In The Open | Adrian Evans & Carole Webster

Adrian Evans is an architect and senior lecturer at the University of Huddersfield.  He has architectural experience across the sectors, and specialises in design and technology teaching. Adrian is undertaking a PhD, which considers the relationship between contemporary modernist domestic architecture and the landscape, as manifest on the West coast of Scotland, and is investigating the potential of Deep Mapping as a creative means for architecture to disclose Landscape narratives. He currently lives in a Million Act church; his long term conversion project, and places great importance on enjoying the process of Making, whatever the scale of the project. He plans to build his own home on the West coast of Scotland.

Carole Webster, is a PhD student in creative writing, Department of LiFTS, University of Essex. A recurring focus of my PhD project has been to interrogate the relationship of the self to the material world through writing and how to represent communication, or interactions between the two. Working with Adrian on the Displacement project has enabled me to extend my exploration of ideas about being in the material world and my attempts at ‘writing inside-out’ which connect to a state of viscous porosity a term described by Stacy Alaimo in her essay Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature (Material Feminisms 2008). Viscous porosity is a term which implies that the material environment and non human entities interact with humans physically, psychologically and metaphysically to mutual affect.  These perspectives have played a significant part in shaping the writing process for the poems which form my contribution to Displacement: the clearance at Arichonan.

The Clearance at Arichonan

We approached the historical event of the clearance at Arichonan via a field trip with the intention of recording our responses to the displacement of the people and the implications of their forced removal from the land through legal process. Our experience, and the material from the field trip has enabled us to create a piece of work which developed from an intensive process of discussion and documentation through photography and journaling to produce an interleaving of poetry and material forms.