have also invested in an evolving relationship
Art
Harriet Hawkins
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Geographers have never seemed more open to,
and interested in, art as they have been in the
first decade or so of the new millennium. Yet,
geographys relationship with artists and artistic
practices is arguably as old as the discipline itself.
Indeed, to inspect the major phases of geograph-
ical knowledge-making is to find an important
place for artists, artworks, and arts practices.
Moreover, at key phases of geographys devel-
opment, the disciplines relationship with art
becomes a point of critical formulation, offering
a site of epistemological evolutions that come to
shape disciplinary directions and hone analytic
foci (Hawkins 2014). Examples include: artists
onboard ship during the long period of capes
and bays geography, the evolving place of artists
and writers in the extension and critique of the
chorographic traditions of regional geographies,
the role of art in the evolution of humanistic
geography, the place of creative practices within
qualitative GIS, and within questions of the
body and affect raised by nonrepresentational
theorists, together with the allied debates around
aesthetics and politics. To overlook this rich
history is not just to pass over an important
influence on geographys development; it is
to miss out on the clear analytic value that an
appreciation of the diverse roles art has played
offers for exploring geographys current phase of
artistic engagement.
This relationship is not one-sided. Art the-
orists, artists, curators, and arts organizations
The International Encyclopedia of Geography.
Edited by Douglas Richardson, Noel Castree, Michael F. Goodchild, Audrey Kobayashi, Weidong Liu, and Richard A. Marston.
2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0663
with the discipline of geography, its substantive
concerns and its knowledge-making practices.
If art, with its concerns with site and situation,
has come to feel especially geographical of late,
this is not a new set of preoccupations. We can
think, for example, of the intersection of art and
urban theory throughout the twentieth century,
as well as the broader spatial turn in the arts
and humanities that found perhaps its clearest
form over the last two decades (Rendell 2006).
Artists have also long produced artifacts and
worked with practices, and knowledge (modes
of mapping, exploration, preoccupations with
place, and so on), that we might more normally
think of as geographical.
There is therefore much common ground
between geography and art, shared conceptual
and methodological territory whose occupations
were not, until recently, explored terribly closely.
As geographys relationship with the human-
ities continues to evolve, there is a growing
concern to explore the form and kind of this
geographyart relationship. There is interest
in mapping the multiple intersections of these
expanded disciplinary and practice-based fields,
around both substantive topics such as landscape
or the body, as well as around common practices
such as mapping, and the geographies of differ-
ent mediums, whether paintings, photographs,
sculpture, performance, or community-based
work (Dear et al. 2012). An ongoing issue
has been to attend to the different forms of
these artgeography intersections, with dis-
tinctions being made between dialogues, which
bring geographic ideas and thinking to bear on
artworks and vice versa, and doings, wherein
geographers and artists collaborate, or work
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separately, to bring artistic practices together
with geographical practices and procedures of
knowledge-making.
The broad spectrum of research that links
geography and art displays a diversity of substan-
tive foci (landscape, urban space, materialities,
nonhuman geographies, environmental mat-
ters), analytic approaches (iconography, sensory
ethnography, ethnography), and methodological
questions. From amidst this diversity emerge
three enduring areas of concern: the geogra-
phies of artworks and art worlds namely the
production, consumption, and circulation of art;
the role of artistic practices in making worlds;
and the role of artistic practices in geographi-
cal knowledge-making practices and methods
(Hawkins 2014). These three dimensions are
common not only to geography and art rela-
tionships, but also to creative geographies more
generally. As such, they are applicable concerns
with respect to creative writing, music, film, and
craft practices (Daniels et al. 2012). This is not
to collapse important distinctions of method,
medium, and politics, but to enable tensions to
be drawn out between these different modes.
Geographies of art worlds
and art-making
Artistic production has long been recognized as
a situated activity with complex and manifold
geographies. Discussions of such geographies
take account of the role of the art world, as well
as the nested sites of studio, home, community,
city, nation, and so on (Bain 2013). Geographers
are very aware that the geographies of art are not
just those of the initial site of the works pro-
duction and consumption, and those places and
locations that feature within the works, but are
also concerned with the circulation of artworks,
the various contexts through which they move,
2
and the sites at which they are consumed. The
sites and spaces and spatial distributions of artistic
production, have been explored via a range of
methodologies and to a variety of ends. These
include economically and politically orientated
studies of the networks, clusters, and scenes of
the art world; detailed studies of the geohistories
and geopolitics of the international diffusion
of artistic materials, styles, and techniques; the
sociologies and histories of art school or colonies
of artists, as well as ethnographic studies of the
embodied, material practices of studio pro-
duction (Kaufmann 2004; Sjohlm 2012; Bain
2013).
