Citing/Siting the Claypits: A workshop for the Art Writing MLitt cohort, Glasgow School of Art | 28.3.23
‘In this session writer and artist Maria Howard invites you to produce a piece of site writing informed by the Hamiltonhill Claypits, alongside the Glasgow branch of the Forth and Clyde Canal. An ex-industrial site that has been recently ‘rewilded’, the claypits can act as a useful lens through which to consider the city’s colonial past, neoliberal present and ecological future. We will be thinking with Jane Rendell’s definition of site writing as a ‘critical and ethical spatial practice’ alongside Imani Jacqueline Brown’s ‘strategies of ecological witnessing’ in order to engage with the entanglement of waterway and weeds, the soundscape of the birds and the M8, the jolt from the view of the hills to the gravel paths beneath our feet.
After a group visit to the site we will return to the studio to refine our notes and to think with clay in order to cultivate somatic knowledge of material and site. We will share our work and take part in a collective notation exercise in order to generate a piece of collaborative writing. Students will also be encouraged to view site writing as a practice that goes beyond psychogeography or nature writing, and to reflect on how it can be applied to writing about the body and identity, art criticism, translation, or practices such as ‘critical fabulation’ (Saidiya Hartman) and speculative writing.’
