Wonder-full geomorphology: Sublime aesthetics and the place of art

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2013 37: 227 originally published online 16 August 2012Progress in Physical GeographyDeborah P. Dixon, Harriet Hawkins and Elizabeth R. Straughan

Wonder-full geomorphology: Sublime aesthetics and the place of art

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Article

Wonder-full geomorphology:Sublime aesthetics and theplace of art

Deborah P. DixonAberystwyth University, UK

Harriet HawkinsRoyal Holloway, University of London, UK

Elizabeth R. StraughanAberystwyth University, UK

AbstractThough not yet readily apparent in articles and book chapters, there is a burgeoning series of ‘in the field’collaborations between geomorphologists and artists focused around the mutual exploration of ‘inspirationallandscapes’, and the harnessing of the emotive dimensions of such body/world encounters in the productionand communication of geomorphological knowledge. Seemingly at odds with the discipline’s emphasis uponthe production of fieldwork data (as opposed to sensed phenomena), as well as its disavowal of the subjective,this work nevertheless resonates with a complex and fascinating aesthetic tradition within geomorphology.Here, we ‘place’ these contemporary collaborations via: reference to Humboldtian science, and the cruciallink between sensibility and precision; a reading of the Kantian sublime in the work of G.K. Gilbert; asketching out of the evisceration of both the aesthetic and art in the second half of the 20th century; and,finally, a review of the current scope of art/geomorphology collaborations, and possible futures.

Keywordsaesthetic, art, G.K. Gilbert, geomorphology, sublime, wonder

I Introduction

Over the past two decades we have been witness

to a variety of efforts to ‘re-enchant’ geomor-

phology. These involve a more ‘direct’ (by which

is meant ‘in the field’) engagement with land-

forms, which becomes a means of prompting

‘out of the box’ thinking in the mode of W.M.

Davis’ (1926) outrageous hypotheses. They have

also generated discussion as to how geomorphol-

ogists should, and could, engage with landforms

as objects of analysis, and communicate their

knowledge (Baker, 1993, 1996, 2008; Baker and

Twidale, 1991; Huggett, 2002; Stoddart, 1981;

Twidale, 1996). In subsequent and related

debates on the past, present and future of geo-

morphology, portentous gaps have been posited

between subjectivity and objectivity, idealism

and realism, empiricism and reductionism and

Corresponding author:Deborah Dixon, Institute of Geography and EarthSciences, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, SY233DB, UK.Email: [email protected]

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so on, each laid one on top of another to form a

disciplinary palimpsest, marked by a deep, see-

mingly impassable fissure. Far from being a ‘phi-

losophically sedate discipline’ (Sherman, 1996:

87), geomorphology continues to grapple with

a variety of conceptual issues, including its place

within and without geography (for example,

Harrison, 1998, 2001; Rhoads, 1993, 1994,

1999, 2006; Rhoads and Thorn, 1994, 1996a;

Slaymaker, 2009).

In this paper we want to engage with these

debates on the character and scope of the

discipline, and explore the potential of a

‘wonder-full geomorphology’. We do so not

to resolve them via an all-encompassing

explanatory framework (as has been attempted

via general systems theory, critical realism and,

more recently, actor-network theory), or shared

concepts (such as relational space). Nor do we

want to create a ‘bridging’ moment based on

mutual concerns (such as global warming, envi-

ronment degradation and loss of biodiversity).

Rather, we want to reconsider key moments in

the study of landforms in order, first, to help

contextualize the emergence of these dichoto-

mies – objective over and against subjective and

so on – within geomorphology, and, second, to

‘place’ current, practice-based, collaborative

projects undertaken by artists and geomorphol-

ogists that do not ‘bridge’ divides so much as

juxtapose and learn from differing approaches

to landforms. Key, here, is a shared interest in

the sensuous encounters via which landscapes

are made sense of, perceptually and cognitively,

and a harnessing of the emotive dimensions of

such encounters in the production and commu-

nication of geomorphological knowledge. This

is an aesthetic mode of inquiry, we argue, which

finds resonance not only in art’s long tradition

of thought and practice, but in aspects of a his-

tory of geomorphology that have tended to be

overlooked or disavowed by its 20th-century

biographers. This is despite continued interest

by some geomorphologists in art and aesthetics

more broadly as manifest in, for example,

Shephard’s (1957) compelling argument on the

way in which emerging geological knowledge

in 1840s New England inspired the region’s art-

ists, and Alexander’s (1982, 1986) observations

on the ‘form of the land’ and the shaping of

Leonardo da Vinci’s and Dante’s artistic output.

The sundering of aesthetic sensibilities from

scientific inquiry is usually traced back to what

is considered to be a momentous, Enlighten-

ment shift in the making of the modern-day geo-

graphic discipline, wherein, as Hartshorne

(1939), for example, observed, geography shed

its ‘pre-critical’ collection phase – based on the

compendium of images as well as texts – and

became a synthesizing effort. Critical analysis

was associated with the sorting and categorizing

of observations, with the ultimate goal of pull-

ing out from this wealth of material a generaliz-

able set of processes. For Stoddart, the year

1769 is pivotal: Captain Cook’s entry into the

South Pacific formally marked the end of a ‘bar-

ren didacticism of capes and bays’ and the inau-

guration of a discipline that produces and seeks

to answer questions concerning ‘man and envi-

ronment within regions’ (Stoddart, 1987: 331).

In both these accounts of disciplinary history,

art, as well as a discussion of the aesthetic, is

barely present. It is unsurprising, then, that

Alexander von Humboldt’s 19th-century ana-

lyses of landforms are so often understood as

on a cusp; and that his Cosmos (1845–1862) is

denoted as tension-laden, and even fatally

flawed, by virtue of his insistence that poetry

and etchings were to be valued alongside sys-

tematic observations of physical processes

(Stoddart, 1975).

Our own discussion of the place of art and

aesthetics in geomorphology returns to and

takes inspiration from Humboldt’s work. Cru-

cial to our argument is the recognition of an

‘expanded field’ of artistic inquiry that predated

the rarification of ‘artworks’ (principally in the

form of oil paintings, watercolours and sculp-

ture), which was firmly institutionalized by, for

example, the founding of the Royal Academy of

228 Progress in Physical Geography 37(2)



Arts in London in 1769.1 Prior to this strict win-

nowing, however (and continuing to circulate

outside of it, not least in diverse scientific,

mechanic and technological institutions), was

an expanded field that encompassed: the instru-

mentalized graphic arts of maps and charts; a

visual tradition of geological cross-sections

based on explanation and exposition; the visual

economies of a Linnaean Botany; and the ideals

of landscape and view paintings. What we want

to draw out from this is how art was indeed much

more than a mode of representation that allowed

for an ‘accurate’ rendering of the form, feature,

colour and texture of landforms – a mimetic, if

you will – but had, as Humboldt acknowledged,

a range of roles in Enlightenment geographies,

all of which relied upon, albeit in different

modes, the working through of an aesthetic sen-

sibility in the production of geographic knowl-

edges (Hawkins, 2010, 2011).2

Aesthetics refer here not to some personally

held sense of beauty, but to a broad-based inquiry

into multi-sensuous encounters between body

and world, and the manner in which these were

to be made sense of. Indeed, it is in the 18th cen-

tury that such inquiry is formalized in the work of

Alexander Baumgarten and Immanuel Kant. As

such, the aesthetic was by no means to be ‘con-

tained’ in the production and form of paintings

and sketches, but undergirded fieldwork practices

more broadly (Stafford, 1993), as manifest in

Humboldt’s ‘artistic’ philosophy.

