Amy Cutler
Research Project
2009-2013
Supervisor: Professor Tim Cresswell
Amy Cutler is a fourth year PhD student in the Social and Cultural Geography department. She researches environmental history, historical geography, and modern British poetry (both small press and large press). As part of her cross disciplinary research, she has also been appointed a National Ambassador for Public Engagement by the NCCPE for her curating practice. This includes the cultural geography cinema Passengerfilms – now two years old – which convenes archival and experimental short films, features, Q&As, drinks, and talks by researchers and guest speakers. In June 2013 she is curating the exhibition ‘Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig’, on forests, history, social memory, and environmental memory. This will include cabinets, specimens, museum objects, book works, wood works, prints, film, music, archival photographs, installations, and small press or one-off editions. Forty artists will be exhibiting work, alongside materials on loan from the Kew Museum of Economic Botany, English Heritage, the London Metropolitan Archives, the UCL Dendrochronology laboratory, and various local historians and collectors.
Amy Cutler also works with land graphics and ekphrastics, curating the online series of ‘twinned studies’, Land Diagrams. The project uses found diagrams as ‘machines of translation’ to provoke divergent specialist interpretations. The series refers to the intellectual and practical uses of visual methodologies, as well as to a history of philosophical work in diagrammatology, using diagrams as migratory objects that reveal diverse understandings of the multiple systems of knowledge attached to the land.
Amy’s first small press publication, ‘Suckers’, was profiled as part of the Lex-ICON international colloquium and publishing project in 2012. This is a short series in which she re-caption archived forestry diagrams, re-inserting lyric, allegorical or philosophical thought about the forest. It concerned managerial attitudes towards forestry, often from old Forestry Commission figures, designed to be instructive – but tested these visual modes of knowledge by bringing in unreconciled literary voices. This piece of work responded to contemporary arguments about the visual modelling of the forest and how to quantify its social and cultural data.
Amy’s first published booklet is ‘Nostalgia Forest’, which came out from the award-winning Oystercatcher Press in 2013. ‘Nostalgia Forest’ uses only text drawn from Paul Ricoeur’s ‘Memory, History, Forgetting’ (2000). The diagrams are all sourced from dendrochronology (tree-ring reading) manuals. Cat-face scars, impact scars, and red-rot infection appear in the catalogue of figures for individual and collective remembrance, alongside a writing-through of Ricoeur’s text on the philosophical misfortunes of memory.
Amy has also contributed poems and translations to projects such as the anthology Herbarium, which came out in 2011 from Renscombe Press. This was launched in collaboration with the Urban Physic Garden, a pop-up garden in a derelict hospital and pharmacy site in Southwark, on the theme of medicinal plants. Amy contributed the poems ‘Sweet Woodruff’, ‘Milk Thistle’, and ‘Hound’s Tongue’, alongside archival botanical illustrations.
As part of Alec Finlay’s Bee Bole project in Spring 2013, Amy contributed several translations of Basho’s bee and peony haiku – part of an anthology of tanzaku hung on the cherry trees at the National Fruit Collection, as part of their Hanami season. Alec hand wrote these collated poem-labels in orange and black to create bee-like forms, translating the peony to the cherry blossom. The installation is open to visitors in the Brogdale cherry gardens, and versions of the poems will be published as a Bee Bole blog.
Biography
Amy Cutler is a researcher and curator who runs the cultural geography themed cinema Passengerfilms, which has won the BFFS national award for Best Film Education Programme. She also runs the online interdisciplinary project Land Diagrams, which uses found geographical figures to prompt essays. Her first book is ‘Nostalgia Forest’ (Oystercatcher Press, 2013), which Gerry Loose describes as ‘brain scans of arboreal memory (and) cones of time lapse poetry’, and Peter Larkin calls ‘diagrammatic profiles offer(ing) intimations of calamity (…) in a tonal or atonal transversal of timber’.
Passengerfilms – http://passengerfilms.wordpress.com/
Land Diagrams – http://landdiagrams.wordpress.com/
Own website – http://amycutler.wordpress.com/
Suckers – http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/2012/04/lex-icon-blog-project-post-38-amy.html
Nostalgia Forest – http://www.oystercatcherpress.com/acutler.html
Public engagement ambassador page – http://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/how-we-help/ambassadors/amy-cutler
rhulpracticebasedphdarchive.wordpress.com 