Flow Country
2018
Artist Novel, 18.7 x 11.2 cm, 123 p, language: English, publisher: Glasgow: Publication Studio, ISBN: 978-1-9995899-0-5.
Materials: ink, paper
Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2029/521).
Literary synopsis
Flow Country is a collaboratively written piece of fictocritisism by artist Jasper Coppes and archaeologist Dan Lee. Based on their earlier cinematographic ventures into a contested site in the far North of Scotland, the artist's novel is a reconnaissance of real and imagined sites – taking shape as a liquid land that fluctuates between blanket bog, film emulsion and literary space. The artist's novel offers a possible way out of the many ‘transformation-narratives’ that tried to exploit or reform this vast terrain. Terrestrial exploration gradually turns into a metaphysical quest.
Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice
This artist's novel is the third iteration of an ongoing artistic engagement with a contested site in the North of Scotland that is called the ‘Flow Country’. Two earlier iterations manifested in the form of a digital film and an analogue one (S16mm). Each outcome can be considered an attempt to register an essentially un-documentable and vast landscape. As an entrance into this terrain each outcome uses the particularities of their medium to open up a new vantage point, and as such generates its own epistemology of an ungraspable terrain. With each outcome this terrain is increasingly historicized and as such mythologises Flow Country.
Authorship: Collective Authorship.
Creative Strategy: Novel Art Object, Open Process, Rewriting Film.
Genre: Documentary Fiction, Fictocriticism.
Publishing: Art Books Publishing House, Print-On-Demand.
Theme: Birds, British Culture, Climate Change, Community, Landscape, Post-Humanism, Scottish Culture, States of the Self, Systems Theory, Travels.
