Domestic animals: Charting land ownership, shifting fields, and spatial patterns in the Wenning Valley.

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

Abstract / Description of output

In a description of his drawing practices, Bryan Cantley establishes a distinction between the tangible artefact—the drawing—and what he terms the antifact, “the possible documentation of an impossible object.” Drawing, for Cantley, becomes a way of describing the unknowable (Kant’s noumenon, the thing-in-itself), an ordering of sensible manifestations (phenomena) which approach but never capture the thing. Domestic Animals is the working title for a series of mapping-drawings and speculative architectural projects exploring ecological and architectural forces—insensible and sensed—within a specific landscape: the valley and catchment area for the river Wenning, which passes from North Yorkshire into Lancashire through the Forest of Mewith. These mapping-drawings engage immeasurable things (the granularity of the debris of a moraine, or delineations inscribed into bedrock by passing glaciers), unconscious acts (impressions left by the iterative movement of machinery, or the incidental morphologies of agricultural constructions), and cadastral orthodoxies (land ownership, field divisions, ridings, and settlements). They document historic and current conditions of a space outside of common law (a ‘forest’) – from the right “to build and burn” and to “pannage” pigs, to the migration of the ‘July Barbers’, seasonal Irish workers who would pass through local market towns to work the harvests – and associated changes to ‘field figures’ which are exacerbating losses in biodiversity. By locating these conditions between the domestic (something possessed) and the animal (something which has breathe, spirit), and between something known and something impossible to know, the project positions drawing—tentatively, precariously—as a means by which to re-consider the complexities of landscapes which seem carefully composed.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusUnpublished - 27 Oct 2023
EventAHRA International Conference: Situated Ecologies of Care - Portsmouth School of Architecture, Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Duration: 25 Oct 202327 Oct 2023
https://ahra2023.org

Conference

ConferenceAHRA International Conference
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityPortsmouth
Period25/10/2327/10/23
Internet address

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