Acknowledging the broad sweep of the

aesthetic, we are interested here in its varied

influence within a history of modern-day geo-

morphology. We draw out, for example, how

a Kantian aesthetic has been used to ground

a divide between the intelligible and the

unknown, the latter viscerally experienced as

the sublime and prompting a sense of awe and

wonder that, importantly, prompts thought. And

so in the work of G.K. Gilbert (1843–1918),

often heralded as the ‘father’ of a modern-day,

scientific, process-orientated geomorphology,

we can trace how a felt engagement with the

order of nature prompts a series of analytically

framed questions concerning landform develop-

ment. This is a very particular rendering of

‘wonder’ that persists across the field today,

perhaps most strongly in contemporary plane-

tary geomorphology: here, an (almost) unlim-

ited frontier is afforded for the exploration of

extra-terrestrial landforms and landscapes

(Baker, 2008).

These themes continue into the 20th century,

wherein we find a ‘sense of place’ as part and

parcel of the ‘scientific study of scenery’ (Marr,

1900). Leveson, for example, notes how, for a

geologist, ‘the pleasing landscape is endowed

with geologic clarity: material, structure,

process, and time are meaningfully articulated’

(Leveson, 1988: 85). An extension of this argu-

ment can be seen in the work of Semken (2009,

2011), who not only emphasizes a sense of place

within Navajo and Blackfeet cultural reper-

toires, but weaves these into a native American

geoscientific knowledge base that parallels, for

example, ‘western’ models of dynamic equili-

brium (see also Semken and Brandt, 2010). This

experiential dimension, however, was written

out as unnecessarily subjective by the propo-

nents of a quantitative revolution, a moment that

was to prove pivotal in the recasting of Hum-

boldt and Gilbert as proto-quantitative scientists

(Chorley, 1978). Yet, while the scientism of this

post-war period may have appeared extreme,

even here we can find the continuing presence

of aesthetics, but in an anaemic form. That is,

sensuous encounters with nature are cast as the

source from which systematic, methodological,

technologically mediated procedures can pro-

duce data, the latter now clearly set apart from

‘mere’ sensed phenomena. Furthermore, this

approach to aesthetics sees value in art works,

but only insofar as they provide an accurate ren-

dering of the world they are understood to

mimic, thus enabling them to function as proxy

data sets.

While we recognize the legacy of such

framings, in the following we want to shed some

Dixon et al. 229



light on what might be termed a ‘geomorpholo-

gic aesthetic’, wherein knowledge of the emer-

gence and transformation of landforms is

attained via a multi-sensuous engagement with

landscape, and the making sense of that experi-

ence. This creative mining of geomorphology’s

back catalogue allows us to then to place the

emergence, in recent years, of field-based, col-

laborative projects between artists and geomor-

phologists that, among other things, seek to:

prompt the generation of ‘inspirational data’;

ask questions relating to audience and commu-

nication; and offer productive re-visionings not

only of fieldwork and practice, but also the

nature of the objects geomorphologists are

working with.

II Putting art in its place

In this section, we want to begin our exploration

of the place of art by returning to the ‘Age of

Wonder’ wherein ‘Romantic Science’, as

Richard Holmes (2010: xvi) puts it, ‘grew out

of eighteenth-century Enlightenment rational-

ism, but largely transformed it, by bringing a new

imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific

work’. Publics across Europe and the USA fol-

lowed with trepidation the cosmic voyages of

William and Caroline Herschel, the flights of bal-

loonists, as well as the maritime expeditions of

Captain Cook and Charles Darwin, each of

which encountered peoples and places, objects

and practices that provoked new ways of think-

ing about a dynamic world, how it might work,

and our place within it; and which also, as

Holmes makes clear, undercut any notion of an

antithesis between various fields of knowledge,

as well as between adventure and diplomacy,

experiment and spectacle, lay and expert.

Weimar Germany was to provide a similar

locus of Romantic-cum-Enlightenment activity

around such figures as Goethe, Bach, Schiller

and Herder, as well as Alexander von Humboldt

(1769–1859), broadly considered a ‘celebrated

patriarch’, as Buttimer (2001) puts it, of the

modern-day geographical sciences, and the

‘creator’, according to Ackerknecht (1955), of

geomorphology in particular. For historians of

science, Humboldt has become a key figure in

the exploration of ongoing tensions in this era

around the aesthetic sensibilities of the field

scientist, and the empirical rigour of the arts and

humanities (Dettelbach, 2001), tensions that

were to foreshadow the humanist/spatial

science debates of the 20th century. Neverthe-

less, any sense of a profound disjuncture

between the humanities and the sciences would

be misleading: in Weimar Germany an emer-

ging collection of geological maps and atlases,

for example, were to have a profound cultural

impact not only upon German landscape art

(Mitchell, 1993), but literature also, contribut-

ing to what Piper (2010: 27) calls a ‘new sense

of space and self according to the principles of

stratification, discretization, and relationality’.

Humboldt’s object of analysis was the Earth’s

surface, to which he applied a physiognomic3

mode of study. That is, in taking landforms as his

focus, Humboldt sought to interpret form and

feature as the profound, sensible expression of

a holism that not only extended to the insensible,

but undergirded the universe itself. Hence, land-

forms were not signs to be read, as though they

were but the inferior semblance of things more

real, but part and parcel of this mutually depen-

dent assemblage of people, animals, vegetation,

microclimate, elevation and so on, all animated

and kept in harmonious balance by these forces

– forces that, for Humboldt, were not to be con-

fused with a creationism.4 Indeed, the surface of

the Earth, as an object of analysis for Humboldt,

lent itself to being sensed by the cultivated, gen-

tleman explorer, who not only had the intellect5

to discern such a beautiful holism, but the finan-

cial wherewithal to be able to enhance his ‘gaze’

via a series of ‘apparatus’ such as magnetic com-

passes, thermometers, electrometers and so on,

which allowed for the systematic and measured

re-presentation of certain key aspects of the

field.




