Reckoning with landscape tensions, reflecting on creative methodologies

In this paper landscape painting is developed as a mode of enquiry through which to explore the tensions inherent to landscape. Set on the high street in a small market town and undertaken by individuals with varying artistic experience, this methodological experiment explores the tensions between the non-representational and representational realms of landscape. By using Elizabeth Grosz’s writings on art, I develop this landscape painting methodology through an understanding of art and artmaking as intensifying sensation. Here, Grosz’s ideas become the foundation for a participatory arts method that decentres the human, whilst remaining focused on the presence of pleasure within landscape. It is by drawing together methodological experimentation and feminist theory that I revisit feminist geographies’ already existing interest in pleasure in/through landscapes through a more-than-representational lens.