This feels a slightly odd mixture of materials to consider and as a result I suspect my comments and thoughts below are similarly going to be a bit of a mixed bag.
Ingrid Pollard’s work is interesting – I do not think I have come across it before – but I have to confess that as an ageing white male it does not really speak to me. I simply do not share her experiences so I can only imagine (which is by no means the same thing as understanding, let alone experiencing) how she might have felt in the countryside. I can see that there is a popular perception that the Black experience is an urban one and in all of my years of tramping about I have to say that I have not been conscious of seeing many people of colour. Particularly in areas of the countryside close to urban areas where there are significant Asian ethnic minority populations, as Simon Roberts goes on to point out in his blog post, it has not been uncommon in my limited experience to see people out and about and apparently at ease in the countryside. I am intrigued by this apparent different between different communities and wonder why it is there. Roberts unfortunately does not really address this, so perhaps it is a bit of a puzzle for him.
My own experience of this is perhaps a bit distorted by where I live. It is some years since I regularly went walking in some of our more famous bits of countryside: the Peaks, Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, and so on. I now live in a largely rural county (not the largest by any means but quite big and with the lowest population density in England) and just by stepping out of my village I am in the country. Not grand nor dramatic but countryside nevertheless, and quiet. The BAME population locally is very small. The nearest significant population, mostly of people originally from South Asia, is in Newcastle and by most standards is still quite small. Rarely do I see them out and about. Perhaps that is because it is such a small, rural population around here and they do not feel comfortable? I do not know but it is striking. To put things in a bit more perspective though if you go to our own “big hills”, the Cheviots which are in many ways equivalent to the Lake District hills, in some places it is possible to go all day and not see a soul, of any ethnicity!
On a different point, I did listen to the Tate audio programme. I have to say that audio is not really a very successful medium alone for discussing visual arts. Without being able to see the works under discussion I found it difficult properly to take on board the points being made and so did not find that I got much out of this. I also have to say that I found the quality of the sound a bit patchy so that it was sometimes hard to follow properly what was being said; and no, that was not just because I am a bit deaf in one ear!
The other audio piece, which I thought did work rather better, possibly because I am more familiar with her work, the episode of Desert Island Discs featuring Fay Godwin, was entertaining but I did not really think I got much if anything new about her work. I think I got much more from the material that we looked at earlier in this module, not least the old Melvin Bragg documentary. Not particularly revelatory but at least mildly diverting. My serious point here though is that I did not feel the move from Pollard’s work, with its ethnic social implications, to Godwin’s more political work, was entirely comfortable.
The same might be said about the foot and mouth disease work of John Darwell and Clive Landon. This is certainly political work with much in common with Godwin but I am far from sure how it fits with the issues of personal identity. So far as this work is concerned, unfortunately I could not find much of Landon’s work online so drawing comparisons with Darwell’s is difficult. The sense I get though is that Landon’s is much more visceral, disturbing. Darwell’s actually reminds me of some of how it felt at the time living within rural communities that were affected by the disease: a strange sense of unreality and physical distance – large parts of the county were closed off and people were distanced from places affected. I remember road blocks and barriers, road diversions, disinfection points where the car was sprayed with chemicals, ominous clouds of smoke in the distance. Where I live is only a few miles from a farm that was at least the epicentre of the outbreak of disease locally and one of the earliest nationally that was affected. Local folk-lore still has it that DEFRA (or whether the government department was called back then, it is constantly changing) were buying up timber (you could not get the likes of old railway sleepers for garden landscaping for love nor money) for weeks before the outbreak eventually went public for the ubiquitous pyres once the slaughter started. It is strange but as I write this – it was a very bad time for the local agricultural community and I have not though about it for years – I can recall the smell of disinfectant and bonfire, a not very pleasant note on which to stop for now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00947zh
http://johndarwell.com/index.php?r=image/default/category&alias=dark-days
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/conversation-pieces-ingrid-pollard-on-landscape
http://we-english.co.uk/blog/2009/01/16/contested-countryside/
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 