That slippery word: Landscape
In the prologue to his new book Innerland, Matt Vance writes that landscape is an idea fundamental to his life, and his living.
“I could not ignore it, so instead I began to wonder how other people deal with the unpredictable concept of landscape”.
The idea he returns to is that, for the most part, landscape is a “fabrication of our minds”; a fabrication so ingrained in our subconscious that it has become “a language we understand without appearing to have formally learned it”.
It’s an understanding, Matt writes in his epilogue, that arises from combining the portion of landscape that is hard-wired into us, the culture around us, and the individual experiences particular to each of us.
In the often exhilarating 241 pages between, Matt unfolds a deftly layered sequence of 55 compact stories, all personal to him, that investigate and transcribe ten senses of landscape: as word, image, movement, symbol, absence, fear, suburbia, city, fantasy, and edge.
Versions of 14 of these essays into landscape trace back to Matt’s commissioned books for Awa Press and his contributions to magazines such as the New Zealand Listener and 1964 Journal.
When interviewed by Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon programme before Christmas, Matt estimated that about half of Innerland relates to recalling memories of places, things that happened and people - including landscape architecture students at Lincoln University.
In his RNZ interview Matt acknowledged he has had a career that is scattered in all directions but keeps coming back to landscape and its fascinations.
His connection to Lincoln University and the learning it sparked for him under the tutelage of people like Graham Densem dates back almost 40 years; firstly graduating in 1990 with a Bachelor of Parks and Recreation Management before taking off to Maui, Hawaii, to be a professional windsurfer, followed by returning to Lincoln for a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture and later dispensing his knowledge of landscape analysis to students as a lecturer and subsequently as a contracted tutor delivering “the odd studio”.
After undertaking studies in natural history film-making at Otago University in 2001, his career fetched itself into the seasonal role of an expert guide - be that with Heritage Expeditions, or five life-altering years with Antarctica New Zealand accompanying photographers, writers, journalists, artists and politicians to the great southern continent.
Concurrently throughout the last quarter century he has worn a hat as a communicator under the banner of Poiesis Communications - a word which means "a making" or "creation".
A resident of Diamond Harbour on the Banks Peninsula, Matt shares a home-based workspace there with his wife Nancy - also a landscape architect.
Explaining his approach to the craft of writing to Kathryn Ryan, Matt said it is informed by his eye for the quirky.
“I’d be a terrible journalist, I’m never going to find the scoop but I’m going to find the subtleties and nuance of things.
“That’s why I really write, and also because I’m naturally an introvert and introverts tend to get talked at rather than being in a dialogue. Writing is a good way for an introvert to have a dialogue with the world”.
Supplementing these comments for LAA, Matt likened his writing to a ‘puzzling together’ of experiences and memories that flicker in his head. He calls it a “bit of a solo sport”.
Self-deprecatingly he would lead you to believe his writing is akin to sharing ‘pub yarns’. While this does reflect an element of the light walking pace each essay follows, every single yarn also possesses the fine-tuning of a fine literary mind.
In a piece for the Sunday-Star Times Matt stated that 90% of writing is reading. Some of his favourite authors are science writer David Quammen, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, Olgar Tokarczuk, Bruce Chatwin and WG Sebald. Closer to home he gave special mention to Alice Miller and to 20th century NZ poets like Allen Curnow, Denis Glover and Hone Tuwhare.
Matt owns to being equally afflicted by his dual passions for landscape and the sea.
As borne out by his two previous books, How To Sail A Boat (which NZ’s doyen of short story telling Owen Marshall called a “fine integration of knowledge, humour and affection”) and Ocean Notorious: Journeys to lost and lonely places of the deep south - published by Awa Press in 2013 and 2015 respectively, it is a Masefield-like passion for the sea, along with a modest disdain for ‘landlubbers’, that has mostly won out.
So what is there to attract readers to Matt’s book Innerland?
First of all it is replete with awareness- and knowledge-raising insights that jar our sense of landscape while elevating aspects that are too easily forgotten.
