{"id":84,"date":"2020-05-01T22:26:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-01T21:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/?p=84"},"modified":"2025-10-18T13:10:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T12:10:11","slug":"cottaging-the-hedgegrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/?p=84","title":{"rendered":"Cottaging the Hedgerow"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mapmagazine.co.uk\/index\/mathew-parkin-chronicle\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">A four part chronicle by Mathew Parkin, foraging queerness and rurality in recent artist moving image for MAP magazine, read here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full wp-duotone-unset-1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"530\" src=\"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mathew1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-698\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mathew1.jpg 800w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mathew1-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mathew1-768x509.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">COTTAGING THE HEDGEROW: PART 1<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">There is that old idea of nature vs culture, female vs male, emotion vs intellect, but I\u2019m not sure where queerness fits into this. If it\u2019s linked with&nbsp;<em>camp<\/em>, and often it is, then via Sontag it\u2019s about artificial exaggeration and performance of the natural (please don\u2019t @ me for this reading, or any of the other readings) because queerness is muddy. It is hard to grasp with both hands. It is a trajectory, it shapeshifts. While queerness is often dripping in memetic cultural references it is of and for the body. It is of sweat, the bowel and the body hair. It is of the belly, both in laughter, six-pack, good food and anxiety. It is not just that queerness is concretely about what bodies do with other bodies, mutual pleasure and collective pain, but it is concerned with authenticity or realness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I won\u2019t and can\u2019t stand by this writing. I am wary of writing. I use it as a way to think through ideas but often it seems too solid. I do not seek to be an authority. Nor am I seeking to make an argument. To paraphrase Ursula K. Le Guin this text is a vessel to hold some thoughts together, it\u2019s not a spear with a point.[1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">A windmill is on the front cover of Bridget Penney\u2019s&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bookworks.org.uk\/node\/1992\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Licorice<\/a><\/em>. A windmill features in the story it contains, of the low budget production of a folk horror film. It\u2019s easy to point to windmills as now aestheticised industrial buildings, either as housing or conceptual photography. Ironically windmills as a renewable energy source are often protested as blighting a constructed natural landscape. As if fields are devoid of labour. However&nbsp;<em>Licorice&nbsp;<\/em>is more interested in trying to record the sound of the windmill, which brings to mind Maria Fusco\u2019s assertion that, \u2018I have absolutely no access to how history sounds\u2019 in&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http:\/\/mariafusco.net\/writing\/legend-necessary-dreamer-book\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Legend of a Necessary Dreamer<\/a><\/em>. The windmill in Bridget\u2019s narrative is a device to hear a past, adding the same authenticity to the film production as hand dyed burlap wardrobes and the real life sexual relationship between the actors. I guess what I am trying to clumsily gesture at here is the distinction between the real and simulated sex, landscape, narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">\u2018Tilting at windmills\u2019 means attacking a perceived enemy of threat. I wonder how much it is connected to a strawman argument. A strawman, according to&nbsp;<em>Wikipedia<\/em>, is a form of argument based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent\u2019s argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. A symbol of the rural, and particularly farming, once again stands in for a fake, perceived or constructed enemy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I think I was tilting at windmills when I suggested this writing. I was reading&nbsp;<em>Licorice<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I have had sex outside, but very rarely have I lain in the mud for it. Or on the hay. Or in the manure. Or on the scrub. Or on the sand. Or the rock. It\u2019s mainly been stood and fumbling. It\u2019s mainly been swift; anxious about a perceived threat. Animals often try to make themselves look bigger when confronted with a perceived threat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The windmill Grindr. Scruff works best for me, or a moustache. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m not attracted to smooth faces, but they are better with a bruise and an accent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I hate to do this, I really do, but mills at the moment (whether wind or otherwise) are struggling to meet demands for flour during the coronavirus lockdown. Well, they are struggling to meet a rise in domestic demand, \u2018it is not the flour that is lacking so much as the ability to package smaller units in greater numbers\u2019.