IN-PERSON London Heritages. Section B
Abstract
Our collaborative research brings into critical focus the landscape image as central to understanding the failure of the hegemonic imagination to recognise and act upon the urgent crises of the Anthropocene. We argue that conventional aesthetic structures of landscape reproduced in art and the heritage sector, are a constraining factor in our ability to address the realities of climate and environmental change. In the UK the idea of landscape is bound up with tourism and an aestheticised view of the industrial past. Cornwall’s landscapes are particularly susceptible here and will provide us with a basis for discussion. We will outline critical questions for the heritage sector that challenge conventional western visual structures, which remain based on the perspectival, rationalised space of Cartesian horizontalities. Taking Maritime Greenwich and the extractivist mindset of the UK’s navigational past as a starting point, we will show how the horizontal mapping of space, as enshrined in the Royal Observatory, is deeply implicated in the limitations of how landscape is understood today, and how this structuring of space is unfit for a 21st century heritage sector. Cornish histories and geologies facilitate a g/local focus and will help us to establish a critique of the horizontal. We will reframe space via its temporal and vertical planes, identifying the underground as a central site defined not through economics and extraction, but as a landscape of transformation, bringing into focus its more-than-human dimensions. We will show how a latent material and spiritual underground must inform the collective landscape imagination.
Henrietta Simson completed an MA and a PhD at the Slade, UCL. Her doctoral thesis (2017), supervised by Professors Joy Sleeman, Alison Wright and Lisa Milroy RA, explored landscape through medieval and early Renaissance visual forms, the materiality of the image, and Renaissance perspective’s role in the history of representational image-making. She has published widely on the landscape image and has presented her work at international institutions. She is currently researching the spiritual and material implications of caves, mines and wilderness in contemporary and medieval landscapes.
Nicola Whyte is Associate Professor of landscape and history at the University of Exeter where she is co-Director of the Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities. She has published widely on environmental and social entanglements in the early modern and post-medieval periods. She is interested in transdisciplinary approaches, crossing temporal and spatial boundaries and working with archival fragments to bring into view alternative pasts that help re-envisage the present and future at a time of climate and ecological crisis. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Professor Tom Williamson, examined plebeian perceptions and experiences of the landscape in Norfolk villages between c.1500 and 1800 (2006).
11:45 am - 1:15 pm
Wednesday 25th June, 2025