As his final project for the interdisciplinary art and architecture MFA degree Art, Space and Nature Eddy van Mourik presents: NT 251732, his contribution to the ASN degree show: Kanocene.

This work is based on open source Ordnance Survey elevation data and portrays a heavily deconstructed landscape that mirrors the landform that Edinburgh is built on.

Made out of paper, this 3.5 metre long piece is suspended in the exhibition space. This technique draws heavily on Eddy’s experience as a designer of virtual worlds for computer games.

Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show 2011
10 – 19 June, Mon – Thurs 10am to 8pm; Fri – Sun 10am – 5pm
Edinburgh College of Art, Evolution House, 78 Westport, Edinburgh EH1 2LE
Admission Free

Initially, looking at the changeable places site takes me back to Dutch Landscapes. The urban sprawl around Rotterdam in particular. I grew up on the edge of Rotterdam and as an avid cyclist I used to enjoy the Dutch countryside almost every day. Ten years later I found myself utterly and completely lost in giant housing estates wandering around, feeling quite lost for quite a while. The shock hit home properly when I turned a corner and suddenly recognised where I was, not more than a mile from where I grew up. In an area I used to cycle through every day.
In general, I think the Dutch perspective on Landscape is an interesting one. It was originally a large flat expanse of brackish marsh that by its very nature was featureless and therefore malleable, in essence it is one of those few places where Le Corbusiers fantasies about the made landscape of modernity were actually applied on a large scale.  The underlying land was completely erased in the process. Personally, by nature I am more like Le Corbusiers pack donkey, at the mercy of the shape of the landscape, finding the way of least resistance. And I think this is why I somehow feel lost in my own native landscape and much more at home in for instance the British one.
I once created a series of works about finding the source of the river Rotte, Rotterdams namesake and the river I grew up next to. As I found out the source was actually a windmill pumping up water from the surrounding polder. This windmill, however does not predate the naming of the city of Rotterdam. The question is what came before. And it is this kind of conundrum that one encounters constantly when looking at the history of the Dutch landscape.

I like the mention of looking forward. I tend to question conservation. Instinctually it makes sense to think we need to protect what we have. But if we need a new paradigm to save ourselves on this world it is not one of protecting what we have but understanding the source and consequences of our actions and understanding the world as a process. We simply do not live in a static world and so many environmental conservation practises (e.g. felling of non-native species etc.) are not actually sustainable and seem to be diametrically opposed to what ecological thinking has to offer. It would, I think, not be so bad if there were more permaculturists and landscape ecologists involved in the making of policy concerning our landscape.

And following this train of thought I am also thinking of how changeable places relate to the opposite: static places. So many British landscapes are conserved to look the way Constable painted them. They are caught in a perpetual past. In a sense they are an image of a landscape.

Furthermore in terms of changeable places I am very interested to look at places where the actual land use does not comply with planning laws, e.g. what the state has decided that land is meant to be used for. Having lived in Devon for a while I have become more and more aware of people using land for habitation that is neither owned by them nor designated to be used as such. I am interested to look at how these semi nomadic dwellers perceive their environment, their sense of place and expanding that to their place in society. I am thinking this is deserving of its own blog post though, so more soon.
Eddy van Mourik

As part of this field study I ran a brief workshop On being lost.

 We walk into the forest. We form a circle under the trees. Please have your sketchbook ready. Please close your eyes.
.   .   .
Before you arrived at the bothy.
Before you walked into this forest.
Before you left Edinburgh to come here.
Before you started studying at ECA.
Where were you?
And before that?
Where were you?
And before.
.   .   .
Does that place still exist? How far away is it?
How long ago?
With your eyes still closed, please draw a line from there to here. Think of the directions you took. You can weave in names or words if you want to. But keep your eyes on your memories.
.   .   .
So here you are back in the forest. And everything is in the past.
We are in another place. A hidden place.
You could come here alone.
.   .   .
What would you do here?
Would you come to think?
What would you think about?
Would you come here with your boyfriend or your girlfriend? Or a secret friend?
Would you like to get lost here?
Would you want to meet a stranger here?
What would the stranger tell you?
Would you want to come here with a bottle of whisky?
Would you come here to cry?
Would you come here to bury something? What would you bury?
Would you come here to carve something into a tree? What would you carve?
Would you come here to hide?
Would you come here to cut down a Christmas tree? With who?
Would you come here to shoot something?
.   .   .
But none of that today.
And soon you will leave this cold and dark day behind and be at home, warm.
Please draw another line from here to there.