Geographic research on art worlds has often
taken the spatialities of artistic production as
an analytic concern, whether such spatialities
be those of local agglomeration clusters or
the intersecting local and global networks of
transnational production, circulation, and cul-
tural exchange. Questions of creative clustering
have developed out of art historical interest in
arts colonies or schools, as well as from the eco-
nomic imperatives of the creative cluster. Here
we find artistic outputs shaped by social rela-
tions, common conceptual questions, and shared
inspirational sources. For more economically
inclined scholars these relations translate into
traded and untraded interdependencies. If
the former consist of connections formed from
sharing, exchanging, or trading (for money,
goods or services) painting materials, framing
services, and so on, the latter might include the
production of and benefit from the formal and
informal social exchanges that constitute a shared
creative and intellectual atmosphere. Informing
these ideas have been discussions around cre-
ative scenes, whether these be historical studies
of the evolution of particular locations or eco-
nomic work on creative cities and city branding
(Rycroft 2011). Running in parallel with such
enquiries is research that deploys postcolonial

scholarship and ideas of transnationalism to
query the mobilities of people, objects, and ideas
in the production of different art forms from
painting to performance work (Rogers 2014).
Accompanying work on art scenes is a growing
body of geographic scholarship concerned with
the sites, spaces, practices, and technologies of
artistic projects, whether these be situated in
the field, the studio, the street, the community,
or the landscape. Across these sites attention
is paid to the intersections of the material and
immaterial dimensions of creative production
to questions of embodied practice and to the
role of technologies. Discussions of the stu-
dio, for example, explore the role of studio
spaces as sites of inspiration, for thinking and
dreaming, for archiving, for identity formation
(Sjohlm 2012). In discussions of art-making in
the landscape, the immediacy of en plein-air
experience in shaping the artworks produced has
been a key analytic dimension. In other words,
how the embodied experience of being in the
landscape informed the works, wherein what is
being pictured becomes a more-than-visual
account of what was sensed. In such a context,
the role of technologies from the camera to
the paint-box in mediating and shaping these
relations is an important concern.
In considering artworks made on the street or
in the community geographers have embraced
the idea of these works as technologies of con-
nection. Geographers interrogate these works for
the form and kind of connections made between
community and artwork, but also the relations
within the community that are catalyzed by the
artwork. Such an approach takes seriously the
social work that these art projects do at the
sites of their creation. Such work might relate
to border and security concerns, to questions of
urban super-diversity, rural community disen-
franchisement, or the alienation brought about
by urban gentrification (Hawkins 2014). It is
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clear from thinking about this work that the
geographies of creative production cannot be set
apart from the geographies that the work creates
within the frame, nor from the geographies of
its consumption.
Geographical scholarship on galleries as a site
of artistic consumption has not perhaps been
as voluminous as might be expected. Indeed a
general trend in geographical scholarship has
followed artworks as they moved from studio
to situation, being more concerned with the
artworks produced and consumption beyond
studio and gallery sites than with reflecting
critically on gallery spaces. If the geographies of
galleries have been largely neglected, questions
of audiencing have gained attention in the con-
text of art produced and consumed in homes,
on streets, in communities and in the landscape.
While such works might involve a gallery-based
period of display, often after their initial phase
of production and consumption, such later
forms of consumption are generally overlooked
by geographers more intent on studying the
transformative effects of these works on the
spaces and peoples they are produced in and by.
An appreciation of the potential of artworks to
make worlds demands an analytic sensitivity
to the intersections of the geographies of the
works production and consumption whether
these be on the street, in the studio, or in the
gallery with the geographies within their
frames.
Artistic practices and the making
of worlds
That artworks do not so much picture worlds
as make worlds is a central premise for geog-
raphers studying art. Looking across the last few
centuries of geographical relations with art is to
witness the evolution of geographys appreciation
3
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of the work art does in the world. In short,
there is a shift from artworks understood as
picturing worlds, with the latter verb under-
stood to be an act of mimetic representation,
to an appreciation of the force and potential
of the making of worlds that happens in that
picturing (but also of course the sounding and
performing) of the world. This attention to
the productive doings of art, its makings and
shapings of worlds, subjects, and knowledge, has
become one of the distinguishing features of
geographical scholarship on art.
