Although I decided where I wanted to go with this assignment a while ago I have nevertheless continued to give it further thought as I work on it. Given the amount of Fay Godwin’s work I have been looking at in response to the course material of late I have given some consideration to another possible approach.
As I have written at various times, going right back to EYV, one of the strands in Godwin’s work that particularly appeals to me, increasingly at a political level, is those images that deal with people being excluded from a landscape: the ubiquitous notion of the “keep out” sign. This seems to me to be a particularly negative way of turning a space into a place. It does to though by exclusion: what was previously an open space, theoretically at least, open to and accessible by all, becomes a place, a specific place from which everyone other than the “owner” is now excluded.
Many of us do it, putting up fences and hedges around our homes, installing gates, intercoms and CCTV (as I have explored within my own village). Increasingly corporations are creating places around their buildings that appear to be public until you run into the security guards, note the cameras, discover the rules and regulations specifying what you can and cannot do (No Food, No Drinks, No Dogs, no rights!). Perhaps it is a natural human impulse.
I do think this offers fertile ground. I am though wary at the moment of getting into another rant (I do not know about any readers but it makes me tired) and so am going to stick with the more neutral, unpolitical approach that I have already started to work on.
So far as that project is concerned, having started out concentrating just on memorial benches, I have discovered that there are not in fact quite as many locally, despite the surprisingly dense cluster within a kilometre of my house, to provide enough material. I have however observed plenty of other, non-memorial, benches that share the same sort of apparently almost random citing that creates “non-views”, spaces becoming a sort of non-place, or at least one without any obvious significance. As they all have this particular factor in common I am going to spread my net a bit wider to include some of these other idiosyncratic spaces/places.
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 