Symposium I

Our first symposium The Alchemical Landscape: Counterculture, Occulture and the Geographic Turn was held at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge on 23rd March 2015.

Our Call for Papers attracted in excess of 80 proposals. From these we put together a day-long event featuring critics, theorists and practitioners associated with the field. Many thanks to everyone who participated and to those who attended: it was great to have a sell-out crowd!




9.00-10.00 Registration and Welcome

10.00-11.30 Panel 1: Experience

Gyrus, ‘The IIkley Implex’

Rob Irving, ‘Playing Puck: Performative Action in the Shaping of Legend Landscape’

Nick Medford, ‘The Haunted Shoreline: Alchemico-Surrealist Beachcombing on the East Sussex Coast’

      11.30-11.45 Break  

      11.45-1.15 Panel 2: Fiction

Brian Baker, ‘The Hunter and the Bull: (Sky) Walking with Alan Garner

George Bickers, ‘Places to Flourish?: Edge Spaces and the Formative Process’

Mark Goodall, ‘Holy Terrors: Filming Arthur Machen’

      1.15-2.15 Lunch

      2.15-3.45 Panel 3: Workings 

Dominic Shepherd, ‘England’s Dreaming: The Land, Dissent and Humour in the Work of Three Contemporary Artists’

Phil Legard, ‘The Land of Many Colours: The Initiated Landscape and the Hermeneutic Imagination’

Janet Banfield, ‘Artistic Practice as Mythological Thinking’

      3.45-4.00 Break

      4.00-5.30 Panel 4: Music

Justin Hopper, ‘The Corner of a Field: Shirley Collins, Folksong and the Pastoral Noir’

Amy Cutler, ‘Rotted Music and Oak Seers: Sounds of the Haunted Forest’

Andy Sharp, 'Invisible Canon: Hidden Seals in the Musical Landscape'

      5.30-5.45 Break

      5.45-7.15 Panel 5: Artist’s Panel

Drew Mulholland, Elizabethan Tape Loops and The Seance at Hobs Lane

Chris Lambert, ‘Altering the Landscape through Fabricated Myth: An Exploration of The Black Meadow and its Associated Phenomena’

Sharron Kraus, ‘The Magic of Place’

7.30 Close of Event