Inspiration from Lucy Lippard's Lure of the Local (1997), The New Press, New York

Sense of Place

Places are our background in every sense (Lucy Lippard, p. 8)
Place is where we stand to look around at landscape (Lucy Lippard, p. 9)
Space combined with memory defines place (Lucy Lippard, p. 9)

What does place mean to you? What places do you love? Where do you feel you belong? Where do you feel at home? And what makes you feel that way? Are the places we love the spaces where we feel most at home? What do you think as you drive through a landscape? Do you imagine yourself in it? What sort of 'homes' do you imagine yourself in? Do you picture yourself living in a cosy little ramshackle cottage on the edge of the forest or sleeping out in the open among the tress and night life? Do you fancy a tree house, a space above the forest floor or do you want to feel the earth under your feet? Do you imagine the textures of the land – the crunching of leaves, the squishing of sand, the coolness of water? When you go away from this place do you miss it? If so, what do you miss about it, the beauty of the scenery, the people who inhabit it or just the pleasure of being there or all of these things? Where did you spend your childhood and does that still feel like home? Or have you made another home for yourself, in another place, another time where your childhood remains but a memory of times past, of another you? Does it still anchor you or are you anchored in some other place you now call home?

It seems to me we attach value to specific places wherein our souls reside. They are places where we feel at home, at one with the world, at peace with ourselves. Yet our homes are the places where our everyday lives are played out where we are struck by the 'lure of the local', as Lucy Lippard says, the area where we exercise, relax, shop, socialise, spend time with friends, go to the movies and theatre, and sometimes even work. If you are like me you have an office at home where you think and write, innovate and create ... such pieces as I am now writing. I suppose in place we are essentially searching for a rootedness to ward off restlessness, to find some sort of permanence and certainty in our lives.

What then is your relationship to the place where you live? Is your identity in any way changed by it? Is it part of who you are? Or does 'nature' or 'art' or some other activity provide the nourishment for you that social life cannot?

So does 'home' have to do with the known and familiar - our land, our place, the local - or is it some far off place of memory or communion with nature?

Landscape

Landscape is everything you see when you go outdoors. Unlike place which is seen from the inside, it can only be seen from the outside for as far as the eye can see (Lucy Lippard, p. 8)

The scene is the seen, yet how much do we look and see when we go outdoors?(Lippard, p. 8)

Beautiful landscapes are symbolic – they evoke images of the mystical, divine and heavenly; beautiful images symbolise the soul, our inner light and craving

I like to think of landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet (Gretel Ehrlich)

If our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, then what is the landscape, the map of my life? I think not for that is not on any map. True places never are (Herman Melville,in Lippard, p. 9)

We journey through the outer landscape to find the inner landscape.
Landscape's most crucial condition is considered to be space, but its deepest theme is time (Rebecca Solnit)

Time

We turn to the past when our future is frightening (McLuhan, in Lippard, p. 10)
Too much made of the past ... limits the future (Lippard, p. 23)
Past, present, and future reside in me
Celebrating the past, toasting the present, and drinking to the future
As I leap forward into a shifting future

Culture

The ideological notion that you can't escape your culture leads to conservative thinking that emphasises reforming the individual rather than larger social change (Lippard, p. 11)

Nature

The ecological crisis is a crisis of character, of culture, and place which are inseparable (Wendell Berry)
Today 'environment' replaces 'nature'. In keeping with our culture, it places humans at the centre surrounded by everything else (Lippard, p. 12)
Nature is a living web of interconnected parts

History

History goes right up to yesterday
History often means what we choose to remember
Without our past our future is a house built on sand
We modify the past as we live in the present

To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop ... is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again (Gretel Ehrlich)

The spiritual

The spiritual is a way of living the ordinary while sensing the extraordinary (Lippard, p. 14)
The spiritual is that invisible world sensed in the visible world that charges everyday life with metaphysical meanings
Even if we don't know what we believe in, we feel closer to it in nature than anywhere else
Too much is made of the interconnectedness of all things. How much responsibility do we take for the ways our lifestyles affect entire ecosystems?
The real challenge is to reinstate a spiritual relationship with that which is close and familiar (Lippard, p. 17)

Home Sweet Home

A starting point for artists is merely to look around where you live, around here and out there
One can be homesick without moving away

Community

Community is often used as a euphemism for poor neighbourhoods under the false assumption that people are huddled together with no-one to depend upon but each other, and that they all get along more or less fine (Lippard, p. 23)
Community ... means knowing how to work within differences as they change and evolve (Lippard, p. 24)

Art

We all have a need to expand the sensuous intellect, whether it is through art or religion
Art finds the special qualities of place embedded in everyday life
Photography is really hard because it's so easy (Willis Hartshorn)