by Susan Brind, Alex Hale and Jim Harold
The Place
The Hamiltonhill area and the Claypits lie just to the north of the centre of the City of Glasgow, Scotland. The landscape, let’s call it that, has become a parcelled-up and owned place: owned by amongst others, the Hamilton Family, whose name interestingly derives from hamel, the Old English word for crooked, and dun, meaning hill. Over the course of centuries, the place has witnessed a complex range of human activity and the area, as we now see it, has become a palimpsest of human and more-than-human (animal, vegetable, mineral) activity: of agriculture, extraction, exploitation and neglect (terrain vague). Through its various emergences, it has appeared as wilderness, as an industrial hub, an abandoned feral space, locally referred to as ‘the Cowp’ (Old Scots for both a midden and something off-kilter, amongst other things). Its most recent manifestation is as a re-imagined eco-nature reserve (wild-like) that is now a place of leisure, a local resource, and a thoroughfare directly connecting the community of Hamiltonhill with the City.
The Research:
Since 2021 we have walked the land of Hamiltonhill, together, alone and with others, using a 2-year period as a window––and a mirror––through which to physically encounter and experience landscape change and re-purposing, as well as changes in the communities’, and our own valuing and shifting perception of it. We have walked the area, we have gleaned information from traces left in the landscape. We have absorbed the weather, talked with those we encountered, and delved in archives. We have also consulted maps dating from the 17th and 18th centuries to the present.
Our research has taken a non-invasive archaeological and artistic approach to site: where site is recognised as an assemblage that is constituted through time, artefacts, our presence – amongst others – in place and out of place, and order and disorder. We have moved across the surface of the landscape, each considering the surface detail and occurrence and affect (Robinson & Kutner 2018 and Deleuze 1988) – the actual, as in things, thoughts, connections, etc – alongside documenting the experience of place. Our investigations include consideration of the historical, social, cultural, natural, and linguistics, as layers of thought, response and naming that shape attitudes to landscape: this landscape, this place.
The Question:
Our speculative process has found focus through asking: Can our collaborative, cultural understandings of the changes (disruptions, ruptures and reclamations) witnessed at Hamiltonhill teach us about how we conceive and position landscape, as a thing and an art-efact?
Our methods and approaches:
We consider speculation as method by exploring collaborative practices. It is a process that enables our individual disciplinary practices to combine, contrast and create new ways of thinking within a specific landscape. We acknowledge the urgent need for ontological shifts within our disciplines. However, we do not consider our speculative approach to re-define our disciplines and subject areas, rather to expand them for future applications. The textual and visual languages we have marshalled to position Hamiltonhill and the Claypits within the conceptual frame of productive and non-productive landscapes, now and in the past, move us towards a shared language that expands transdisciplinary methods of engagement with place and matter, including the more-than-human, acknowledging the entanglement of ourselves and the environment (Morton 2009, Barad 2006).
Dates
2021-2023 / ongoing
