This is Landscape!

This is Landscape!

BRUCE DAVIES

This Is Landscape! is a series of short films made in response to the place and the literary depiction of Frenchman’s Creek and commissioned

by Kestle Barton Rural Centre for Contemporary Art. The starting point for the work is Davies’s interest in how cultural activity changes our perceptions of landscape and place and in turn how this affects our experiences of it. This collection, made with a video microscope, attempts to find room and understand the possibilities and difficulties of making work at a place heavily defined by a widely known cultural work. The collected sound samples and video images used in the films were taken during walks at a number of sites made famous by Daphne Du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek and the new cultural venture of Kestle Barton.This Is Landscape! literally examines the physical point of contact with the landscape at microscopic quarters in order to interpret the landscape in a new way.

Kestle Barton Rural Centre for Contemporary Art Manaccan, Helston Cornwall www.kestlebarton.co.uk

© Bruce Davies. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

This is Landscape - reinterpreting Frenchman’s Creek My work is inspired by the cultural history of the landscape, its changing use and the working processes and that occur there. The motivation for this work started here along with a desire to find new ways to look at, interpret and respond to the landscape and its meaning to us. I am particularly drawn to sites or places which have become inseparable or dominated by our cultural actions.

Actions (a novel in this instance) that leave an indelible mark imposed on a place can make it problematic when trying to respond to place from a fresh perspective. The affect of such activities that reference real places is not lost at Frenchman’s Creek.

This Is Landscape! takes this dilemma as a starting point to examine how our relationship changes when our perceptions and experiences of the landscape and place are affected by cultural works. Further to this is an interest to find working space at such sites in spite of any cultural baggage present, to develop possibilities for exploring creative responses that attempt to start a new chapter of interaction between site, contexts, cultural history and artist. Whether additional contemporary works made in reference to culturally busy places can create a widening of the dimensions of a site to act as a catalyst against cultural torpor.

Given the legacy of landscape art that still appears to be encumbered with issues of pictorial representation, on a regional level at least, a re-interpretation of Frenchmans Creek was an opportunity to strip away the context as laid down by Du Mauriers novel and produce a response that started by considering the traditional means of representing the landscape. But at the same time exploring new ways to side step conventional expectations by presenting a film based abstract about place without the usual references to context, given history and a definable narrative in an attempt to encourage the development of independent interpretations.

Bruce Davies

Bruce Davies has an established and dynamic practice that has become notable for the extensive platforms he has created for the presentation of his work and also for the formulation of his ideas. His interests in exploring practical applications for contemporary art, visual enquiry and research are prominent in his site specific explorations of contemporary land use. Recognition of the contexts of place play a fundamental part in the success of these often ambitious land based and urban projects that have been staged both across the UK and internationally. He is based in West Cornwall, UK.