Charlie Lee-Potter

The sound and geometry of fotminne: walking ancient landscape to imprint foot memory

This practice-based project examines new ways of understanding how long-distance walkers move across the natural landscape. The Swedish neologism fotminne or foot memory is a touchstone, expressing the idea that the walker is imprinted with some kind of mark in their encounter with the land. Using the idea of foot memory, combined with geometric patterning and soundscape, the project asks if it is possible to map a remembered/rememberable path across ancient terrain. If such a connection can be made, might it have a role in sustaining a future landscape freed from passive nostalgia? Fotminne is a form of deep understanding, deep mapping; true foot memory is vested in entrenched knowledge and walks which can be replicated. The project is shaped by the organisational, schematic principles of patterned, geometric form. It asks whether walking in the shape of triangles, rectangles, or circles can imprint foot memory more readily. Does a long-distance walk of several hundred miles play a different role in defining foot memory.

In a form of archaeological excavation of the practice, what was on the surface is exchanged for what lies below, and vice versa. The purpose of this aspect of the project is to explore, in the context of climate change, whether it is possible to find a new, dynamic way forward, rather than to continually return to a position of mournful nostalgia where landscape is, inescapably, a place of loss. ‘Surface’ is etymologically derived from the seventeenth-century French word sur-face, or above the plane. Landscape is a sur-face over which we move. For this project, I have devised a neologism for the subterranean negative of sur-face. I call it sous-face, or underneath the plane, and I use interfaces, layering and folds in my work to investigate its potential to imprint memory.

The project has two key methodological strands, the first of which focuses on composed soundscapes and video. Some are created to embed the sense of being immersed in the landscape and paying deep, intense attention, while others are constructed to actually be a walk, using sounds and images gathered sequentially in the field. Field recordings, on analogue and digital tape, with manipulated pitch and speed, blended with geophony, biophony and harmonics played on a cello, produce not a metaphor for a walk but a finite, specific journey walked from one place to another. My poetry, mixed with the soundscapes, takes the form of sonnets, villanelles and paradelles. The text chronicles the walks and acts as a kind of literary geometry which is combined with experimental dance notation to map movement across the land. The second strand focuses on the creation of geometric book sculptures larger than the human form. Combining etchings, photographs, photogrammetry, ortho-photomaps and text, they invite the onlooker inside as a form of visceral, fotminne encounter with landscape: they are geometric books to walk in.

School, Centre or Area

School of Arts & Humanities

Supervisors

More about Charlie

Biography

Charlie's practice as a walking artist emerges from her work as a lecturer in English literature, teaching the work of walking writers such as Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth. She has a PhD in English Literature and teaches English at Hertford College, University of Oxford. She is a former foreign correspondent for BBC Television and BBC Radio 4 and presented programmes such as PM, The World At One, The World This Weekend and Open Book. She continues to work as a writer, lecturer and journalist. Her podcast Inside A Mountain explores the relationship between walking and the creative imagination.

Degrees

PhD English Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London

MA Fine Art: Printmaking, Camberwell College of Art, UAL: Distinction

BA English, University of London: First Class

Awards

2021 Shortlisted for the International Créateurs Prize for Creative Journalism

2020 The Printmakers Council Prize

2019 Teaching Excellence Prize, Department of English, Royal Holloway, University of London

2018 Shortlisted for the University English Prize for monograph Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and

the Evolution of the Novel (New York: Bloomsbury Academic)

2008-2013 Royal Holloway, University of London Research Scholarship

Exhibitions

2021 Solid Air art exhibition, No Format Gallery, London

2020 Changing Landscapes exhibition, Central Saint Martins

2020 Woolwich Printmaking Fair

Two etchings selected

2019 Artist in Residence, Arts on Main, Gloucester, Virginia

Invited to complete a series of paintings and drawings highlighting the dangers of climate change

2017 The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, USA

Juried Biennial International Miniature Print Competition

Series of drypoint etchings selected. Exhibition juror: Freyda Spira of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Publications

Selected publications include:

Monographs:

2017 Writing the 9/11 Decade:

Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel

(New York: Bloomsbury Academic)

ISBN 979-1-5013-1320-2

Afterwords:

2017 Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest,

(London: Persephone Books)

ISBN: 978-1-9102-6311-2

Book Chapters:

2017 These Islands: A Portrait of the British Isles

(London: Francis)

ISBN: 978-0-9930-4974-3

Walking the city: three chapters on the flâneur/walker in Edinburgh, London and Bath

Small sample of essays, reviews and articles:

Cereal magazine:

Auguste Rodin

Park Seo Bo and the Dansaekhwa art movement

Donald Judd

John Pawson

Agnes Martin

Disegno magazine: Paul Baker, Fabulosa!: The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language

The Independent:

Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows

Simonetta Wenkert, The Half-Known Life

Stefan Merrill Block, The Story of Forgetting

Caroline Oulton, Unsafe Attachments

Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveller’s Wife

Joanna Trollope, Friday Nights

Valerie Martin, Trespass

Grace Bowman, Thin

Andrew Motion, In the Blood

Tomas Eloy Martinez, The Tango Singer

Meg Wolitzer, The Position

Dorothy Whipple, They Were Sisters

Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces,

Nadeem Aslam, Maps for Lost Lovers

Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

Slightly Foxed:

Francoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

The Observer: Gillian Slovo, Ice Road

Jay Rayner, The Apologist

New Statesman:

Richard Benson, The Farm

Roger Scruton, News from Somewhere

Conferences

Invited papers, lectures, workshops and masterclasses:

2021 Thame Arts and Literature Festival:

Interview with Kate Kennedy: Dweller in Shadows

2020 Thame Arts and Literature Festival:

Interview with Gill Hornby, Miss Austen

2019 Bookbinding and Printmaking Workshop for the mental health charity, Re-Lit, Worcester College, University of Oxford

2018 Faulkner Studies Colloquium

‘Unbroken-surfaced confusion’: geometric shapes in As I Lay Dying

2018 Oxford Arts Festival:

Julia Samuel, Grief Works

2017 Thame Arts and Literature festival:

Marie-Elsa Bragg, Towards Mellbreak

2017 Persephone Books lunchtime lecture series

Effi Briest and the nineteenth-century adultery novel

2016 Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

Primary witnesses: gathering post-9/11 testimony

2016 Royal Holloway, University of London:

Masterclass on the art of interviewing and writing

2015/2016 Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

Interdisciplinary creative-writing workshops

2015 Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford:

Interdisciplinary creative-writing workshops:

Number theory and topology in literary texts

Futurism, food, and sensory writing

2014 Oxford Union Debate

Participant on regulation of the press

2014 Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

Feminism and Friendlessness in The Good Wife

E Pluribus Unum: Television Cultures of the United States seminar series

2013 Royal Holloway, University of London

Finding a form to accommodate the mess: language and expression in the post-9/11 novel.

Media, War and Conflict Conference (participant)

2011 Dulwich College Symposium, ‘Science and the Imagination’

Galvanizing Frankenstein: the art of Mary Shelley’s science (invited paper)

2002-2006 Newnham College, Cambridge

Persephone Books Literary Conferences:

Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own

The short stories of Elizabeth Berridge

Marginality in Joanna Cannan’s Princes in the Land

2005 Oxford public lecture:

The History of the Oxford Novel

2002 Hay Literary Festival:

Presenter and guest interviewer

Jazz rhythms in the fiction of Sebastian Faulks

The fiction of Nicholas EvansI

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