University of Nottingham
  

Touchstone test-piece

Project outline

Within Touchstone Test-Piece, Shipsides climbed regularly with John, a blind man. The project aimed to develop ways to capture something of this landscape experience, including attaching micro cameras to John's fingers, backpack and feet so as to record 'finger tip' footage of the climbing.

This project started with the idea that the climber's landscape is not predicated on the priority of sight but on a balance of senses. Climbing in this context expands the tactile and physical experience of landscape whilst also embodying a level of problem solving and creativity and demanding interpersonal partnership, negotiation and co-operation. This research aimed to explore a phenomenological based experience of landscape through rock climbing with a blind person. This enabled the project to develop visual landscapes or spatial narratives that were not predicated on the directing or organising principles of sight.

View of Echo Valley View of Echo Valley 
 
 

Achievements

As the project progressed the aims changed as it was realized that the original aims about the cameras 'forming' the landscape through John's searching physical climbing activity didn't reflect the whole experience and therefore alone was inadequate in addressing the research process and concept.

'…early on in the project, as the whole activity became more personalized and human, I realized that this was too narrow an approach which treated John almost as if he was a paint brush. We realized was that the landscape was as much about how John and I interacted (and his friend Gerard and guide dog Voss), and what our activity was in these places as much as it was about the "finger-tip" footage. Researcher's reflective notes. 
 

Ongoing influence

The research outcomes will continue to build a track record of exhibition, presentation and citation as the works are shown and toured nationally and internationally over the coming years.

Since the conclusion of the project, Shipsides has developed new art projects which further focus on rock climbing as a research frame for art and landscape. For example, 'Radical Architecture' (2007) charts social and cultural change through an analysis of rock climbing in the Peak District. Vertical Nature Base (2011) and The Cove (2012), (Legacy Trust funded projects) with Echo Echo Dance Theatre which both developed the collaborative methodologies grounded in Touchstone Test-Piece to look at embodied ways of working in landscape.

Concurrently Dan Shipsides and Neal Beggs formed the collaborative climber / artist duo Shipsides and Beggs Projects which combines the processes of climbing and making art embodying Picasso and Braque’s description of ‘two artists tied to the same rope’.

Touchstone Test-Piece project findings remain available to the wider public on Dan Shipsides' website (still live as of Feb 2014).

Award details

Duration: October 2006 - September 2007 (12 months)

Principal Investigator:
Mr Daniel Shipsides

Higher Education Institution:
Belfast School of Art, University of Ulster

Outputs

Outputs from the project included a number of artworks as well as publications.
 

Related links

 

Landscape and Environment Programme

School of Geography
University Park
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

telephone: +44 (0) 115 84 66071
email: landscape@nottingham.ac.uk