Laurie Reynolds

Abstract

It is the intent, by working within the expanded field of photography, sculpture, video archiving and writing practice, to create a new theoretical model of landscape’s agency as co-author and collaborator. The inquiry is approached through a Deleuzian sense of crystallization; a process of forming concepts through a series of encounters with post-industrial landscapes. Through practice, these encounters are an attempt to understand the nature of collaborating with a non-human agency; explored not through historical, material, or evolutionary origins, but rather, through the conditions that afford the emergence of a collaborative practice. These encounters are transcribed and presented through the metaphor of the Earth’s geological formation, deploying a vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines including the sciences, mathematics, arts, and philosophy. In lieu of chapters are a series of plates, named after plate tectonics, they behave similarly to the movements of the Earth’s surface, they conceptually overlap, crash into each other, shift and merge, forming and re-forming new territories. The mapping of these ‘plates‘ is a form of Deleuzian rhizome. It is in the movement between these plates where tensions and gaps in the visual and theoretical discourse are exposed, articulating the embodiment of a diffractive entanglement. These plates reside in both a conflicting and harmonious open system employing diverse approaches to collaboration. The Progenitor Masses plate, for example, introduces the discourses constructed through a collaboration with non-human agency at a tin and arsenic mine; the Pangaea plate considers the agents at play alongside the aesthetics framed through the concept of indeterminacy; the Paragenesis plate explores the entangled nature of deploying diffractive methods through the concept of intra-action; the Tectonics plate explores an iron mine where the concept of the anorganic forms new ways of knowing; the Paleocurrent plate explores the reproduction of Strindberg’s Celestographs, enabling nature to participate in the creative process; the Pahoehoe plate presents a critical framing for the engagement of non-human and human agentic collaboration through metal industry locations within UK. Postindustrial landscapes represent locations where there is a pre-existing relationship of human and non-human interactions, which both have imbued influence on each other. Locations of copper, iron and tin production were chosen to explore the differences and diversity of each non-human agent whilst maintaining comparable constants; material of the metal and human influence of the practice, brought to each location. The findings discovered through the inquiry are crystallised within the concluding Pneumatolysis plate. Tangential to all these plates, the Paralogue, acts as a legend to the rhizomic map in the sense of an extended glossary and context. This practice-led inquiry reveals that collaboration with a non-human agency is not reducible to a single approach, but rather, it is an entangled process of working with multiple agencies and concepts. These collaborations and their transcription afford new knowings to emerge, including: a new theoretical model of non-human agency discovered through creative collaborations with landscapes; a new territory of photography comprising a mix of novel and composite methods; and a toolbox of new concepts and ideas. The significance of this new knowledge is that it establishes new practices, a new lexicon and set of definitions that can be used by other practitioners and researchers in their investigations into the agency of landscape.

Keywords

Process, Practice-Led, Non-human Agency, Landscape, Photography, Collaboration

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Date

2023

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