Representation and landscape: Drawing and making in the landscape medium

Abstract

A central characteristic of the often ambiguous term ‘landscape’ is that it is first a schema, a representation, a way of seeing the external world, and, based on one's point of view, such schemata vary significantly. Geographers and painters see the land in different ways, as do developers and environmentalists. If asked to draw the landscape, each party would no doubt produce a wholesome variety of graphic models and representations, reflecting their own peculiar mode of (re)cognition. Drawings might range from a cartographer's map, to an ecologist's transect, to an artist's perspective rendering. A poet might prefer words and tropes to visual images when describing a landscape. Collectively, each of these texts would ‘draw out’ of an existing landscape a particular description, or analytique, as seen through a specific conceptual lens, and would subsequently alter or transform the meaning of that landscape. Landscapes are thus the inevitable result of cultural interpretation and the accumulation of representational sediments over time; they are thereby made distinct from ‘wildernesses’ as they are constructed, or layered.2

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