[2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I wonder if the farmer is trade. Or the farmer\u2019s son. The labourer is I guess, but I find it hard to map my class politics onto this. What makes trade, is it the presumed heterosexuality and by extension masculinity, or is it proximity to manual labour? The mill and the field are both sites of labour, but are they both sites of radical organising and collective bargaining? I\u2019m not going to get into the enclosures here as I fear I don\u2019t have the word count or the knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">In Jamie Crewe\u2019s&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/glasgowfilm.org\/shows\/margaret-tait-award-ashley-presented-by-lux-scotland-nc-15\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ashley<\/a>,<\/em>&nbsp;their Margaret Tait Award commission which recently screened at Glasgow Film Festival, we see the titular character taking a trip to a rural cottage in an attempt to regain or consolidate their sense of autonomy or selfhood after a break-up. Travis Alabanza\u2019s narration contextualises the landscape as belonging to the ex, however the threats seem mainly situated in the domestic environment, not the outdoors. What we find in the landscape instead is a trans body glowing among the green: a powerful being running amok through the field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">At a screening event programmed as part of Jamie\u2019s sister exhibitions at Grand Union and Humber Street Gallery&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/grand-union.org.uk\/gallery\/love-solidarity-jamie-crewe\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Love and Solidarity&nbsp;<\/a><\/em>and<em>&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.humberstreetgallery.co.uk\/exhibition\/jamie-crewe-solidarity-love\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Solidarity and Love<\/a><\/em>, we collectively watched a YouTube playlist that Jamie first compiled in 2017 for&nbsp;<em>Art In America<\/em>&nbsp;magazine. Accompanying this communal remote watching event was a chatroom, which for me became an essential part of the experience. Finding togetherness while apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">One of the films in the playlist was&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/c_VRj1RMTXU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Juliette of the Herbs<\/a><\/em>, depicting the life of Juliette de Bairacli Levy, a \u2018world renowned herbalist, author, breeder of Afghan hounds, friend of the Gypsies, traveller in search of herbal wisdom and the pioneer of holistic veterinary medicine.\u2019 In the film, they talked us through the plants in their gardens, and the names of the herbs alone were so provocative. Large bushes of antiseptic rosemary, dew of the sea, by the door of her house. I keep lavender, rosemary and thyme by my building\u2019s door. The opening scene was of someone swimming on a blue shimmering sea, slightly distorted by dated VHS technology that in some ways made it more tangible. I longed to be enveloped. The film was shown alongside drag performances, sometimes from trans performers, who were occasionally naked, and I was interested in the coexistence of these two types of film styles\u2013documentary and cabaret\u2013and that they may mush together better than we have been led to believe.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/6t0kPyTeZps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Lady Bunny and RuPaul cooking on an open fire<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Through digital communications geographical importance lessens and discrete social spaces become a larger overlapping space. In Sg\u00e0ire Wood\u2019s&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/L6XkzXj4oq8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Extreme Beauty<\/a>&nbsp;<\/em>YouTube video for Vogue, she succinctly expresses an idea I\u2019ve tried to talk about in previous work: that finding community online is a queer millennial experience, perhaps equal in significance to the ritual of coming out and moving to the city for previous generations. However the importance of where one grew up, and an origin story, seems to be just as important. Through the internet I can understand other specific and nuanced queer cultures. Queer expression can become more multitude. What I am saying is through the internet I can find people who understand my reference to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/XGRUJQxyEWU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">French and Saunders<\/a>, rather than having to align with other forms of dominant cultural production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I wish I hadn\u2019t pitched this as talking about queerness, and I wish I could stop using that word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">*<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">[1] Expanded from the theory of the novel as a vessel not a spear outlined in Ursula K Le Guin\u2019s 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. The essay argues the vessel is the first human tool, not the spear, and links this to a feminist critique of linear storytelling and time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">[2]&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/food\/2020\/apr\/14\/grains-flour-shortage-tells-us-about-who-we-are\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/fo\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full wp-duotone-unset-2\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"530\" src=\"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/05030029_29.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-85\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/05030029_29.jpg 800w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/05030029_29-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/05030029_29-768x509.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">COTTAGING THE HEDGEROW: PART 2<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I text Marcus to ask, is Margaret Tait queer? His response is no LOL, \u2018Why u ask?\u2019 I guess it was something about what you choose to document, who you are addressing and how you are looking.