Broken north [conference presentation]

This paper touches on ideas of wilderness in the North and in particular visiting artists and writers. There’s a connection with my earlier article on Scottish landscape Contemporary Scottish Art and the Landscape of Abandonment for Visual Culture in Britain. That article discussed how a north directed journey towards an empty landscape is a common theme in contemporary visual art, not just in Scottish art, and one imbued with an intangible sense of an abandoned landscape. What I didn’t say then was while there is always the opportunity of a further North. For the Northern visitor the ideal is that the North offers up a place of personal arrival which has no ‘beyond’, i.e. a place one need not go beyond, and that seemingly what needs to be left behind can be left behind.