Place-crafting at the edge of everywhere

Paton, David ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2790-7687 (2020) Place-crafting at the edge of everywhere. In: The Routledge Handbook of Place. Routledge, United Kingdom. ISBN 9781138320499

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Abstract / Summary

This chapter attends to place and matter. I pay attention to place as being both analogous to craft, and that place can be crafted. As I guide you through some of the granitic landscapes of south west Cornwall, the quarry becomes a lens through which to highlight how acts of making align with the multiplicitous coproductions of place. The discrete specificities and mutabilities that transmit through maker and material are also present, I argue, within the always emergent identities of place. Place is always becoming; its specific natures assembling into part known, and part unknowable narratives. In the western limits of Cornwall myth is woven through the landscape. Industrial practices resonate with ritual and Magick, sea land binaries dissolve, and the literature of granite-working is evidenced in farms, mining tunnels, fogous, hedges and menhirs. These ancient features are tangled up with modern housing estates, factories, refuse tips and busy towns. Idealised promotions for artists’ col-onies and cosy fishing villages nestle alongside poverty and environmental degradation. All of this sits upon an immense granite body -- a mineral-rich giant, whose once fluid mass emerged from the core of the earth, and cooled just near enough to the surface to drive global economies, and nurture a sense of belonging within its people.

Item Type: Book Section
ISBN: 9781138320499
Subjects: Geography & Environment
Arts > Sculpture
Depositing User: Users 2235 not found.
Date Deposited: 18 Sep 2020 14:47
Last Modified: 23 Nov 2023 17:51
URI: https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/4047
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