<br><br>I\u2019ve often thought about the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/I3r-P7G0rE4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">long lazy cruising look and the outdoors<\/a>. For a long time I followed a porn Tumblr that was short iPhone videos of people having sex in the outdoors, but all that was really visible was a shaking branch, or a mound of scrub.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">A common narrative which seems to play over and over again in literature, films, and TV is&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/lux.org.uk\/work\/pedagogue\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the coming out<\/a>&nbsp;story. It\u2019s an origin story we are asked to repeat and perfect. I am aware at this point that the coming out story also has different importance for members of the queer community. I don\u2019t want to present gay male sexuality as a vector for the whole of queerness. I\u2019m not sure if asking why we have to come out is a useful project. The coming out feels less like a large revelation, then a focusing\u2013a making visible of that which was often sensed, but on a periphery. The common narrative goes that after it has rendered itself legible, a queer body migrates to an urban centre. Que Bronski Beat\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/88sARuFu-tc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Smalltown Boy<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Eternity Knocker<\/em>&nbsp;by Andrew Black shows this tension of sites of rural labour and how they can be aestheticised, calling into question the taxonomy of industry and leisure. The work seeks to explore previous attempts by Marie Hartley, Ella Pontefract and Joan Ingillby to preserve a way of living through documentation; and trying itself to preserve or document something of a way of life through the conversation Andrew has with current farmers. The film feels like a development of Black\u2019s earlier work&nbsp;<em>Submerged Village,<\/em>&nbsp;which explored his position as a queer in the rural landscape. In&nbsp;<em>Eternity Knocker<\/em>&nbsp;he asks questions about how the landscape was constructed, and what his role in it may be. There is a scene of tagging lambs ears\u2014<a href=\"http:\/\/thefanzine.com\/when-the-lambs-rise-up-against-the-bird-of-prey\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">lambs have long been a beloved animal of mine<\/a>, I made my first sculpture in memory of a lamb at Yorkshire Sculpture Park as a child, I always felt like some of the lamb was in me\u2014and I can\u2019t help but think of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sfmoma.org\/artwork\/2014.57\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">gay boys earrings<\/a>. A single earring in one ear, one ear means you are gay, one ear does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Urban centres are historically places where queers can find community as well as opportunities for inter-class encounters, as discussed at length in Samuel R Delany\u2019s&nbsp;<em>Times Square Red, Times Square Blue<\/em>. Proximity to others\u2019 pent-up sexual desire is intoxicating through pheromones alone. I often think of being able to walk lit-up street after street late into the morning in the way Eileen Myles describes in&nbsp;<em>Chelsea Girls<\/em>. I tweeted in 2016 while visiting the city how thickly sex hung in the air in London, not just because the bodies that populate it are consciously maintained and presented, but because things are endlessly open and available. The off license doesn\u2019t shut. Although in Scotland it does at 10pm. But I don\u2019t want to get into queer futurity and the&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/bostonreview.net\/arts-society\/samuel-r-delany-ash-wednesday\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">idea of youth<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t disagree with this grounding, or the work that is made as a result of it. I live in a city and grew up in a town fantasising of living in London, Berlin or New York. I remember once talking to Jamie at a private view before a long drive down to my partner\u2019s family\u2019s farm, explaining my reliance on the convenience of urban living, a lack of knowing what to do with myself at the farm. In return, they exclaimed something along the lines of no, \u2018just bathe me in manure\u2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I guess what I am actually talking about is language or semantics. It\u2019s about legibility: which queer bodies are legible, who gets to identify as such, and who actually chooses not to? How is this complicated by place?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The windmill I was tilting at was the idea of trying to queer the rural. As constructed as I think the \u2018rural\u2019 is, it is for sure already queer. Animal husbandry feels queer, and when non-exploitative feels to me like something to do with radical mutual interdependence. In most conventional folk horror there\u2019s something&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/NSt2dv1XGV4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">evil in the soil<\/a>, in the carnal, the breeding, in the kids. That\u2019s queerness. Faggy-ness. But how useful is it to continue to present ourselves as monsters?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Francis Lee\u2019s film&nbsp;<em>God\u2019s Own Country<\/em>&nbsp;is as much about shame and how to have conversations as it is about gay love on a farm. It\u2019s not that Johnny doesn\u2019t understand his own desire, it\u2019s his shame and inability to vocalise this that causes the ensuing drama. Dealing with the shame is part of the coming out narrative. Do I really dream of some pastoral fantasy where one doesn\u2019t have to come out? I imagine a dialect, a slang, similar to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/Y8yEH8TZUsk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Polari&nbsp;<\/a>[1], a secret queer language or slang, but of rural queers. Words for lambs, twinks and fisting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The rural is magic and magic is gay so therefore the rural is gay. Not just for the radical faeries. I\u2019ve stolen that. But gay is to steal. The gay faerie movement. Cats are magic, and gay, and rural, and lazy in the sun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">*<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">[1]&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/staff\/bakerjp\/polari\/home.