Landscape Surgery was delighted to host a creative workshop led by Dr Sage Brice (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography, University of Durham). Focusing on past and on-going experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we explored her participatory drawing method for engaging with vulnerabilities and their potentials.
Sage convened a two-part session, both involving us in a version of the creative research process she has developed to explore pandemic experiences, and staging critical discussion about that methodology.
Practically, working in smaller groups of five or six, we focused on cartooning the early stages of the pandemic (for example, through lockdowns), with a brief to do this from the virus’ point of view. Particularly notable was the care that Sage exercised in bringing us into the process, and the clear emphasis not on representational skill but on a generative contemplation enacted through acts of drawing. Iconic virus images (round, fluffy spikes / tufts; see above), bodies, bubbles, doors / windows, outside environments, emotional sensings (fear, loneliness, calm, love, care), disabling physical states and more were sketched out with widely varying graphic skills. I shouldn’t speak for the whole group, but personally I failed, I think, in the viral point of view: my hand more mobilised by remembrance of personal experience, and with viral relationality largely reduced to projections from my own imagination (a variously angry, pleading or mocking virus observing my precautionary behaviours). Particularly powerful imagery and testimony came from others drawing the problematic relations of infection; the ‘virus’ not separate from ‘us’, but part of new embodiments. In parallel, our picturings of lockdown behaviours evoked the sense of changed subjectivities in relation to COVID-19.
More broadly, we discussed the development of Sage’s creative research practice, both in relation to conceptual fields such as queer ecologies and her biography of work on ‘transindividual’ relationalities. Discussion picked up on the traditions of drawing research in Geography and their renewed role within the GeoHumanities today, including amongst ‘surgeons’ present and past (Helen Scalway’s long-standing contributions deserving of particular mention). There was also a thread of discussion about the role of technical skill in drawing research, even when participatory in ethos. Does limited drawing skill inhibit or prevent evocation, despite the open, safe environment produced by a skilled convenor?
Issues around creative research methods will return at various points in our programme; so, particularly warm thanks to Sage for her generosity and care in visiting us and running such a rich workshop. Her departmental profile is here; and her twitter handle is Sage_Brice.
Philip Crang
Landscape Surgery 