It is this commitment to systematic study –

translated into a series of diagrams that tabu-

lated and cross-referenced various forces, thus

enabling comparisons to be made and rudi-

mentary forms of multivariate analysis to be

conducted – that have earned Humboldt the

moniker of the first ‘geovisualizer’ (Jackson and

Romanowski, 2009). His projections of land-

scape are physiognomic silhouettes of rising

plateaus and falling elevations, which expressed

the character of people as well as place. His iso-

thermal lines, curves of constant annual mean

temperature mapped for both surface position

and mountain elevation, expressed a harmonious

balance of all forces. Certainly, such diagrams

worked to a topological imaginary that carved

space into lines, interiors, exteriors and so on.

But, as Dettelbach points out, within Humboldt’s

aesthetic, ‘sensibility and precise measurement

cannot be separated’. This is because the latter

is ‘embedded in a particular account of philoso-

phical authority, the mind, its faculties, and their

legitimate scope’ (Dettelbach, 1999: 477).

Humboldt’s sketches, undertaken in the field,

were later polished by European artists in the

form of dioramas of a landscape’s diverse

organic and inorganic components. These

would in turn inspire landscape painters such

as Frederic Edwin Church, who produced the

large-canvas oil painting ‘Heart of the Andes’

(1859). Exhibited in New York, the painting had

a profound impact: ‘When confronted with its

immensity, the crowd becomes hushed. Women

feel faint’ (Poole, 1998: 107). Such methodolo-

gies were especially important to Humboldt

insofar as they allowed certain sensuous

encounters with the land to be perceived,

digested, made sense of in light of this holistic

reality, and communicated to others.

While admiring of Humboldt’s attempt at sys-

tematic and error-free surveying and measuring

practices, as well as his far-flung substantive

interests, historians of geomorphology have

tended to look upon his holistic philosophy as

an unfortunate imposition of cultural ideas

peculiar to the epoch. Stoddart, for instance,

writes disapprovingly that, ‘These works aimed

to demonstrate the interconnections of phenom-

ena and the continuity and completeness of

knowledge, rather than to adduce principles or

explore problems: hence Mackinder’s little-

remembered remark that the Cosmos ‘‘helped

to delay the advance of science’’’ (Stoddart,

1975: 17–18). The German public’s adoption of

Humboldt’s universal harmony as a spiritual-

cum-political belief no doubt exacerbated Mack-

inder’s sentiments. More recent commentators,

however, writing on the complexities inherent

to a history and philosophy of geomorphology,

have been more forgiving, with Buttimer

(2001: 105), for example, observing that ‘there

are aesthetic and experience-based facets of

[Humboldt’s] overall vision which enable the

work to transcend tensions between objectivity

and subjectivity, macro-scale survey and micro-

scale theatre, scientific explanation and artistic

representation’.

Humboldt’s enrolment of art, as well as his

desire for precise and systematic measurements

of sensible phenomena, becomes, for Buttimer,

folded into his overall aesthetic; that is, a particu-

lar mode of encounter with nature. Bunske (1981)

goes further, and observes that such an encounter

was illustrative of what has been termed the sub-

lime. At first blush, the sublime refers simply to

the overwhelming sense of wonder and awe felt

when regarding the vastness of nature, as evinced,

for example, by the public’s response to Church’s

‘Heart of the Andes’. In this broad sense, it par-

takes of many centuries of philosophical thought

regarding human-environment relations, as well

as the influential treatise of Edmund Burke

(1756) in particular, in which he traces his physio-

logical, as well as emotional, response to such

grand vistas. Yet, and this is what we want to flesh

out below, in acknowledging the importance of

the aesthetic it is also possible to draw out, in

the work of another ‘founding father’ of geomor-

phology, G.K. Gilbert, another rendering of the

sublime, one associated with the work of

Dixon et al. 231



philosopher and physical geography lecturer

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

III A sublime nature

For Kant, a key problematic recurring through-

out his work was the question of how we come

to know the world around us, and in doing so

come to know ourselves. It is in this context that

the sublime, and the related concept of the beau-

tiful, becomes a way of framing this encounter.

Both the beautiful and the sublime, Kant pro-

posed in his Critique of Judgement (1790), should

not be understood as the intrinsic qualities of

objects, such as landforms; rather, they emerge

from a person’s perceptual and cognitive ‘making

sense’ of such objects, and a judgement of some-

thing as either beautiful or sublime. Whereas the

former is manifest as a feeling of pleasure in the

fact that one can discern a harmonious order to

an object (and this certainly echoes Humboldt’s

views on the pleasure felt in observing nature),

the sublime emerges from the discernment of a

boundlessness or formlessness (whether by virtue

of scale or scope) to nature. But, and this is cru-

cial, while phenomena such as volcanoes and

earthquakes evoke a wonder and awe that sug-

gests a physical powerlessness, and propose the

apparent limits of imagination, nevertheless it is

the uniquely human recognition of this limit that

in turn evidences the superiority of understanding

(Rolston, 1995). The sublime, then, is much more

than a particular appreciation for a ‘grand’ nature;

it brings into play the intellectual response to such

grandeur. It is an invitation to thought.

Here, we want to think through the role of

such an aesthetic in G.K. Gilbert’s wondering

engagement with the order of nature, manifest

as a series of analytically framed questions con-

cerning its development. Broadly considered

one of the founding fathers of a modern-day

geomorphology (Orme, 2002), or ‘onlie beget-

ter’, as Tinkler (1985) puts it, referencing Sha-

kespeare, of a process-orientated, dynamic

approach, Gilbert’s mode of inquiry is more

usually described in positivist, methodological

terms, as the ‘interplay of observation and

deductive reasoning wherein data were accumu-

lated within a robust and logical theoretical

framework’ (Chorley, 2000: 569).

Importantly for our argument, Gilbert’s artis-

tic practices emerged out of an ‘expanded field’

that included geologic cross-sections, field

sketches and photography, as well as the chromo-

lithographics, woodcuts and so on that formed

such a large part of the output of key

knowledge-forming institutions such as the

Smithsonian in Washington, DC (see Nelson,

1980). Gilbert, trained in geology and mathe-

matics as well as anatomy, was hired to assist

on John Wesley Powell’s geographic and

geologic survey of the Rocky Mountain Region,

1874–1879, producing ‘Geology of the Henry

Mountains’ in 1877. With the establishment of

the US Geological Survey in 1879 he was

appointed Senior Geologist, and went on to

publish his study of the (Pleistocene) Lake Bon-

neville in 1890. Over the course of his career,

Gilbert also speculated as to the manner in which

meteor impacts shaped lunar landscapes, and in

1906 documented with camera and notes earth-

quake damage along the San Andreas fault-line.

