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Literary synopsis

Flow Country is a collaboratively written piece of fictocritisism by artist Jasper Coppes and archaeologist Dan Lee. Based on their earlier cinematographic ventures into a contested site in the far North of Scotland, the artist's novel is a reconnaissance of real and imagined sites – taking shape as a liquid land that fluctuates between blanket bog, film emulsion and literary space. The artist's novel offers a possible way out of the many ‘transformation-narratives’ that tried to exploit or reform this vast terrain. Terrestrial exploration gradually turns into a metaphysical quest.

Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice

This artist's novel is the third iteration of an ongoing artistic engagement with a contested site in the North of Scotland that is called the ‘Flow Country’. Two earlier iterations manifested in the form of a digital film and an analogue one (S16mm). Each outcome can be considered an attempt to register an essentially un-documentable and vast landscape. As an entrance into this terrain each outcome uses the particularities of their medium to open up a new vantage point, and as such generates its own epistemology of an ungraspable terrain. With each outcome this terrain is increasingly historicized and as such mythologises Flow Country. 

Novel's website