ARTISTS TALKING

An Artist in the Parks project, I was working in partnership with the project's initiator Joyce Majiski (a wilderness guide, biologist and artist). I went equipped with computer, solar panel and video camera to interview, video, animate and edit on the move, exploring the impact language and technology has on our sense of presence in the world, our lived experiences of geography and to understand the connections between urban space and wilderness.

Bordered on the north by the Beaufort Sea and Alaska on the West, Ivvavik Park is part of the Beringia Refugium; an area untouched by the last ice age. Time's geological pace is etched across its mountains. Unglaciated, their forms are rounded like shoulders; a rhino skin mapped with the scars of time. Sometimes the land falls away to reveal rocky tors and ridges, here and there a single pointed peak, a perfect cone of loose pebbles precariously balanced. It is as if the gods pondered there a while at the beginning of all things and let earth run through their great fingers onto the timeless wilderness. I'm told there is still gold in the hills. Many came for it a hundred years ago, trekked the long route up from the Klondyke and fought the darkness and brutal winter. With their dreams of riches they carried disease to the people who lived here. They came from a colonising people moving west and north who brought churches, schools and new laws and robbed a generation of the names they couldn't pronounce.

If you know how to look, the legend of desolation falls away to reveal silent traces of life where hunters, trappers and travellers have walked and mines been claimed. You see strands of hair in a tree where the grizzly bear scratches or caribou fur on the riverside. Here distances seem indefinable and our sense of space expands and contracts with each new revolution of a sun that doesn't set. The mighty Firth River gouges a canyon as deep in the earth as the imagination. Like the inevitable progression of the river our dialogue with the landscape changes as knowledge ebbs and flows through our spheres of experience.

The vast wilderness of Ivvavik is the first national park in Canada to be created as a result of an aboriginal land settlement. For people who grew up near it is part of their backyard. This is not so different from someone whose personal territory includes the urban space they commute through to work, the places they shop and eat and their mental map of their world. Years ago my mental map was the weather map on TV – an isolated view of Scotland. Now we are used to satellite maps of North Africa and Europe. These changes in geographic information and communication affect our sense of presence in the world. While some technology could reduce our ability to recognise landmarks or use maps, others may allow us to mediate presence, sharing different perceptions of land, cultural ideas, languages and identity.

We are in dialogue with shifting amorphous spaces that we must think about in new ways in order to piece together maps that fit. When we learn to find our way in a strange place, in a world unfamiliar to our eyes, whose boundaries in flux, we must learn a language of space that includes the presence of the people who are part of it.

Alice Angus is a London based artist and co-director of Proboscis www.proboscis.org.uk
Project website www.landscapes-in-dialogue.org.uk will be launched in February.