Independent artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces a special new essay for our Longer section, reflecting on his practice of open deep mapping as an inclusive, creative approach to working with and in place, and moving beyond ‘Business-as-Usual’.
1,500 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes
Longer is the place for works that don’t fit within the normal ‘short reads’ format of our blog. Longer is for essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail the creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces it here with an original post, where they can reflect on the motivation or inspiration behind the work or the process of creating it.
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Mark Goldthorpe and I have been having an exchange about open deep mapping and, as a result, he kindly suggested I write an introduction to this inclusive creative approach to place for ClimateCultures.The result is a longish essay called Open Deep Mappings today: a personal introduction — which is published today in the Longer feature of the site. Since that in turn needs an introduction on this blog, and because people understandably expect to know something about the relationship between what we do and what we say (perhaps the creative equivalent to being asked to “put our money where our mouths are”), I’ll start from an old blog post called Two dimensional aspects of deep mapping that shows just that and work my way forward into the essay.
As I say in that blog:
I’m interested in ‘polyvocal’ drawing that helps me explore ideas – often about landscape or landscape related issues – through combining different media and/or categories of sign. It’s an informed ‘playing around’ that aims to keep different elements ‘talking’ to each other, rather than to arrive at an aesthetic solution. However, aesthetic qualities remain indicative of imaginative ‘fitness for purpose’, like the goodwill that sustains a conversation between people who hold very different views on a single topic.
Fig. 1: A Hidden War (with and for Anna Biggs) Art Iain Biggs © 2009
For health reasons, I’ve had to give up the extended fieldwork that was central to the open deep mapping I did between 1999 and 2013. That period of work produced a whole range of material, some of which appears in that old blog post, but also included everything from A Hidden War (with and for Anna Biggs) — a double mapping of Mynydd Epynt made as a result of a field trip organised by Mike Pearson [Fig. 1] — to 8 Lost Songs, an artist’s book and CD made in collaboration with the musician Garry Peters [Fig. 2]. However, my interest in open deep mapping as a process, and its influence on what is now primarily a studio-based, rather than walking-based, practice continues to this day.
Fig. 2: 8 Lost Songs, CD and Book cover Photograph: Iain Biggs
The first thing to say about open deep mapping is that, although as a process it may result in the production of non-fiction books, art works, performances, artist’s books, even unorthodox maps, it’s best understood as generating conversations-in-process about a place-in-time. (Hence the section in the essay that’s entitled Why ‘deep mappings’, not ‘deep maps’?)
Open Deep Mapping – an inclusive orientation
Fig. 3: Edge 2 – Fluctuations (for Josh Biggs) Art: Iain Biggs © 2009
Something of how my attempts to capture that ‘conversational’ element in recent two-dimensional visual form can be seen in the shift between two images – Edge 2: fluctuations for Josh Biggs [Fig. 3] (one of the set of three images made as a result of groundwork on the Isle of Mull and included in the Two dimensional aspects of deep mapping blog post) and Notitia 7: Tamshiel Rig [Fig. 4]. As one of a series of hybrid collage/painted construction pieces made since 2016, this attempts to convert my experience of deep mapping into a lyrical ‘micro-mapping’, one that evokes a condensed sense of the richness, the polyvocality, central to an expanded experience of place-in-time. Judith Tucker writes of this series of works that they provide:
the kind of levelling out, or lack of hierarchy of visual experience, that also occurs when walking. As when walking, it is up to us to consider what we are presented with. What is of the relative significance of a discarded wrapper, a stony outcrop, a rare plant, a dank smell, the sound of birdsong, of traffic or silence?
She then adds:
What is key in terms of environmental thinking is that Biggs is neither privileging the human view, nor is he writing himself out of the place… This kind of composite work with its constellation of viewpoints, montage, collage and bricolage does not allow any fixed reading of the landscape that is referenced. It is at times as if we are mapping from the inside of the land out.
Fig, 4: Notitia 7 Tamshiel Rig Art: Iain Biggs © 2018
As I hope this suggests, ‘place’ in the context of open deep mapping is best understood in Edward S. Casey’s sense, as: “an essay in experimental living within a changing culture”, and this notwithstanding “its frequently settled appearance”. But also as a space in Doreen Massey’s sense; that is as “a simultaneity of stories-so-far”. As the example of The Tahualtapa Project (concluded before the term deep mapping was first used) makes clear, open deep mapping is as much an inclusive orientation to the world as anything else.
A strange alchemy – working with/in place
Following on from that section I have included another, simply called Further examples, which includes links to eleven very different types of open deep mapping. That in turn is followed by a further section that explains my use of that term, called The ‘openness’ of open deep mappings. For those who want a better understanding of how open deep mapping sits in relation to other cultural concerns, I’ve included two sections, one on Contexts and consequences and the other called Open deep mappings as ‘partial’.
Throughout the Introduction I’ve tried to stress that open deep mapping is, as Judith Tucker notes of my Notitia works, based on the articulation of a constellation of viewpoints; that it does not allow any fixed or settled reading of place to take a once-and-for-all precedence over any other. I’ve also tried to stress that open deep mapping is not a strictly bounded ‘genre’ but bleeds almost imperceptibly into other approaches and practices.
The example of this I end with is the Irish poet Eavan Boland’s book of photographs and poems called A Poet’s Dublin, which I see as a ‘close cousin’ to an open deep mapping. In that book Boland says, in conversation with the poet Paula Meehan, that at a certain point she realised that: “a city could be mapped, not just by cartography or history, but by instinct, memory, passion”. It’s something of that impetus, that same alchemical working out of wonder, listening, poetic insight, fine-tuned attention to what is, and a depth-soundings of deep memory, that inform both a work like A Poet’s Dublin and open deep mappings. And I believe that it is with that strange alchemy that we need to work in and with place, whatever we then choose to call the process involved, if we wish to help develop an understanding capable of moving us on from the mentality of ‘Business-as-Usual’ that now threatens not only our own psycho-social wellbeing but, in all probability, the ongoing survival of the entire biosphere.
Find out More
Iain’s full essay, Open Deep Mappings today: a personal introduction, is the second piece in our new feature, Longer.
Iain’s post on his own blog, Two dimensional aspects of deep mapping, appeared in May 2013 and includes many more of his artworks.
The quote from Judith Tucker is taken from ‘Walking backwards: Art between places in twenty-first century Britain’ (Judith Tucker, 2020) in David Borthwick, Pippa Marland & Anna Stenning (eds) Walking, Landscape and Environment (Routledge, p. 137).
Other quotes are from:
Edward S Casey (1993) Getting Back Into Place (Indiana University Press p. 31).
Doreen Massey (2005) For Space (SAGE Publications p. 11).
Eavan Boland 2014 (Paula Meehan & Jody Allen Randolph eds) A Poet’s Dublin (Carcanet Press p. 106).
‘Business-as-Usual’ is the term used by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone to denote a mentality predicated on such mainstream contemporary ‘progressive’ economic values as ‘getting ahead’, and a ’view of life’ in which “the problems of the world are seen as far away and irrelevant to the dramas of our personal lives”. See Macy and Johnstone (2012) Active Hope; How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (New World Library p. 15). You can read an excerpt, How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy, at the NEL blog.
Mynydd Epynt, the subject of one of Iain’s deep mapping works included here, is a former community in the uplands of Powys, Wales, which the UK Ministry of Defence evicted in World War II and remains a military training zone. You can find out more at the Abandoned Communities site.
Iain Biggs