 

A line from here to there by Catriona Gilbert.

‘Rooted tight under a branch not to get wet, with the group.  

But the group was not important anymore, nor was the rain or the writing pad I was trying to blindly jot down whatever was going through my mind. I could not help it, for me the forest became a desert, where re discovering the sense of being was a just conclusion to the natural response of this familiar and yet alien environment.’ 

Joseph Calleja in response to the workshop.

An art installation in Tent Gallery, Edinburgh, resulting from a walk through a highland landscape. Reflecting on the sense of being “in history”, in a landscape suspended in a perpetual past. 

An installation by Eddy van Mourik exploring further the relationship between time, walking and writing.

Private viewing: Tent Gallery, Evolution House. Corner of Lawson Street and West Port. Jan 13th 17:00-19:00

Sgurr Nan Gillean; Mountain of Young Men – 2008 I spent most of my childhood years meticulously painting British landscapes from pictures in travel guides, fantasizing about how one day I would visit. Years later, when I received a grant to spend on a research project I finally decided to visit some of these places I had painted. What followed was a rather bizarre and confusing experience of place.

The imagined landscape of my youth is the one I entered when I got off the bus on the Isle of Skye. I wandered around, now an adult, and told my younger self:  “Don’t worry I’m here now and so will you one day”. In essence I conversed with my younger self and this became a feedback loop where I walked through both the imagined landscape and real landscape at the same time. Afterwards I wrote a series of reminders on post-it notes that together recapture the journey. These were presented at DPC 2 at the former Photo Museum in Rotterdam where they could be read in chronological order, like a journey, or randomly from a pile where people could also pick their favourite to take home with them. These notes were combined with video footage of me wandering around on the flanks of the Mountain of Young Men.

FIELD 2009 – Present FIELD is a monthly journal published by artist/writer Eddy van Mourik based on field visits in Scotland and the wider world. For a brief description of the project go here.

50 Walks - Using the raw data from ten different researchers, mostly within the university/BHF Centre for Cardiovascular Science, Eddy generated 50 lines. Placed in a 3d space, in proximity to those which are most closely related these lines form a network of relations and as such, can be imagined to make up a landscape. Result of BHF Core Artist in Residence award 2010.

NT 251732 - This work is based on open source Ordnance Survey elevation data and portrays a heavily deconstructed landscape that mirrors the landform that Edinburgh is built on.
Made out of paper, this 3.5 metre long piece is suspended in the exhibition space. This technique draws heavily on Eddy’s experience as a designer of virtual worlds for computer games.

Art Space + Nature degree show 2011: Kanocene

How can we truly comprehend this world of complex relations, where everything is affected by everything and nothing stands on its own?

For Eddy, the practise of mapping and the process of walking, of moving through space and time and of drawing out a single line, a single viewpoint, enables him to attempt to understand this complex environment.

During his time at the QMRI he soon realised that the way the research is conducted here is rather parallel to walking. The researcher eliminates, and reduces down to the comprehensible quantities, which run as a line through a world of unknown relations.

This was the starting point for 50 walks. Using the raw data from ten different researchers, mostly within the university/BHF Centre for Cardiovascular Science, Eddy generated 50 lines. Placed in a 3d space, in proximity to those which are most closely related these lines form a network of relations and as such, can be imagined to make up a landscape.

Following the artist’s ministrations, the model you see before you, although based on scientific data, is no longer a sound scientific model. It is rather more an invitation. An invitation to imagine science as a whole and to think of the research conducted here in a spatial way. Who are my neighbours? How far apart are we? Where are the obstacles? And where do we connect?

Morningside; Line

Innocent Railway; Line

South Devon; Lines

Elidir Fawr; Lines

Elidir Fawr; Lines 2

Rat vessels, diesel with ACh/SOD; Lines

Revisiting some older work in preparation for a mapping workshop I will be running for Cupar Arts Festival later this autumn.