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ANTONY LYONS - LANDSCAPE AND TRANSIENCE

RESEARCH CONTEXTS, INVESTIGATIONS + INSTALLATIONS

EXPLORATIONS OF 'IN-BETWEEN'; SLOW RESIDENCY + GEOPOETICS

With a background in environmental/geo-sciences, sculpture and landscape design, many of my projects are concerned with explorations of place and reconnections to natural processes and cycles. Special areas of focus include water environments; deep-time (geological) perspectives; relationships to materials (assemblages, symbolism, metaphor); and intangible culture. My research and production methods rely on open-ended creative fieldwork and experimental remixing of archives, recordings, data and contemporary narratives - explored in the context of both 'slow' and 'intensive' artist-residencies. Slow Residencies are long-term, deep investigations of place and processes, building up meshes of meaning over time. This creative terrain is situated within a spectrum of eco-creative research and creative practice. Sites of interest and enquiry are often those that are undergoing rapid change or those that form 'connective tissue' - pathways, waterways, greenways, watersheds, coastlines. Resulting works includes sculpture, intermedia installation, data-augmented spaces and the seeding of ideas and possibilities - all examining the interplay of tensions, traces and transitions within landscape settings; always holding multiple meanings and conjectures.

LANDSCAPE LAYERS, DEEP MAPPING + INTIMATE SCIENCE

Landscape is everywhere, and is more than the simple view or spectacle. Its layers can be perceived through the prisms of archive (memory, stories), biophysical/biosphere relationships (ecology, geology), and geopoetic investigations (fieldwork, sensing, imagination, palimpsest, deep-mapping). The original meaning of the word landscape relates to the ability to live in, on and from the land. When the romantic veneer is scraped away, landscape is a mesh, a web(-site), embodying the past, determining the future and linking the local with the global. Landscapes are in-tension between the immediate reality and endless radiating associations. My approach embraces complexity, change and fragility; celebrating the scientific, the surreal and the eco-symbolic. Often collaborative and trans-disciplinary, there is a fusion of the rational, the ritual and the imaginative. The growth forms of the mycelium and rhizome are useful analogues for the conceptual approach - following entangled threads in time/space, in society and the subconscious.

SLOW TRACKS + SACRED WAYS   |   RIVER DREAMINGS + WATER WAYS

'Slow Tracks' are frequently the subject of my ongoing enquiries, reflecting an interest in ancient and traditional pathways through landscapes that are rich with associations, layers and sounds. Tracks may also be river journeys or pilgrimages. Walkabouts and chance encounters provide opportunities for fossicking for stories, exchanges and hidden worlds. In the contexts of ecological disconnection and dissonance, I am involved with projects that seek to bridge, reconnect, and re-enchant - especially around water landscapes. Creative approaches can reveal new horizons as well as the undercurrents and shadow-lands. Through juxtapositions and unexpected associations, the creative outputs can become poetic catalysts and provocations. 'Slow Tracks' relate to the traditions and sensitivities of land-art, psychogeography, sacred ways, 'dreamtime/songlines', 'dragon lines' and much more.

THE IMAGINARIUM | MATERIALS + LAND-INGS  |  EXPERIMENTS IN SALT+PEAT+CLAY

The emerging installations can involve the production of sculptural assemblages of materials, and are rooted in both concept and craft; but also incorporate intangible amalgams and meditations: cinematic essays, projection, sound, light, photography, and exploratory texts. Working in landscape settings, they are experimental attempts to open up new prospects, and create space to consider the new conjunctions. In one sense these are all activations.

CONTACT  Antony Lyons

2015-2019: Senior Creative Fellow, Heritage Futures Project (AHRC, UK)

Visiting Research Associate

Bath Spa University, Environmental Humanities Research Group

&

Countryside & Communities Research Institute (CCRI), University of Gloucestershire, UK

Founder member of Mapping Spectral Traces

This network "serves to mediate and facilitate inter- and trans-disciplinary international dialogue to explore

the role of the visual and performing arts in addressing such relevant concerns as ecological activism,

‘deep mapping’, place-based memory work, trauma, postcolonial geographies and related topics."

CREATIVE COLLABORATIONS AND CONSULTANCY: DEISEAL (Ire)   NOVA (UK)

“Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who

has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today” 

Richard Buckminster Fuller

"We know that landscape does not pre-exist by itself. There is no landscape without human meaning"

Enric Miralles

Part of 'Quantock Dreaming', 2008