We want to look in depth at his artistic prac-

tice in the two years (on and off) Gilbert spent

in the Henry Mountains. Reading his published

monograph, we gain a sense of how the ‘compre-

hensive views from the mountain tops’ (1877:

vii) afforded Gilbert an overall, visual grasp of

landform; this ‘field of surpassing interest’

(p. 2) is rendered as a pared and pinned-back spe-

cimen, opened up for observation not by the

hands of an anatomist, but by physical processes

of weathering and erosion. He wrote:

The deep carving of the land, which renders it so

inhospitable to the traveler and the settler, is to the

geologist a dissection which lays bare the very anat-

omy of the rocks, and the dry climate which makes

the region a naked desert, soilless and almost plant-

less, perfects the preparation for his examination.

(Gilbert, 1877: 2)




This was no mere record of slash and cut, how-

ever, opening all to the God-like gaze of the

scientist, but the prelude to what B.M. Stafford

(1993) calls a ‘finer touch’, that used the full

complement of senses in an exploration of

objects.6 This was a visual imagining that

acknowledged and then disavowed grand sur-

face impressions as open to myriad interpreta-

tions, and hence duplicities, and sought

instead, via a series of more intimate encoun-

ters, signs telling of the work of primal forces.

In the process, as she goes on to write, ‘a

‘‘hard’’, prestigious method, deemed intellec-

tually superior to the ‘‘soft’’, loose, irregular,

or geometrically shapeless material it was sup-

posed to regularize, was imposed from on high

and from the outside’ (Stafford, 1993: 466).

Gilbert’s attentiveness to how things look

became part and parcel of this imagining. In deli-

neating the Blue Gate and Tununk shales, for

example, it is their perceived colour and banding

that is deemed crucial to their categorization;

thus, ‘They are beautifully laminated and are

remarkably homogeneous. It is only in fresh

escarpments that the lamination is seen, the

weathered surface presenting a structureless

clay’ (1877: 5). Such loose, amorphous, complex

visual scenes prompt a feeling of uncertainty,

and, in Gilbert’s imagining, are hence very much

an invitation to thought. Following a description

of the thickness of the individual strata in the Gray

and Vermilion Cliffs, he observes:

The thickness of individual strata in these great sand-

stones is remarkable, and is one of the elements which

must be taken into account in the discussion of the

problem – which to my mind is yet unresolved – of the

manner in which such immense quantities of homo-

geneous sand were accumulated. (Gilbert, 1877: 7)

More often than not, such visual acuity is sup-

plemented by touch, so that, ‘The rock of the

Flaming Gorge group’, for example:

is of a peculiar character. It is ordinarily so soft that

in its manner of weathering it appears to be a shale.

It is eroded so much more rapidly than the Henry

Fork’s conglomerate above it, that the latter is

undermined, and always appears in the topography

as the cap of a cliff. Nevertheless, it is not strictly

Figure 1. ‘View of the Canon and the Waterpocket Flexure. The Cliff at the left is capped by the Henry’sFork Conglomerate. The arched rocks to the right are the Gray and Vermilion Cliffs Sandstones’, G.K.Gilbert, from ‘Report on the geology of the Henry Mountains’ (1877).

Dixon et al. 233



speaking a shale. The chief product of its

weathering is sand, and wherever it can be exam-

ined in its unweathered condition it is found to be

a fine-grained sandstone. (Gilbert, 1877: 8)

Gilbert’s field sketch of the Gray and Vermilion

Cliffs (Figure 1), which also takes in the Henry

Fork conglomerate, emerges from this visual

imagining of the encounter between body and

land. That is, it systematically records and

locates in visual terms the key sighted and felt

aspects of these encounters, but is also a crucial

means of ‘thinking through’ how these aspects,

rendered legible to self and others, can become

subject to explanation.

In a following sketch of the Waterpocket Flex-

ure (Figure 2), we see a loose grouping of tiny fig-

ures, some walking across the base of the cliffs,

some seemingly gazing with rapt attention at the

grandeur and sweep of the intersected landscape

before them, which becomes, with distance, more

white space than line. If we compare this to the

previous view of Waterpocket Canon, what we

see are two very different registers of sketch exist-

ing side by side within Gilbert’s text. In the first,

we see the use of field-sketching to render the

landscape structurally intelligible, a form of topo-

graphic art that foregrounded an accuracy of deli-

neation, while in the second sketch we see Gilbert

practising a mode of working akin to view-

painting, wherein the focus is on capturing the

scene but to emphasize a subject-centred, aes-

thetic appreciation of it.

During his time in the Henry Mountains Gil-

bert was to detail his observations and findings

in the form of numerous notes and sketches, all

woven together as he strove to make sense of

how particular landforms had been shaped by

underlying physical processes (see Hunt, 1988,

for reprints of these).

Yet Gilbert’s notebooks have usually been

described as evidencing a move from ‘faithful’

description to idealized hypothesis, the latter

alone being deemed scientific in character

(Egger and Carpi, 2008), or, more figuratively,

as the move from seed to germinating plant

(Pollard and Fletcher, 2005: 458).7 Gilbert’s

drawings of Mt Hillers are proffered here; made

on repeat visits, they take the form of field

Figure 2. ‘Waterpocket Flexure, as seen from the south end of Mount Ellen’, G.K. Gilbert, from ‘Report onthe geology of the Henry Mountains’ (1877).




sketches of the type noted above, as well as

iterative drawings of the laccolite he surmises

to be the result of magma inserted into the sedi-

mentary layers of the region (see Figure 3).

Leaving to one side this framing of science as

the delineation of cause-effect relations, what

we can draw out of these notebook excerpts is

the Kantian sublime. When faced with the com-

plex landscape of this site, for example, Gilbert

wrote in his notes, ‘I don’t understand Mt

Hillers’ (quoted in Egger and Carpi, 2008:

n.p.). In order to make sense of this formation

Gilbert has recourse to a graphic representation

of a key process – magma intrusion and subse-

quent uplift and erosion – thereby typifying,

regularizing and shaping a Henry Mountain

‘structure’. To be sure, Gilbert’s artistry here

can be described as providing a visualized

mode of description and explanation, but what

is also apparent is that its varied forms – scenic

view, topographic sketch, diagrammatic cross-

section, and so on – all speak to a multi-

sensuous, and hence aesthetic, encounter with

landscape, and a sustained reflection upon how

this encounter is to be made sense of percep-

tually and cognitively.

