Truly native :  birds in the Orkney landscape

Abstract

In the Orkney landscape, birds are a textural layer – a constant, breathing presence as they move above the ground, settling in pockets of heat and shelter, flocking and dispersing. This presentation considers how to record birds-in-place; not through our egocentric lens, but as intrinsic to and at home in this landscape. I reflect on the processes of writing and drawing in situ, and on whether either of these avoid what John Kinsella calls the “centre-edge effect”. Laura Drever’s drawings seem self-contained, referring only to the movement of the bird and its embodiment of three-dimensional space; while even the bare language of the poems import metaphor and quotation, locating them within the culture of our shared language. But do the drawings still reflect our act of looking in their scale and proportion?

Perhaps some form of asemic poetry offers a less conditioned, more unselfconscious means of recording the non-human; although, in a sense, all poetry, in its manipulation of form, white space, typeface etc, falls into this category – we ‘read’ the poem before we read it. Is the only authentic response one that foregrounds, and scrutinises, the viewer? This presentation explores some recent attempts to remove the ‘human’ in writings and drawings of birds in their landscape.