Where We Come From, and What We Carry With Us
On poetry, painting and the landscapes that make us who we are.
I've spent much of this week thinking about two poems with my students: Carol Ann Duffy's The Map-Woman and Elizabeth Brewster's Where I Come From. Both explore the relationship between landscape and identity, and how the places we have lived become part of who we are. Then, rather unexpectedly, I found myself thinking about them in an art gallery.
I spent a wonderful couple of hours at Rye Art Gallery this weekend, where fourteen paintings by Joan Eardley are hanging alongside the work of contemporary landscape painter Natasha Cooke. Natasha was leading a walk and talk through the exhibition, and one of the things she said stopped me in my tracks. She doesn't begin her paintings with sketches. She begins with writing.
Not descriptions of what she can see, but deeply personal reflections on her relationship with the landscape. Conversations with the places she visits, the memories they stir and the feelings they provoke (and occasionally the animals that come by for a visit). The writing becomes a way of finding her place within the landscape before she begins to paint it. I was back with Duffy and Brewster.
In The Map-Woman, Duffy imagines a woman whose hometown is quite literally mapped across her skin. The streets, buildings and geography of the place become inseparable from her identity. Even when she tries to escape her past, she cannot simply shed it - what she loses is more than her past, she loses her future self too. The landscape is not something she looks at. It is something she carries.
Brewster approaches the idea differently. In Where I Come From, the places we have inhabited shape the people we become. Landscape is absorbed through the senses, through sounds, smells, seasons and memories. We may leave a place, but something of it travels with us.
What struck me was that Natasha's paintings seemed to be exploring the same questions, but in reverse. Rather than asking how a place becomes part of us, she asks how we might put something of ourselves back into a place. Her landscapes are not simply representations of fields, trees and coastlines. They are records of her encounters with them. She even incorporates fragments of the landscape itself into the paint: grass, leaves, mud. The boundaries between the artist, the material and the place begin to dissolve. I think there is something rather wonderful about that.
We often teach students to identify imagery, metaphor, symbolism and structure. All important, of course. But sometimes we can become so preoccupied with how a writer creates meaning that we forget to ask the more interesting question. Why did they need to write this in the first place?
What is it about a place, a memory or an experience that makes someone want to turn it into words? Why does Duffy imagine a woman who cannot escape the map of her past? Why does Brewster return to the landscapes of childhood? And why does a painter sit down to write before picking up a brush? These are not simply questions about technique. They are questions about what it means to be human. So I return to my preoccupation - asking why is where the most interesting analysis begins. Not with spotting a metaphor, but with recognising the thought, the feeling or the contradiction that made the metaphor necessary.
I drove home from Rye thinking about the landscapes I carry with me, and those my students carry too. Some are places we have left behind. Others are places we are still trying to understand. And that, whether we are writing poetry, analysing literature or painting a landscape, seems like a very good place to start.
The photographs are mine, taken at Rye Art Gallery. I've done my best with the gallery lighting, but these are paintings that really deserve to be seen in person - and some have Natasha’s stories with them. They're hanging until 22 November, so don't say I didn't tell you.
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