Nevertheless, it is this sense of ‘progress’

from one mode of thinking and communicating

(ostensibly descriptive) to another (scientific)

that was to become dominant in accounts of the

history of geomorphology. As Sack (1992)

observes, it was Gilbert’s emphasis upon pro-

cess geomorphology, and particularly his atten-

tiveness to a thermodynamically based method

of systems analysis, that was to become lauded

by a new cadre of quantitative analysts, such as

Strahler and Hack, while historiographies by,

for example, Church (2010) have stressed

Gilbert’s figurehead role in regard to general

systems theory. Part and parcel of this

‘installation’, as Sack calls it, of a new paradigm

was, we would add here, the delinking of

aesthetics (that is, sensuous encounters and

sense-making) from the art ‘object’. As we go

on to discuss below, while such aesthetics were

to remain a disciplinary stalwart, albeit unac-

knowledged as such in the form of fieldwork,

the art work was to be pinned down and

accounted for in thoroughly instrumental terms

as a mimetic of real-world processes and events.

IV Enhanced’ field encounters andart as mimetic

As Sack (1992) observes, Gilbert’s installation

came at the expense of W.M. Davis. In presenting

his ‘geographical cycle’ of landform develop-

ment as a matter of ‘structure, process, stage’,

Davis, of course, borrowed directly from

Darwin’s evolutionary framing of organisms and

Figure 3. ‘Ideal Cross-Section of a Laccolite, showing the typical form and arching of overlying strata’, G.K.Gilbert, from ‘Report on the geology of the Henry Mountains’ (1877).

Dixon et al. 235



the transformation of species. Whereas Gilbert

had deployed an anatomical imaginary that prior-

itized the intimate exploration of bodies via a

‘finer touch’, Davis’ biological borrowing was

firmly grounded in the gaze and the surface

appearance of formations. Hence, his field

sketches were initially based on maps of an area

so that Davis could gain a sense of extant form;

these would be redrawn after a field visit, but very

much in accordance with the stage in the cycle of

erosion that Davis wanted to emphasize. In conse-

quence, what we see in Davis’ famous block illus-

trations are very much ‘ideal types’.

A useful articulation of this form-based ima-

ginary, and its manifestation in the field sketch,

is provided by Woolridge who, in vehement

defence of Davis, wrote:

In the first place I regard it as quite fundamental that

Geomorphology is primarily concerned with the

interpretation of forms, not the study of processes.

The latter can be left to Physical Geology. Here an

analogy may be helpful. The fact of organic evolution

was sufficiently demonstrated by comparative anat-

omy long before the details of its mechanism came

to light . . . Similarly Davis proceeded essentially

by recognizing a developmental series of forms.

Sketch, or better still photograph, a large number of

river meanders and you will readily convince yourself

of the reality of downstream shift or ‘sweep’, as well

as the stages leading to cut-off. (Woolridge, 1958: 31)

Even here, however, we can see the emphasis

upon the sketch as an accurate mimetic of real-

world events and objects – such that it can be

‘bettered’ in this role by the photograph8 – as

opposed to a thinking through of a multi-

sensuous encounter with nature. To be sure, these

encounters remain today a crucial part of the

much-vaunted field trip (Ritter, 1986), but are

now rigidly systematized as the technologically

enhanced, error-free measurement and recording

of variables. Such encounters, in effect, allow

for the production of data, which, because it

has been methodologically and technologically

mediated, is not to be confused with mere sensed

phenomena. If we compare such a methodology

with that of Humboldt, precision has by now

become firmly sundered from the aesthetic sensi-

bilities of the European gentleman.

Contemporaneously, the instrumentalization

of art as a now separate, reified sphere of prac-

tice reached its apogee in the emergence of a

body of work that seeks to use paintings, sketches

and other artistic media as data proxies (Gemtou,

2011).9 For Grove, an early pioneer of this

approach, while oral narratives were ‘not to be

taken at face value’, the detail provided on paint-

ings of the Mt Blanc massif ‘is so accurate that

full dependence may be placed on them as a

source of evidence’ (Grove, 1966: 135). Gellatly

(1985) and Schubert (1980, 1984, 1987) have

situated paintings and photographs as part of a

suite of sources to reconstruct past glacier posi-

tions in Mt Cook National Park and the Sierra

Nevada de Merida, respectively. In similar vein,

Parham (2005) looks to Chinese art for evidence

of type of local bedrock, the intensity of rock

weathering, and the status of soil erosion, while

Hejl (2005) notes tafoni weathering in a Greek

prehistoric wall painting.

As Cosgrove’s (1979) analysis of the aes-

thetics of Ruskin draws out, in some contexts the

faithful representation of nature in all its colour

and morphology is a matter of artistic principle.

What is problematic, however, in such geo-

morphic analyses is the disavowal of the context

within which art-making occurs, including but

not limited to: the intentions of the artists and their

existential and metaphysical concerns; the socio-

cultural environments within which they work;

changing stylistic modes, such as the introduction

of the picturesque; and the symbolic deployment

of a colour and brush palette. Analyses that look

to art to accurately represent nature (or not), we

would emphasize, both draw upon and reinforce

a more general, scientific understanding of visual

culture as principally mimetic. Also, as Rhoads

and Thorn (1996b) note, this mimeticism is itself

predicated upon a logical empiricism, wherein a

fundamental gap is posited between an apparently

objective observation that picks out real-world




truths, and a subjective theorization that must

then work in accord with these truths.

V The return of the aesthetic?

Over the past two decades we can discern an

intermittent call for a return to more ‘direct’

encounters with nature as a source of intellectual

inspiration, but also the productive channelling of

an all-too-human curiosity. In 1981, for example,

Stoddart appealed, in rather more appreciative

vein, to the inspirational nature of landforms, as

evidenced in the work of Humboldt. He writes:

We take pleasure in an aesthetic and even emotional

appreciation of the landscapes we perceive and proj-

ect our imaginations on to them. Often we think this

to be a modern development, though Humboldt

treated it at length in the Cosmos. And it leads to the

sense of wonder which we all must feel, on the coral

reef, in the redwood forests, in high mountains or

the desert, and indeed in Los Angeles or Calcutta,

Istanbul or Peking, in the realization not only of

Earth’s diversity but of man’s [sic] ingenuity in cop-

ing with it in the process of making a living . . . Let

us not allow an arid formalism to replace the true

attraction of geography, either at the elementary

or the research level. (Stoddart, 1981: 296)

Ten years later, Baker and Twidale made a simi-

larly nostalgic call for a return to the ‘Golden

Age’ of geomorphology, wherein Gilbert,

Powell and their contemporaries were inspired

intellectually and emotionally by the grand

landscapes of the American West. They write:

‘Explanatory paradoxes posed by the newly

reported landforms and landscapes stimulated

creative thinking that expanded and improved

explanations for already familiar landscapes’

(Baker and Twidale, 1991: 74). Here, the invita-

tion to thought proffered by complex landscapes

is contrasted with a predictive, systems

approach, which, they argue, relies upon meth-

odological innovation and which, they imply,

is hence lacking in wonder and excitement. For

our own part, we discern here an interest in what

may be termed the ‘affective capacity’ of

landscape, a capacity that takes us back to the

sublime as a viscerally felt invitation to thought.

