Reading Landscape Through Women’s Gaze

In her article entitled Reframing Landscape, Liz Wells points out how "landscape reflects a masculine attitude to the land". What follows is that our relationship with her and her representation, passes through an imaginary that is first and foremost masculine. While it is true that for centuries women have not had access to "land" in terms of ownership and "exploration", it is also true that they have been excluded from landscape practices and performances as a figurative (but perhaps not literary) genre from a distinctly female perspective. However, in recent decades many women artists have begun to bring out the female experience in landscape practices and performances. These are mainly female photographers and writers who –from different artistic, cultural and identity backgrounds – question traditional aesthetic paradigms of landscape while exploring new categories of understanding the genre as well as the woman/environment relationship. Specifically, Ingrid Pollard’s work, Pastoral Interludes, will be examined, in which the photographer documents the relationship between the English countryside and the black people who inhabit it in a sequence of photographs accompanied by text (and other geographic apparatuses such as maps) resulting in a complex photo-textual narrative. Pollard’s work can then be related to that of the writer Zadie Smith who, from the same point of view of identity and culture, uses both physical and metaphorical landscape to explore the dynamics of power, violence and repetition in human history, especially in the short stories Moonlit Landscape with Bridge.