Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

Rethinking ‘lived space’ through issues of site mediates mapping practices with multidisciplinary studies of painting, drawing, fine arts, poetry, literature, archaeology and architecture. These discussions radiate from the Ditchley Portrait, c.1592, and all the places that are integral to and/or associated with this painting. The notion of ‘lived’ locates and alludes to different types of boundaries across the various disciplines and mediums, and these studies are essential for reconstructing and representing the numerous buildings and sites that have not survived. Places and events including Woodstock and Ditchley Manor, and the sixteenth-century Accession Day celebrations are manifested by means of associated memories and intangible allegorical narratives. This knowledge that would otherwise be consigned to memory or totally forgotten are retold, reworked and given new uses, readings and meanings. Histories of representation are explored through ‘perspective of meaning’. This storytelling methodology apparent in historical works of art is revisited to communicate theoretical, cultural, social, ephemeral, experiential and material narratives within existing and reclaimed boundaries. Mapping practices expand upon the technique’s inherent complexity to articulate the term ‘layers of meaning’ and demonstrate that the architecture and activities related to these places are perceived as constantly shifting knowledge. Hence memories are conjured and reclaimed simultaneously in different and differing capacities, and the significance of the historical palimpsests and presence of physical geographies can be additionally conveyed through current digital mapping technologies. These simultaneously serve to confront, place and integrate material and chronological shifts regarding habitation, use and experience to initiate multiple visual and experiential interpretations of the past, present and future of these sites through different creative processes.