Such calls are usefully understood, we would

like to suggest, as a return of the aesthetic,

which, as we have argued throughout this paper,

derives its impetus from a consideration of

body/world encounters.

Yet, it must be stressed, given its broad-based

remit, the aesthetic cannot be matched with a

particular theoretical orientation or substantive

domain. Indeed, we can find iterations of the

aesthetic in biology, physics and chemistry, as

well as art and the humanities. In other words,

there is no one ‘hook’ upon which to hang an

aesthetic framing; rather, there is a wealth of

aesthetic modes of inquiry that can be brought

to bear. Underscoring this particular geomor-

phological appeal to more direct encounters is,

we would suggest, a broader reflection upon

visual culture as an embodied (as opposed to

an intellectual or cerebral) practice that brings

the hands, eyes, sensory apparatus, nerve end-

ings, neurons and so on into play. In the language

of mimeticism noted above, ‘re-presentation’ as

a term implies an inferior copy, or sign regarding

something else, and it is precisely this language

that we see being challenged, often via recourse

to a prior Humboldtian or Gilbertian tradition.

Where Baker and Twidale (1991) look to the pro-

ductive, sensuous engagement of body and land,

Tooth looks to the affective capacity of the ‘vir-

tual globe’ (2006) and the satellite image (2009).

Each of these also engage the sublime, which, as

we hope the example of the Heart of the Andes

used earlier indicates, is by no means ‘contained’

in the field. It can very much be discerned in such

spectacles: their status and import in this regard

lies in their singular capacity to affect people.

Part and parcel of this challenge is a

renewed, disciplinary interest in art, a body

of thought and practice that, manifest via its

own modes of expression, has a long and com-

plex aesthetic tradition. In recent years, how-

ever, we are also witness to collaborative

practices in the field, as well as associated

Dixon et al. 237



works produced by artists for diverse publics,

from school children to gallery audiences. A

pivotal point for such collaborations tends to

be particular landscapes (some extreme, others

considered mundane) that are considered com-

plex in the sense that they prompt uncertainty

over and against surety, as well as an acknowl-

edgement of how this uncertainty has been nar-

rativized in diverse ways across the disciplines.

The term ‘inspirational’, as used in the

collaborative work of glacial geomorphologist

Peter Knight and visual artist Miriam Burke, for

example, denotes how their mutual collaboration

has led them to explore how it is that they

‘notice’ and understand landscape differently,

and, further, how this recognition prompts them

to reconsider the nature of what was once overly

familiar. Based in explorations of the local

landscapes of North Staffordshire and its

history during the last Ice Age, the project, devel-

oped over the course of three years, saw methodo-

logical exchange in both the cold lab and the field

(with Burke visiting Iceland), culminating in the

exhibition ‘Know this Place for the First Time’.10

Included in this exhibition was Burke’s ‘Measur-

ing Spoon’, a sculptural reflection on the ad hoc

use Knight makes of a teaspoon for scale in his

photographs (Figure 4).

Beyond these reflections on scientific

method, both Burke and Knight see artistic

practices, and particularly the arts’ traditional

emphasis upon measuring the individual over

and against a sublime Nature11 as a means to

take account of the inherent uncertainty in

science. Indeed, in a comment thoroughly

reminiscent of the Kantian Sublime, and the

tension at its heart between the comprehensi-

ble and incomprehensible, Knight writes:

Despite progress in remote sensing and analytical

techniques, our reconstructions of past glaciations

remain tentative, our understanding of modern glacial

processes incomplete and our modelling of their

future unreliable. In nineteenth century art, glaciers

represented romance, mystery and unassailable

majesty. In twenty-first century science their position

is perhaps similar, but what art calls ‘mystery’,

science calls ‘uncertainty’. (Knight, 2004: 385)

Questions around risk and prediction are, for

Knight, thoroughly emotive ones, insofar as

they excite feelings of wonder and awe.12

Risk and uncertainty have also underscored

the collaborative work of vulcanologist Carina

Fearnley and designer/performer Nelly Ben

Hayoun. Key to their project ‘The Other Vol-

cano’ is a desire to communicate the viscerality

of living with volcanic landscapes, and in partic-

ular how wonder, excitement, fear and trepida-

tion can be usefully harnessed as a means of

prompting more sustained reflection upon how

the risks associated with volcanoes are to be

communicated.13 The project takes the form of

what the artist describes as ‘semi-domesticated

volcanoes’, each capable of ‘randomly’ erupting

dust and gloop (from a combination of gunpow-

ders, potassium nitrate and sugar), and housed in

galleries – including the Welcome Trust, Lon-

don (October–December 2010) and the Central

Booking Gallery, New York (April–June 2011)

– and the living spaces of volunteers (Figure 5).

It is while ‘waiting’ for the eruption, which

sometimes does not happen, that observers are

presented with the complexity of natural disas-

ters, as well as the challenges faced by those who

predict natural hazards. As with Burke and

Knight’s work on glaciers, ‘The Other Volcano’

highlights the potential for art to move beyond the

sense of accurately conveying scientific informa-

tion, to communicate the ambiguities and hesitan-

cies of Earth science, as well as its explanatory

frameworks and ameliorative advances.

These ideas about risk and public com-

munication, especially in relation to uncertain

futures, are drawn together in a number of recent

collaborations with artists and archaeologists

undertaken by fluvial geomorphologist Mark

Macklin. As part of an ongoing research project

to examine the intersections between river

dynamics and the archaeological record on the

Teleorman River, a lower catchment of the




Danube, Macklin has worked with artist Judy

Macklin to gather data on recent changes in the

landscape – thereby adding to a multi-sourced

‘thick description’ of the site (Macklin et al.,

2011) – as well as to raise public awareness of the

longer-term evolution of the river landscape and

the likely impacts of climate change.

Intersecting this work with the European Union-

funded project ‘Art-Landscape Transformation’,

Macklin and Macklin (2011) developed a pro-

gramme of creative activities with local residents,

including a four-day workshop with 30 pupils

Figure 4. ‘Measuring Spoon’, Miriam Burke (2011), photographer Guy Archard.

Dixon et al. 239



and their teachers at a school in the valley. Here,

using aerial photographs and river walks, and the

making of sketches and large-scale earth-art-style

sculptures using natural and found materials, the

children were encouraged to get to know and to

model the river landscape within the scale of their

lifetime, as well as that of their parents, grandpar-

ents and beyond (Figure 6).