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/staff\/bakerjp\/polari\/home.htm<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large wp-duotone-unset-3\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"679\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/07040026_26-679x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-699\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/07040026_26-679x1024.jpg 679w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/07040026_26-199x300.jpg 199w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/07040026_26-768x1159.jpg 768w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/07040026_26.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 679px) 100vw, 679px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">COTTAGING THE HEDGEROW: PART 3<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I remember a conversation with Laura Guy about trying to act against the American-centrism of much queer theory, and\u2013as an extension of that\u2013to act against the urban-centrism of this theory as well. In the essay \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.co.uk\/books\/about\/De_centring_Sexualities.html?id=E12_RAKMz6sC&amp;source=kp_book_description&amp;redir_esc=y\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Eroticizing the Rural<\/a>\u2019 about Southern American horror cinema<em>,<\/em>&nbsp;David Bell argues via Foucault that in the rural hillbilly filled country depicted in these films, sexual acts and sexual identities are ripped apart. There is the penetrator and the penetrated. Whether you are a sissy or not pays little heed. The locals of the narratives enjoy sodomising outsiders, and don\u2019t see that as unnatural. A footnote in the essay also introduces the idea of Dolly Parton as a folk she-devil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Cases of sodomy in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.co.uk\/books\/about\/Sodomy_in_Early_Modern_Europe.html?id=BiwbAAAAYAAJ&amp;source=kp_book_description&amp;redir_esc=y\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">early modern Scotland<\/a>&nbsp;were often actually cases of bestiality. The two actions were fairly interchangeable and were both somewhat related to age. Sodomy in a young person could be seen as something that you would grow out of, a youthful experiment. Bestiality was often also included in the accusations of witch trials in Scotland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m not so interested in identities vs acts. What I am interested in is queer bodies in landscape. Hannah Hauxwell is arguably not a lesbian as much as a spinster, but her historical independence can be read as that of a butch queen. [1] In Charlotte Prodger\u2019s recent trilogy of films,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/lux.org.uk\/work\/stoneymollan-trail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Stoneymollan Trail<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/lux.org.uk\/work\/bridgit\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>BRIDGIT<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/lux.org.uk\/work\/saf05\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>SaF05<\/em><\/a>, we see many examples of the queer body\u2014and the queer gaze\u2014in the rural, the outdoors, the sidelined. These bodies do not feel like outsiders arriving to queer the landscape, but are instead inherently&nbsp;<em>of&nbsp;<\/em>and&nbsp;<em>in&nbsp;<\/em>the landscape themselves. Prodger achieves this not just through the queer readings woven through the narrative overlaying the footage, but in her ways of looking. The trainered feet moving over the stones. Rushing snowy landscapes edged by glitches of the video-camera codec. Trainers on the couch backed by a window blown out by the sun. A grid over standing stones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Charlotte\u2019s interest in technology and industry develops further than machinery to include standing stones and ancient pilgrimage routes. These routes are forms of knowledge that are passed like queer gossip among those who need to know. The stones can be a sparse visual language, like that of speakers or cube monitors, of measuring time or space. They are primed for projection. Could these stones mark queer space and time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Introducing his project&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.iangiles.co.uk\/#\/open-ramble-east-1\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Open Ramble East<\/em><\/a><em>,&nbsp;<\/em>Ian Giles explains, \u2018historically queer lives and achievements have often gone unrecorded within regional settings: this project is part of a wider invitation to correct this\u2019. [2] Giles organised a queer rambling group as a site of communality in the country, creating temporary meeting points and making space for queers to come together. When presented as an installation, the project exhibited artefacts to re-read the rural through the lens of communal queerness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">But we are not the only inhabitants of the land. The well policed category of human has used its boundaries to exclude queers, BIPOC, migrants, women and working class people. As well as the lives of animals, plants and minerals. Other critters as&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/article\/making-kin-an-interview-with-donna-haraway\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Donna