts and byres, giving some indication of previous populations. The Outlandia project is sensitive to this shifting ecology between human population, industry and landscape. The site is on Forestry Commission land overlooking the southwest facing side of the glen with its ancient, native trees. This context makes explicit the dichotomy within a landscape under pressure to function as an area of outstanding natural beauty (the area has been branded Outdoor Capital of the UK) as well as a resource for society's raw materials - a schism common to many rural communities. 
During its time of service, Outlandia will provide a multi-purpose platform for the use of diverse community groups as well as selected artists and researchers. Outlandia is in line with The Scottish Forestry Strategy that aims to create opportunities for more people to enjoy trees, woods and forests in Scotland, and to help communities benefit from woods and forests.

Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson 2008
(London Fieldworks)