The collaborative ventures outlined here –

and more are appearing each year – very much

resonate with the appeals for context by

Harrison (1998, 2001), Rhoads (1999) and

Spedding (1997, 1999), appeals that query the

ontic character of landforms as well as their

epistemic framing. It is no small matter that

these calls are sometimes wrapped in an appre-

ciation for earlier geomorphic inquiries that

have an avowed commitment to the aesthetic.

Harrison’s (2001) quantum-based arguments

regarding the importance of emergent features

and forms, for example, contains a persuasive

call for an attentiveness to the diverse, sensible

attributes of landforms, wherein:

Earlier writers on the nature of landscape and the sci-

entific study of scenery, perhaps freer of the con-

straints imposed upon them by issues of process or

time, appeared to identify with the emergent struc-

tures of landscape. For instance, Marr (1900: 2) sug-

gested that, ‘in viewing any scene, the attributes

which strike us specially are size, form, character of

surface, colour and movement . . . ’ and reductionists

argue that these are the subjective elements of a

land-scape since the only objective variables are the

elementary ones. The question can then be asked:

what does this attitude say about our ontological and

epistemological treatment of such emergent charac-

teristics, especially since these elements are those

which constitute the necessary (to human geomor-

phologists) parts of landscape? (Harrison, 2001: 334)

In similar vein, Rhoads (2006: 17) makes a

strong argument for the dissolution of a

subjective-objective divide, insofar as ‘human

experience is as real as the existence of elemen-

tary particles and that experiences such as aes-

thetic appreciation, purposiveness, valuation,

feeling, and harmony have equal ontological

status to the entities of physical science’. Such

Figure 5. ‘The Other Volcano’, Nelly Ben Hayoun (2010), photographer Nick Ballon.




a holistic effort is consistent with ‘the great tra-

ditions of Humboldt and Ritter, both of whom

were interested in the interconnections among

the physical, biotic, and human features on the

face of the earth’ (Rhoads, 1999: 767).

Yet, while we note that the aesthetic very

much resonates with such contextual concerns,

it is also important to emphasize once more that

there are many forms that such inquiry can take.

Whereas Humboldt, as we outlined earlier,

looked to a holistic universe of harmonious

forces, and Gilbert developed his ‘finer touch’

as a means of illuminating the process-based

nature of landforms, the current collaborative

projects we describe are not so easily categor-

ized. In large part this is because they are not

predicated upon ‘bridging’ disciplinary, con-

ceptual or methodological divides, nor is differ-

ence subsumed, such that one becomes a mere

resource for the other. Instead, these collabora-

tions appear, we want to suggest, to work to a

post-Science Wars zeitgeist, wherein various

aesthetic impulses and traditions are brought

together and valued precisely because of their

differential character.14 Geomorphologists do

not become artists, or vice versa; rather, the aes-

thetics generated by each serve to render the

familiar unfamiliar. In the process an awareness

of other narratives, other modes of research,

other concerns and other publics certainly

emerges, and, we would argue, this awareness

is crucial if geomorphologists and physical geo-

graphers more broadly wish to intervene in what

are heavily politicized, multi-sited debates on

issues such as climate change, biodiversity,

environmental degradation and so on. This, for

Graf (1996), would be evidence of a ‘maturing’,

outward-orientated subfield. As recent events in

the USA, and increasingly in the UK, have made

clear, physical geographers can no longer rest

assured that their data is received as objective.

But also, perhaps, in their willingness to crea-

tively juxtapose fact and fiction, realism and

idealism and so on, we can gain glimpses of how

Figure 6. ‘Making the River Mosaic’, J. Macklin and M. Macklin (2010), photographer J. Macklin.

Dixon et al. 241



such collaborations can produce novel narra-

tives that no longer ‘fit’ the established spaces

of the journal and the gallery, the field site and

the studio. Such efforts resonate with a

burgeoning art-science movement that eschews

the modern-day, institutional compartmentaliza-

tion that distances the arts, as a subcomponent of

the humanities, from the natural sciences, and

looks instead to how these revolve within a

shared history characterized as much by negotia-

tion, mutual learning, and symbiosis as by the

search for fundamental difference.15

VI A post-human geomorphology?

By way of conclusion, we want to offer some

thoughts – by no means didactic – on how such

collaborative ventures may proceed. To begin,

we would note that the artists so far engaging

with geomorphologists, whatever their medium

of choice or genre, tend to work to a humanist

rendering of the sublime. This is by no means

unusual in the art world, insofar as Kant’s

emphasis upon the play of the imagination and

understanding has generally been taken as an

argument on the human power of reason over

and against a meaningless, agency-less nature.

In human geography also, Kantian aesthetics

have tended to be understood as celebrating a

‘human-mind-social’ nexus over and against a

‘non-human-body-nature’ one; indeed, this

framing has characterized all manner of debates

on the human-environment relationship.

Yet it is possible to articulate a ‘post’-human

aesthetic that incorporates those corporeal bod-

ies – animal, vegetative and bacterial – that are

non-human. Here, aesthetic inquiry picks up on

other sense-made worlds, giving them body and

consequence (Dixon, 2010). This post-human

aesthetic can be extended further, moreover,

into a reconsideration of the ‘agency’ of nature,

not as a bundle of forces, materials and events

awaiting human perception and analysis, but

as existing in and for itself. As Clark writes, this

is a nature that does not lend itself to the human

condition, but to a thoroughly impersonal

cosmos:

[It] bears the trace of an ‘infinity’ that is palpably not

of this world, one that is extra-terrestrial in a material

rather than an ethereal or otherworldly sense: an exor-

bitance that no form of reciprocity, no contract, no

economy on this spherical planet or anywhere else

will ever square up. (Clark, 2010: 8)

This seems at first sight, to be at odds with a

geomorphological tradition that, as Graf

(1996) points out, has emphasized its role

within geography more broadly as an unravel-

ling of ‘human-environment’ relationships; to

paraphrase W.M. Davis, this is an outrageous

concept that, perhaps, disrupts the ‘rooting’ of

more comfortable ones (1926: 465–466). Yet

what is of import here is how the ‘human’ has

itself come under query from a number of quar-

ters, including physics, chemistry and biology

as well as the humanities and arts, and found

in many cases to be wanting. To quote from

Davis’ provocative essay on the role of the out-

rageous in rendering the familiar unfamiliar:

The very foundation of our science is only an infer-

ence; for the whole of it rests on the unprovable

assumption that, all through the inferred lapse of

time which the inferred performance of inferred

geological processes involves, they have been going

on in a manner consistent with the laws of nature as

we know them now. We seldom realize the magni-

tude of that assumption. (Davis, 1926: 465–466)

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful for the engaged and construc-

tive comments of two reviewers, to Stephen Tooth,

Helen Roberts and Mark Macklin for reading prior

drafts, and to Miriam Burke, Nelly Ben Hayoun and

Judy Macklin for letting us reproduce images of their

work.