Picturing places: geographical imaginations
The value of art for providing packets of
information about a place is how expeditionary
art from the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies has often been discussed. In the midst
of this Age of Exploration, artists commonly
accompanied great voyages such as those of
Captain James Cook in the service of science
and empire. Indeed, the casting of aesthetic
practices in relation to military and commer-
cial interests, and as part of the production
of enlightenment science, earned this era of
artistic practice the moniker the winter of
the imagination. An important figure in the
context of exploration art is Alexander Von
Humboldt, the eighteenth-century polymath
for whom artistic, and aesthetic practices more
generally, were a mode of apprehension equal
to, and indeed a building block of and cata-
lyst for, scientific knowledge. The influence
of Humboldts geo-aesthetics can be traced
into the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
formation of branches of geography as differ-
ent as geomorphology and cultural geography.
In geographys twentieth century evolution,
Humboldts scholarship is a touch-stone for a
humanistic critiques of a scientized geography,
and more recently it backstops both human
4
geographers embrace of aesthetics and geopol-
itics, and physical geographers recognition of
the role of enchantment and the arts in critical
approaches to their methods and scholarship
(Hawkins 2014).
The richly varied visual cultures of exploration
produced during the sea-going voyages of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from large
oil paintings to informal sketches in diaries to
scientifically accurate botanic drawings were
valorized for their situated geographies of pro-
duction. Being produced on the spot such visual
cultures provided privileged forms of evidence.
They were valued over the written word for
their production of more perfect accounts
of places and species than words could create.
Crucially such pictures of place were formative
building blocks in the geographical imaginar-
ies of the European Enlightenment era. They
provided not only scientific source material,
but also pictured exotic places and others
for those European populations who could
never hope to travel there. Sent home ahead of
explorers, they were hung in galleries, stored and
displayed in scientific institutions (including the
Royal Geographical Society), and reproduced in
newspapers, their circulation creating globally
encompassing geographical imaginaries (Driver
and Martins 2005).
Such geographical imaginations are, of course,
not neutral picturings of place. Rather, the
imaging of places far distant was the result of
a complex set of aesthetic geographies, often
overlaying the terrains of non-Western places
with the pictorial conventions of the Western
world. William Hodges (17441797) images of
Tahiti, for example, picture the island through a
Western optic, a lens that owes much to the aes-
thetics of classical Italianate painting. This optic
shaped everything from lighting to composi-
tional layout, the types of plant species included,
and the mode of picturing the inhabitants of

places. The complex geographies of these imag-
ined, pictured worlds, importantly, did not just
take form on the surfaces of the painted canvas,
but also came to find form in the materiality of
landscapes, the textures of social relations, and
the topographies of Western imaginaries that
were created as a result of these paintings.
Landscape art: from iconography
to embodied experience
The force of painted aesthetics in shaping land-
scapes and lives is foregrounded in geographical
scholarship on landscape painting. Scholars such
as Stephen Daniels (1993) focus on the Marx-
ist duplicity of the landscape, developing an
interdisciplinary approach that begins from the
Marxist cultural studies scholarship of Raymond
Williams and John Berger. The empirical focus
of this scholarship included the works of great
English and American painters of the eighteenth
and early nineteenth century. The surfaces of
these canvases were examined as veils, aesthetic
screens drawn across the landscape. Exploring
both the symbolic codes and the affective and
emotional qualities of the landscape, its beauty,
sublimity, and order, such aesthetic conventions
were understood to constitute a covering over
and a turning away from the uncomfortable
truths of the landscape. In many cases of the
English picturesque in paintings, for example,
by John Constable, and landscape gardens by
Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown this
turning away involved the picturing or recre-
ation of a rural idyll, an aesthetic ideology that
hid from view the dark side of the land- men, seeking subjective accounts of place and
scape, masking the squalid living conditions
of the rural poor, their existence at the edge of
starvation, and the widespread unrest that existed
in the countryside at the time. Such ideological
picturings of place produced and reproduced,
indeed legitimized, particular types of power
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regimens, especially when, in addition to being
pictured, they came to shape the materialities
of the landscape. Migrating from the surface of
the painted canvas to the earth, soil, stone, and
flesh of rural landscapes and communities, these
aesthetics re-aligned roadways and coppiced
woods, and ensured houses were left to tumble
down in picturesque ruin. Such aesthetic migra-
tions were not just restricted to the national
environs of their creation, but were rendered
mobile by practices of colonization. The global
circulation of these aesthetic principles was one
way in which colonial power was made manifest
in the landscapes of plantations, and in the lives
and the bodies of their workers.
