Deep Encounters

///rush.handicaps.infuses

A multifaceted mapping of a small piece of land – a ‘Walking the Land’ artists’ project initiated in 2025 by Janette Kerr.

A year-long project involving 13 artists working in different areas/locations. Working collaboratively, but from different parts of the world, periodic conversations about how artists are each representing their chosen piece of land are planned, and prompts for shared activities. Identifying each area of study via Google mapping / OS map / w3ws, each artist has walked the perimeter of their patch, tracing the outline, recording what it contains using photos, words, drawings, maps, sound etc. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A small community apple orchard forms part of Sara’s village green, opposite her house. It is a very familiar and well-loved dimension of her village and as such, she is fascinated to get under the skin of it. Sara would like to understand it in its ecological entirety. She will seek out and reinterpret the ecological relationships within this small, managed patch of land. Rather than measuring, weighing or researching the facts about this place, she wants to become a deeper part of it.

She is lured by the uncertainty of discovering new insights and surprises found in a place already known. Sara will also invite members of the community to share her journey, collaborate and help to dig deeper into this place. 

A Deep Mapping Project

‘…..Places are not stable; they mean different things to different people – even different things at different times. The deep map recognises the slippery identity of place, and seeks to visualise the multiple identities that go towards constructing the human experience of place’. https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/lakesdeepmap/the-project/gis-deep-mapping/

We increasingly need to work in “the curious space between wonder and thought” a space where….“there is no single Disciplinary (in an academic sense) voice” (geographers Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift), …. the: “space–between representation and reality, language and life, category and experience” (feminist philosopher Geraldine Finn). Click this link to find out more.