Haraway might say<\/a>. There is a recognisable trauma in the reduction of animals to their sexual organs and acts, and the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/caroljadams.com\/spom-the-book\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">usefulness of those organs and acts<\/a>&nbsp;to humans. Emilia Beatriz examined human and non-human relationships in their 2019 exhibition at CCA, Glasgow,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cca-glasgow.com\/programme\/emilia-beatriz-declarations-on-soil-and-honey\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>declarations on soil and honey<\/em><\/a>. The works present the negotiation and management of relationships between bodies\u2014animal, mineral and geological\u2014through fact and fiction. There is a focus on the maintenance of the health of these bodies which seems to problematise the boundaries of bodies. This included the geographical boundary of the nation state. In the installation a visitor negotiates a bodily interaction with moss covered seating, becoming part of the interdependent web Emilia creates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Charlotte\u2019s film&nbsp;<em>SaF05<\/em>&nbsp;allows us to spend time around a queer butch queen lioness, who has taken on some of the forms of behaviour and looks of the male lion, not just his sexual appetite. This is not an attempt to map a human identity onto an animal or to gesture at some essential biological self, but instead to understand that social and sexual behaviours are more complex than the binary they are often distilled to. The mapping of these identities onto humans may be as ridiculous as doing so onto animals, but some pleasure can be gleaned at the recognition of perceived queerness even if that recognition is not mutual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">*<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">[1]&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=F4XNv0QGwdA&amp;feature=youtu.be\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hannah Hauxwell&nbsp;<\/a>was a farmer who came to fame through several ITV documentaries about life on the Dales. She lived most of her life on the farm she was born on, running it on her own after the death of her family, living what could be seen as a solitary and frugal, or even austere life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">[2]&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.kettlesyard.co.uk\/events\/ian-giles-outhouse\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/www.kettlesyard.co.uk\/events\/ian-giles-outhouse\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full wp-duotone-unset-4\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"800\" height=\"530\" src=\"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mathew-4-small.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-700\" srcset=\"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mathew-4-small.jpg 800w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mathew-4-small-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/mathew-4-small-768x509.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">COTTAGING THE HEDGEROW: PART 4<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">There is something about knowing without being able to vocalise&nbsp;<em>how<\/em>&nbsp;you know. We are back to language, legibility and magic. Gaydar I guess. You can recognise something in another person and can\u2019t explain beyond that. You know that holding their gaze will affirm a desire to fuck. You can tell the weather is shifting. You can feel when something bad is coming. I don\u2019t know what wild garlic looks or smells like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I guess this points towards indigenous knowledge and health. Witches, midwives, healers. Carolyn Lazard\u2019s film&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.carolynlazard.com\/get-well-soon\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Get Well Soon<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;is a complex and rich work, and I don\u2019t want to read it too reductively in this context. There is a body struggling to survive in an apartment navigating the American healthcare system, and then a vulnerable body surviving in a beautiful field. Dressed in a nightgown that brings to mind a pastoral damsel, Lazard navigates the field like a quest computer game. Perhaps she is seeking an older form of natural healing, mediated through a frame of computer games and selfie technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">The move to the city\u2013finding community,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/thenewinquiry.com\/lose-your-kin\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">finding kin<\/a>\u2014is a search I understand. But what I am trying to argue is that by re-looking at the spaces we instinctively moved from, we can see how those kin may be pre-existing there. We should not allow the assumption that the rural environment is synonymous with the heterosexual family unit. As queers, we should not automatically seek to disrupt the rural\u2013we should acknowledge that its connection to the traditional is constructed and forced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Queer child-rearing in the film&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/danirestack.com\/strangely-ordinary-this-devotion-2018\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Strangely Ordinary This Devotion<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;by Dani Leventhal ReStack and Sheilah ReStack is not only situated within the landscape, but is of the landscape. The reproduction comes from and with the water, conjured by older lesbians. Then raised alongside love making, feasting and ritual. It is not seeking to be extraordinary, is it seeking to be as it is. This interrogation of geography, community and relationships to animals