Funding

Research for this work was funded by an AHRC/NSF

grant [AHRC Grant No. AH/I500022/1; NSF Grant

No. 86908] on ’Art/Science Collaboration: Bodies

and Environments’.




Notes

1. See Smith (1988) for an account of the intersection of

the aesthetic ideas of the Academy with those of scien-

tists at the time.

2. We share this perspective with both historians of art and

historians of science who refuse to accord a privileged

status to ‘art’ objects, thereby opening up the field of

study such that visual practices and products of science

are set alongside artistic practices and aesthetic

concerns (Alpers, 1983; Cook, 2005; Crary, 1992;

Jones and Galison, 1997).

3. Physiognomy, usually dismissed as a scientific dead-

end, or read as a precursor to biological racism, is most

famously associated with the work of Casper Johann

Lavater who sought to illuminate how the fundamental

character, or ‘mental powers’, of the human being could

be read from a simplified sketch or even profile of the

face. Eschewing the mobility of expression (or pathog-

nomy) as ephemeral and confusing, Lavater looked to

the more truthful signs of the face in repose, often pla-

cing his subjects in a specially adapted chair to draw

their silhouettes. This, he wrote, ‘arrests attention by

fixing it on the exterior contours alone, it simplifies the

observation which becomes by that more easy and

accurate’ (Lavater, 1789: 176–178).

4. As such, Humboldt’s work is in contrast with the ‘artistic

geology’ of his contemporary John Ruskin, who sought in

his landscape paintings to present Christian scripture with

scientific precision via preparatory field sketches and

map reading. Ruskin was also fascinated with landforms,

and looked to the erosional processes that reduced moun-

tains to ruinous architectures, which in turn worked spiri-

tually upon their local populations (see Ruskin, 1856).

5. For Humboldt, a political democrat, intellect was a mat-

ter of learning and refinement, not biology. Hence,

‘T[t]here are nations more susceptible of cultivation,

more highly civilized, more ennobled by mental culti-

vation than others – but none in themselves nobler than

others. All are in like degree designed for freedom’

(Humboldt, 1849: 368). Nevertheless, his emphasis

upon the sensibility and discernment of the gentleman

explorer, as well as the need for large-scale, nature-

based studies, had a profound impact upon what has

been termed ‘empire science’.

6. Gilbert was to use similar rhetoric in describing the depth

of features on the moon’s surface as ‘gigantic furrows’

(1893: 279) and ‘boldest carving’ (p. 278). Here, how-

ever, the finer touch could not yet be brought to bear.

7. Certainly, in other visual histories of science, perhaps

most appropriately those of the geological cross-

section, we find a similar value accorded to the diagram

as an ideal explanatory register (Rudwick, 1976).

8. Thank you to Bruce Rhoads for pointing out that

Woolridge’s comments on the ‘betterment’ of mimetic

representation in photographs resonates with the work

of photographic landscape artist and ‘monkey wrench’

author Edward Abbey, wherein the image captures a

stark reality, but also a transcendent, sublime encounter.

It is worth noting that Abbey is also, of course, famous

for advocating a thoroughly visceral encounter with

landscape, such that you ‘walk, better yet crawl, on

hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the

thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to

mark your trail you’ll see something’ (Abbey, 1968: 97).

9. Art as mimetic is also manifest in analyses of the

intense optical phenomena following volcanic erup-

tions, being used to provide proxy information on aero-

sol optical depth. Zerefos et al. (2007), for example,

reconstruct past aerosol optical depth, before, during

and after major volcanic eruptions, by studying the col-

oration of the atmosphere in 500 paintings that depicted

sunsets between 1500 and 1900. They note that the art-

ists under study ‘appear to have simulated the colors of

nature with a remarkably precise coloration’, and con-

clude that their study provides a ‘basis for more

research that can be done on environmental information

content in art paintings’ (p. 4033).

10. A summary of the exhibition, as presented at the New-

castle Borough Museum and Art Gallery in March

2010, can be found at http://www.newcastle-staffs.

gov.uk/documents/leisure%20and%20culture/arts_

dev/creative%20catch-up%2021.pdf.

11. For Burke, reflection on this lineage is crucial to her

practice: she writes: ‘When Caspar David Friedrich

painted The Polar Sea (1823–24), he inspired a sense

of awe and the sublime in his viewers, yet where does

this wonder reside now that we can pull up images of

the fabled and elusive North West Passage on Google

maps? I start with the premise that uncertainty in sci-

ence could also be described as what we do not know.

As mystery. It is left to our imagination to fill the gaps

where technology holds no answers, it blurs the

boundaries of fiction and reality’ (from http://www.

miriamburke.co.uk/about.php).

12. A similar engagement with the poetics of nature and

scientific knowledge can be seen in the work of artist

Dixon et al. 243



Joanna Berger and geomorphologist Uwe Dornbusch,

undertaken as part of the European Union’s ‘Beaches

at Risk’ Project (2003–2009). The focus of Berger’s

work, ‘Series 130–141’, was the artificial pebbles used

to assess coastal erosion. Cast in tinted resin, and with

a copper core designed to be easily visible and datable

with a metal detector, Berger wrapped lines of love

poetry around the cores of a batch of 11 and then

placed them on one of the French study beaches. See

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressre-

lease/media/media457.html.

13. A short summary of the project can be found at http://

www.nellyben.com/projects/the-other-volcano. Their

collaboration has also extended to a series of DIY sci-

ence workshops called ‘Home Chaos’, which explore

‘how to develop thrill . . . Participants were asked to

experiment with their everyday domestic objects, and

try to find them a creative potential. It aims to give

methods on how to juxtapose the epic with banal

details, the extreme with domestic. The result was a

Domestic Super object, which has the property to erupt

dust and gloop at random’ (from http://www.nellyben.

com/workshops/home-chaos-manchester-madlab).

14. As Rhoads (2004) points out, such bridging efforts

may be social as opposed to meta-theoretical.

15. The distinctions drawn between scientific and artistic

endeavours have a long, historical trajectory, punctu-

ated by a series of debates on the relative merits of

each (for example, Arnold, 1882; Huxley, 1880; Lea-

vis, 1962; Snow, 1956). Here, the apparent consensus

regarding the impermeability of their categorical

boundaries has two origins: first, the scientific revolu-

tion of the Renaissance, predicated in large part upon

the rise of Copernican cosmology, empiricism and the

systematic development of modern mathematics, phy-

sics, biology and chemistry; and, second, its gradual

institutionalization in the faculties of the modern uni-

versity, which in the 19th century culminated in the

‘segregation of the European educational system . . .

between classical studies and scientific and technical

training’ (Blair and Grafton, 1992: 535).

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Wonder-full geomorphology: Sublime aesthetics and the place of art