Indoors Outdoors at Brightside: A Critical Visual Study Reclaiming Landscape Architecture in the Feminine

Abstract

While researchers have increasingly examined visual landscape practices, the potential for using the visual as a research method remains relatively unexplored. At the same time, with notable exceptions, landscape architecture theorists have been slow and reluctant to engage with contemporary discourses on gender and discussions of the feminine/masculine dualism. In this paper we seek to bring these two fields together with a third emerging landscape discourse: the reclamation of post-industrial landscape. Drawing on fine art practice-based research, we develop the potential of a critical visual method as a feminine hermeneutic by making five visual-fictional readings of Brightside, a former steel production site in Sheffield, UK. We then reflect upon the process of image making and the content and meaning of the images. In the process of exploring what the feminine is, or might be, both in the context of landscape architecture in general and this post-industrial site in particular, we play with and disrupt the dualisms and binaries of feminine/masculine, indoors/outdoors, and private/public and their interconnections. The resulting images and text aim to communicate feminine meanings and interpretations of the site. As it is the intention that the images are ‘read’ in as much detail as the accompanying texts, the paper opens with these. In these collaged drawings, fragmentation, immersion, dwelling, intimacy, juxtaposition, and inversion are tools of both the image making and intellectual processes. The ultimate aim of this visual study and its accompanying text is twofold. First, it aims to expand upon the potential of visual practices as investigative cultural research methods. Secondly, it aims to open up a discourse on how ideas of the feminine might be further explored in landscape architecture theory and practice.