Exploring a vague terrain

This paper presented recent work on space and place emerging from Returns, a collaboration between artist-researchers at Sheffield Hallam University and Nottingham Trent University, which developed from Topographies of the Obsolete, an international cross-disciplinary initiative focusing on post-industrial landscapes. An artists' residency for the project enabled me to make a photographic exploration of surfaces and artefacts found at the former Spode ceramics factory in Stoke-on-Trent; this prompted a return to previous research I’d pursued on places lying in between use, and as a result I went on to discuss and reframe a series of actual and conceptual terrains vagues in my Pam Flett Press independent serial publication. Since then, having recently moved back to Sheffield, I have been walking and photographing urban lanes in the city in order to consider how close visual attention to their most infra-ordinary aspects both reveals and transforms the complexity of these sites. Keywords: space; place; post industrial; the everyday; walking; photography; artistic research; terrain vague