builds on previous work by Dani. Not just in building works through relationships, and the interrogating of distinction between document and story, but through the taking of animals as talismans\u2014horses in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/danirestack.com\/video#\/2015-1\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Hard as Opal<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;and coyotes in&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.vdb.org\/titles\/come-coyote\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Come Coyote<\/em><\/a>\u2014moving between loneliness, contact and locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Of course this formulation is complicated by intersecting oppressions, and at times being in the landscape can be transgressive in itself. Jade Montserrat has explored this in her collaborative films&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/261390112\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>CLAY<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/155794300\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>PEAT<\/em><\/a>. \u2018Appearances suggest we were not meant to be here. Alienation is magnified by a landscape scarred by borders, raised inscriptions of territorial ownership.\u2019 [1] The videos are tender, moving and beautiful. This sense of belonging, or not belonging, is complicated by Jade\u2019s own biographical anecdotes and references to Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s Heathcliff. I wonder what it can mean to use mud as a balm for a legacy of alienation. White supremacy sits at the root of all oppression and queers should fight against this. Violent borders (or \u2018enclosures\u2019 to take a Federici slant) resonate through the urban and rural and need to be resisted and dismantled. To quote Montserrat again \u2018The questions are geo and bio\u2013political, of universality. The challenge is to pass the caring on. Articulating a different kind of usefulness might be. What is the true purpose of our illimitable nature? New and revised systems.\u2019[2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I want to ask myself what is rural, who is rural, what counts as rural, and who decides it. Can the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nyclgbtsites.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/EPH_1350-LG.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Christopher Street docks<\/a>, an ex-industrial landscape&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/h7X2r07hnSA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">offering space<\/a>&nbsp;to a queer community, be read as a rural landscape?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I should have asked is land art queer? It often feels like&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/0\/02\/Cerne-abbas-giant-2001-cropped.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">dick swinging<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m attracted to the idea of the man who goes cruising in the park as much to be outside as to be fucking. Fucking on the grass, against a tree, in a haybale. These are romantic images, but also sensory excesses. If the pleasure in sex is often understood as a moving from the singular to the collective, a shattering of boundaries of the self, then surely in nature this can be heightened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m attracted to the idea of the man who goes cruising in the park like a bird watcher. There is a nerdy similarity in watching for rustles in the bushes, taps of feet, long lingering glances, following the trail of condoms. A replication of that teenage desire to go for a walk to allow yourself breathing space to act how you want to act. Ain\u2019t nought as&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/NYJPMJWXQdA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">queer as folk<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">This is not a colonist or militaristic fantasy, to impose queerness on a beautiful landscape. The rural I speak of is just as violent, as constructed, and its boundaries as policed as the urban centre. It\u2019s not an attempt to read and codify things in a way that suits a political agenda. It\u2019s an attempt to recognise that assumptions have been made about where the queer imaginary belongs. Subversiveness, queerness and cultural production are not exclusively properties of the urban cultural classes, and following these assumptions plays into historic binaries. I want to recognise that the margins that we thrive in must include the hedgerow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">*<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">[1]&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/shadesofnoir.org.uk\/jade-montserrat-clay\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/shadesofnoir.org.uk\/jade-montserrat-clay\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">[2]&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/shadesofnoir.org.uk\/jade-montserrat-clay\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/shadesofnoir.org.uk\/jade-montserrat-clay\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A four part chronicle by Mathew Parkin, foraging queerness and rurality in recent artist moving image for MAP magazine, read here. COTTAGING THE HEDGEROW: PART 1 There is that old idea of nature vs culture, female vs male, emotion vs intellect, but I\u2019m not sure where queerness fits into this. If it\u2019s linked with&nbsp;camp, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":85,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing","tag-30"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":965,"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/965"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/85"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewparkin.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}