Aspects like the marginal landscape we know as the mudflat, for instance, or the miracle of viewing landscape from high altitudes, or the realisation that “losing someone is to lose place” because “attaching people to landscapes is what we do”, or the constant dipping and wobbling of sun, moon and Earth that govern the tides.
Innerland’s accessible succession of vignettes draw attention to landscape features in ‘hidden sight’ - under the theme of absence these include scraps of remnant land next to motorways and park benches; under fear, a heritage of coastal pillboxes as well as war memorials accorded an equivalence to “paperweights to hold down our memories”.
The book carries a reminder too that once you have adapted to being alone in a vast landscape - say the Mackenzie Country - you are rewarded with a delicious taste “that the Earth is large and we are not”.
It offers a reminder of the potency of the tree as a landscape symbol with seemingly “eternal powers of death and rebirth”. And of the potency of wind as a trigger of fear when it animates things that are thought to be inert into movement.
Three recurring threads in Innerland are its brief tales of field trips with landscape architecture students, divertingly informative historical references and Matt’s penchant for “messing with uniformity” made real through a string of observational outdoor art activations.
The field trips traverse rooftop spying on the campus of Lincoln University for lines of desire, time lapse photography in Christchurch’s Cathedral Square, a difficult aural and sonic landscape assignment, explorations of a stuffy mall and a visit to the Macraes Mine in East Otago.
Innerland’s swathe of history-based educational ‘lessons’ (Matt’s parents were educationalists), begin with laying out the difference between the underlying meanings of picturesque and sublime.
In sum the picturesque amounts to “artifice masquerading as nature”. Next to the often terrible elemental forces of nature exhibited by the sublime, it withers. And yet, as made explicit by Matt, the picturesque continues to exert an influence on ideas of landscape, in fields like advertising via parasitic manipulation and mediation, doppelganger distortions and clownish conformity.
Examples of absurdist art works highlighted in Innerland, and enacted by Matt the artist, include an ‘in situ’ coastal placement of super-sized copies of the first page of the Resource Management Act 1991 and wrapping a tree in Dunedin’s Botanic Gardens in a poem scripted on building paper. Not one to leave a stone unturned, he also writes about the times he surreptitiously entered a remote farm field to physically shifting a singularly large rock from point to point - all captured by camera and later published in an out-of-print booklet called Reaction.
Matt’s ruminations on the landscape of suburbia having “spread like a weed” over a relatively short period of history, and his take on New Zealand’s deficiencies of ‘civic anatomy’, are sharply written, and highly readable.
On RNZ he spoke to the culture shock he had as a kid moving from rural climes in the South Island to a suburban existence: “(I was asking) how come they don’t know each other? How come they don’t say hello? I still don’t like being in cities to be honest. It must have hard wired itself into me somewhere”.
Matt’s experience of suburbia engendered a sensation of being lost, a ‘netherworld’ feeling that resurfaced unexpectedly many years later when the Christchurch earthquakes dealt a mix of disconnection and displacement.
Innerland is a vocabulary-building travelogue of paths deserving to be walked.
It could, in many of its passages, be read as a strongly quotable love letter that sets its heart on re-imbuing the “messy business of landscape” with awe and respect.
It’s a love letter as well to all of the time that Matt has spent by the wavering edge of water and land, leaving no traces.
Near to the close of Matt’s book he writes “for me, the attraction of the edge lies in its constant flux, illuminating landscape in all its fragile and impermanent glory”.
As cited in Innerland, urbanist William Whyte’s injunction to ‘look hard, with a clean, clear mind, and then look again - and believe what you see’ - clear of theoretical or aesthetic biases - rings loud and true throughout the book.
We are anchored in our innerland, full fathom five.
Editor’s note: For more on Matt’s absorbing experiences of the Southern Ocean as planet Earth’s heart you can listen to his Pecha Kucha presentation at the 2016 edition of Christchurch’s WORD Festival here.