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CUTTINGS
Charles Dixon

An orchard, Warwickshire, UK






Cuttings - PDF



‘Cuttings is an archive of an orchard; weaving together processes of capture, including photography and painting, with an extended textual reflection on place. The often wavering, experimental, essay form of the text compounds more traditional academic works with a personal reflection on nostalgia. The multiple branches within the work explore the formation of memory, essence of place, material, the breakdown of words, and how site is inherently rooted in a great web of experience. Overall, it makes an attempt to locate an inexplicable quality that remains just out of reach.

The form of the artist’s book serves as an extension of the project’s concept. The text, broken down into individual numbered cards, may be read linearly, or reshuffled, along with the photographs and drawings, to give a new sense of narrative. This choice was made to highlight how sites such as the orchard may generate entirely new stories and memories, depending on the viewer. Stored within the wooden archive box, the final work is part time capsule, part toolkit for the future. These fragments, or cuttings, are also an extension of the work’s title.

The photographs, and watercolour illustrations the punctuate the project, are chosen to enhance the overall sense of prolonged dwelling with the orchard and its materiality. The images are subject to some of the same processes of capture that one may find in the text itself, shifting between formalism and abstraction.

Cuttings avoids over-editing to capture a sense of emotive immediacy. The narrative and temporal jumps allude to a more conversational form of writing, that closely recalls the reality of memory and storytelling. Towards the end of the work, the site is used in more broad strokes, opening up into more general discussions of situation and identity.’

Charles Dixon 
 

 

Echoes and Intersections is a collection of site-writings produced as part of the module Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing across the MA Architectural History, MA Situated Practice, and MA Historic Urban Environments dgree and PhD programmes at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

The featured works take the reader through fixed spatial locations and buildings, and on temporal journeys across ambiguous lands and waters. Written simultaneously across the globe, our situated writing offers diverse perspectives and narratives on plural geographies, landscapes and cities, through pieces interwoven with multiple, intersecting threads.

Many of the works occupy edgelands, peripheries or crossing points, writing the boundaries of buildings, states or bodies. They explore homelands, homes and selves that have been deconstructed, revealed and returned to. Echoing with memories, histories and absent others, the sites written carry the voices of place and voices displaced or fragmented, which resonate through the materials of the land - mud, sand, sky and rock.

These writings can be read in any order, allowing connections to emerge differently upon each reading.

Curatorial committee: Toby Blackman, Chia-Ying Chao, Kanza Leghari, Charlotte Morgan & Rasha Saffarini. 

With thanks to Polly Gould, Jane Rendell and David Roberts.


Bloomsbury Festival 2021

In October 2021, participants from the class read from their work on Bloomsbury Radio as part of Bloomsbury Festival 2021, alongside Polly Gould, Jane Rendell, David Roberts and participants from the class of 2020.

Find the recordings on Soundcloud here.