Understanding Place

I have moved many times throughout my life, starting anew in a place and forming attachments to people and the environment. There are some places I think of fondly and feel more at home in than others, that feature more prominently in the story of my life. The original question that started this particular chapter was whether I could ever truly understand a place if I was not from there. I have come to believe that yes, I can understand what a place means to me and to cherish and hold dear the memories I create there.

Memories of a place seem, for me, to be the most important part of what creates a sense of space and meaning. The smell and touch of the air in spring, the quality of the light as it passes through clouds in winter, the feel of the grass under my toes in summer, the taste of the foods I forage in autumn. The embodied sense of place I create is meaningful to me yet will in its essence be different to that of another. Intertwined with this embodied experience of a place comes the knowledge of the history and culture of the area: taking part in local festivals or rituals, enjoying local beers with friends, and appreciating the stories that form the character and building blocks of the space. Timescale is unnecessary in coming to know a place. A week may be as intense and impactful as a decade.

However, there are different levels of understanding and of knowing a place. I want to deepen my understanding through research, learning, and gathering, through investigations that are embodied and emplaced. My purpose in this essay, is to explore what it means to understand a place. Through repeatedly visiting Spurn Point, experiencing, and researching the area, I have developed a very different perspective of the place. Instead of feeling as if I am embodying the space while making my own meaning, I am discovering a layered response to a location I am gradually getting to know first-hand. These layers of understanding of Spurn as a ‘place’, lie on top of each other, not wholly uncomfortably, shifting and sliding but never settling. New layers are added regularly, mostly with each visit and sometimes with a new branch of research. In this installment, I would like to share the first layer of my understanding of Spurn as a place.

Stump, Jane Robb, 2021

Experience as sense of place

November 2021. Strong winds, hail. Sand was escaping across the Wash into my pores like a million tiny pins needling my cheeks. Each grain, scathing my skin and that of the wooden posts long since sunk and sculpted. No harsh edges here, every inch smoothed from a thousand past days like this. Progress across the Wash was interminable. Anyone living there day to day is truly living on the edge.

Abandoned village?, Jane Robb, 2021

Pebbles on the beach, Jane Robb, 2021

Spurn as traumascape

Everything I had read about the Spurn suggested to me an ongoing battle between humans and nature. Of course, Spurn had also had a military history, with many relics still visible. I came across the term ‘traumascape’ while exploring literature on geographies of place. According to Maria Tumarkin, it means a ‘distinctive category of places transformed physically and psychically by suffering, part of a scar tissue that stretches across the world’ (1). Spurn was literally painful on that day, and its history is peppered with people’s stories of repeated loss through destruction (2).

Time, Jane Robb, 2021

Rose tinted view, Jane Robb, 2021

Geopoetics

Speaking to another artist, I discovered the concept of geopoetics. The philosophy criticises the idea that humans are separate to the natural world, and instead proposes a view that we are all connected. This resonated with me from my own background which had already led me to be critical of this typical Western view of separation. For me, Spurn embodies the intricate human-nature connection that exists everywhere. Humans in their follies may believe they can shape and form nature, but in the end all we achieve is to be written in as a layer of human presence in the earth’s story.

(1) http://www.mariatumarkin.com/traumascapes 

(2) https://thecriticalfish.co.uk/spurn/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=spurn