Nuggets of experience: more than
presenting
Geographical perspectives on the ideology of aes-
thetics, and the transformative work such aesthet-
ics did on subjects and urban and rural landscapes,
dominated geographical scholarship on art for
much of the late twentieth century and rightly
so (Pinder 2005). A parallel understanding run-
ning throughout geographys engagement with
arts in the twentieth century has been ideas of
arts as offering geographers access to experience.
Yi Fu Tuan (1973) and others writing of geog-
raphys relationship with literature and art have
been rather disparaging of this relationship, sug-
gesting that geographers were scanning artistic
and literary sources for nuggets of experience.
In moves described as akin to stamp collecting,
geographers become merely intellectual middle-
experience in arts as sources, and sorting them
for collation as data within the chorographic
impulses of the regional geographies of the time.
As geographys engagements with art and
its own theoretical interests evolved, a rather
different sense of the value of art in relation
5
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to subjective experience has begun to emerge.
In the light of a growing interest on the part
of feminists, nonrepresentational theorists, and
others in questions of the body, the senses, affect,
and emotion, arts practices became re-valued.
Within the context of these concerns painting,
sound and installation art, dance, urban walking
practices, video practices, among other arts
practices, have become situated as sites in which
geographical sensibilities can become extended
and attuned to our sensing and experiencing
of space and place. These studies often have
a two-fold imperative: a remapping of bodily
senses, challenging the privileged position of
vision by asserting the value of other senses for
example, hearing, taste, and touch in knowing
place and self, and by exploring the complex
intersection of these external senses with the
internal senses. The second imperative which
perhaps marks out geographic studies from other
approaches, is a concern with how in knowing
space, place, and self, we are not just concerned
with the bodily senses, but also with their
intersections with questions of habit, memory,
and prior knowledge of these and other places
(Hawkins 2014).
These ideas of the body have also reconfig-
ured the set of analytic modes and questions
geographers ask of and with art. If geographical
studies of historical landscape paintings would
commonly approach these paintings as a set of
symbols to be decoded, then recent reconfigura-
tions attend to art as productive of sensations and
experiences. For some geographers this resulted
in a revisiting of ideas of landscape in relation to
abstract practices. In these works artists engage
their embodied experiences of landscape as the
subject of their work, creating canvases that are
less concerned to picture than to create evocative
blocks of sensation and experience that audience
members feel in their bodies as well as explore
with their minds.
6
In such a context artistic practices are the
result of encounters with the landscape and
environment, but also create encounters with
landscape and environment for their audiences.
From the recognition that arts practices enabled
geographers and others to explore everyday
embodied experiences of being in and moving
through the world, recent geographical research
has begun to examine the potential of artworks
to open us out to experiences of the world and
move us beyond the capacities of our human
senses. This is to understand art as potentially
creating ways of knowing the world beyond
what is possible for our human cognition and
our sense organs alone to develop. Art, as a
result, holds the potential to create encounters
that might open us out to experiences of airy
and earthy matters, nonhumans, the organic,
and the inorganic in ways that are important for
shaping our future environmental imaginaries.
Artistic practices and the production
of geographic knowledge
The place of artistic practices in producing
geographical knowledge has evolved since artists
accompanied explorers on board ships produc-
ing rich visual cultures of distant places. From
this foundation based on the valorization of
mimesis, it is possible to explore the alternative
value that has been found in creative methods
for geographers, which have become variously
understood as creative, experimental, or artful
geographies. Such work sees geographers across
the discipline coming to embrace various cre-
ative practices film-making, visual art, creative
writing both as the means through which
research can proceed and by which it can be
communicated and presented.
Primary among the justifications for practicing
such creative geographies is to understand them

as a response to the disciplines orientation
toward embodied and practice-based doings.
Such orientations demand the means by which
to engage, research, and re-present the sensory
experiences, affective atmospheres, and flows
of life. Geographers development of artistic
practices, either alone or in collaboration, is
understood as a means to enable such messy,
fleshy, and experiential modes of engagement to
be explored and developed. Furthermore, cre-
ative writing practices offer a means by which to
begin to write about, to grasp, such experiences
and convey them to others.
