Landscape and Memory

Schama, S., 1995, Landscape and Memory, Toronto: Random House of Canada

This project is rooted in an understanding of landscape as being more than a visual scene and with an interest in its capacity for both holding and reflecting myths and memories. In Landscape and Memory, Schama, with a curiousness and an alternating mixture of academic and personal voice, tracks persistent mythologies around the landscape. Schama divides these into wood, water and rock and investigates the places where threads of culture and nature touch, intertwine and reflect back on each other; the processes by which myths reflect distorted and reconstructed impressions back onto landscapes themselves.

Text Box: Figure 4: Anselm Kiefer, The Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen, 1974 (Schama, 1996, p18)

Xylothèque, Franeker. the Netherlands (photo Rosamund Purcell) (Schama, 1996, p18)
A picture containing indoor, sitting, table, white

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Anselm Kiefer, The Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen, 1974 (Schama, 1996, p18)

Schama’s two wooden books illustrate the contribution Landscape and Memory is making to my project. The first of these, an 18th Century Xylothèque (Figure 3), is described as a statement on the union of culture and nature (p19), a symbol of the scientific enquiry and poetic sensibility of the Enlightenment, and a product of the German development of modern farming. The work is an example of the concept of recursion, a keyword in my project, each work calling on itself within itself. The books also embody the keyword terroir; the very character of each book being drawn from the elements and process that have made it – from the scientific enquiry of taxonomy in its content and conception to the soil in which the specific sample tree was grown.

Schama refers extensively to the work and life of artist Anselm Kiefer throughout the book, drawing out his works’ links with cultural memory and exploring the reciprocal connections between Kiefer and the German landscape. Schama’s book utilises metaphor in describing the second book – Kiefer’s The Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen (Figure 4) – as “written in letters of fire” (p19) and speaking of leaves of a book/of a tree, illustrating an interconnectedness between this artwork and the landscape that is beyond representation. Schama’s observations of Kiefer’s work are of relevance to my project in describing an artwork as more than a representation. The object of the book is the landscape made literal, with the burnt pages not only evoking a ravaged landscape but transmitting meaning through its own materiality (Daly, 2016).

Landscape and Memory triggered this project and began a journey into exploring the interconnectedness of landscape, culture and artmaking; that we are represented in the landscapes we live in and tell stories about, and the landscapes live in us as well.

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