For other geographers engagement with the
artful proffers the means to grasp the messy,
unfinished, and contingent in everything
from spatial imaginaries to knowledge-making
practices that a more scientistically inclined
geography might orient us away from. Artful
engagements might include critical reflections
on the spaces and sites of the archive and other
knowledge-making institutions; they might
reflect a concern with how we know and write
about places and spaces; or they might be a
response to an epistemological turn within
geography that seeks to do away with categories,
binaries, and fixities, in favor of multiplicities,
hybridities, and becomings. Rightly, or wrongly,
geographers across the discipline, whether his-
torical, concerned with nonhuman relations in
the Anthropocene, or with modes of contem-
porary urban living, have found value in artistic
practices and creative methods as a means to
confront the epistemological challenges they
encounter at their research sites.
A further reasoning behind geographical
engagements with creative methods has been
in terms of the contemporary extension of the
long appreciated possibilities such methods offer
for enrolling audiences other than academics.
Long recognized to form affective means of
communication, scholars are now recognizing
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the value of arts practices as proffering a means
by which to constitute new and engaged publics
for their work. Thus we see geographers creating
plays, developing arts workshops, and configur-
ing creative activities based on the recognized
social work that aesthetic practices have been
understood to do. As well as being driven by
intellectual agendas, such practices should also
be situated in the context of the contemporary
political agendas and climates of higher educa-
tion wherein concerns with moving research
beyond the academy, and thinking through
politics in a new way loom large. Where perhaps
there is work still to be done is around the seem-
ing absence of a more critical radical politics
from these creative geographies (Marston and
De Leeuw 2013).
GeoHumanities: looking to the future
Geography has had something of a return toward
art and arts practices, as both empirical objects
of study and as the methods by which research
can proceed, and through which it can be
disseminated. Furthermore, art practices and
theories have never seemed more geographically
engaged. The result has been a ground-swell
of practice and attention to what has come
to be called the GeoHumanities, with these
intersections becoming increasingly institution-
alized in interdisciplinary masters courses, in
practice-based doctoral work undertaken within
geography departments, as well as in the evolving
collaborative research practices of academics and
artists (Dear et al. 2012).
If these productive intersections are to con-
tinue to fulfill their not inconsiderable promise
there are a number of perhaps self-explanatory,
and also perhaps not so self-explanatory issues to
consider. The first of these relates to an ongoing
7
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need to be clear and respectful about the knowl-
edge and practices being deployed and developed
in these intersections. Geographers may like the
idea of being artists, writers and film-makers,
but enthusiasm should not outweigh a concern
for the skillful nature of these practices. Equally,
there should perhaps be a shared sense of such
intersections not only being based in comings
together that are predicated on the in common
and the collapse of differences. One of the
delights of finding similar interests in practices
of mapping, of exploration, or in ideas and terms
such as region, topography, or vision has to
be also to commit to probing the differences
between these understandings. This is not to
create rifts within newly formed relations, but
to ensure their intellectual integrity, and also to
aid in the mutual development and evolution of
such ideas.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in these
comings together we should not lose sight of the
importance of attending carefully to the geogra-
phies of creative production and consumption,
not least because such perspectives enable a
close attention to the kinds of work that
artistic objects and experiences do in the world.
Geographers need to attend to the changing
geographies of art over the twentieth century, to
remain attuned to how the imaginaries and mate-
rialities of places shaped by canvases denote but
one important sort of work art does in the world.
This variety needs to be appreciated alongside the
refiguring of artistic regimens around eventful
and relational aesthetics, wherein, aesthetic prac-
tices create opportunities for social encounters
in which individual subjects and communities
can become transformed.
There is a need to attend closely to the type of
encounter with the world that is being created
by art forms, to acknowledge how they affect
us as academics, as makers, as geographers,
but also what impact they might have on their
8
audiences. This is to become attuned to the
political possibilities, but also the responsibility
associated with the art that geographers study,
the creative practices deployed within their
research methods, and the artworks that they
might be involved in creating.
SEE ALSO: Cultural geography; Cultural
turn; GeoHumanities; Humanistic geography;
Imaginative geographies; Interdisciplinarity and
geography; Landscape iconography and
perception; Nature, art, and aesthetics; New
cultural geography; Nonrepresentational theory;
Phenomenology; Representation;
Situationists/situationist geography; Visuality
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