Uncanny Landscapes

An interview by Justin Hopper with artist and writer Camilla Nelson. Camilla Nelson is an artist whose work explores the materiality of language, particularly in regards to the other-than-human. Her workshop BECOMING begins soon and is an exploration of ways to engage with fungus, birds, animals, plants and more through language and art. She'll discuss this online workshop as well as her own work...

An interview by Justin Hopper with artist and musician Jem Finer. Jem Finer is an artist and musician whose work spans the musical gamut from co-founding The Pogues to creating Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long composition that has been performing itself, so far, for 23 years. On Mayday, Finer and co-conspirator Jimmy Cauty (of the KLF) release the first record as Local Psycho - a hurdy-gurdy led acid...

An interview by Justin Hopper with artist and roboticist Ian Ingram. Ian Ingram is an artist and roboticist based in California. His practice is concerned with building robots - kinetic sculptures - that attempt to communicate with animals in their own languages.   So, for example, you'll hear him discuss a 'lizard' robot that does push-ups the way some lizards do, to mark territory - yet through...

Uncanny Landscapes #12 -Michael Pawlyn   An interview by Justin Hopper with architect, writer and systems thinker Michael Pawlyn.   Michael Pawlyn is a pioneer in the field of biomimicry - drawing inspiration from mechanisms found in the nonhuman world to inspire architecture and design - and a leading name in regenerative thinking. Michael was one of the key figures in designing the Eden Project...

Uncanny Landscapes #11 - Richard Skelton   An interview by Justin Hopper with writer, artist and musician Richard Skelton.    Richard Skelton is a writer, artist and musician whose work explores the human relationship to landscape; along with the poet Autumn Richardson, he is co-founder of Corbel Stone Press, a preeminent venue for contemporary and historical writing about place and nature from ar...

An interview by Justin Hopper with writer, academic and psychogeographer Sonia Overall.   Sonia Overall is a writer, academic and avid psychogeographer based in southeast England. She is the founder of Women Who Walk, a network for creatives and academics, as well as the creator of many walking-based projects including Distance Drift, a lockdown-inspired weekly psychogeographic prompt. Her recent...

Uncanny Landscapes #8 - Gary Budden   An interview by Justin Hopper with writer Gary Budden   Gary Budden is a Kent-born, London-based, writer of weird fiction and also-weird non-fiction. His latest collection of short stories, London Incognita, explores the realities of a fractured capital through tales of the otherwise. His non-fiction collaborations with the artist Maxim Griffin explore his unc...

Uncanny Landscapes #8 - Rich Pell, the Center for PostNatural History   An interview by Justin Hopper with artist Rich Pell of the Center for PostNatural History.    Rich Pell is an artist and art professor based in Pittsburgh who founded and operates the Center for PostNatural History - a permanent museum dedicated to the cultural influence on evolution.   Links: on Twitter . The film Pell made w...

[NOTE to subscribers: Due to a technical glitch this episode was briefly removed, edited, and is now uploaded a second time - which is why you may have two notifications, etc.] Uncanny Landscapes #7 - Kate Davis   An interview by Justin Hopper with poet Kate Davis.    Kate Davis is a poet, performer, artist, swimmer, taxidermist and more based in the Furness peninsula of northwestern England. Her...

Uncanny Landscapes #6 - Gareth E. Rees   An interview by Justin Hopper with writer Gareth E. Rees.    Gareth Rees is an author whose books explore modern myths and folklore of place. He has previously published 2013’s Marshland, about Hackney, and 2018’s The Stone Tide, before becoming nationally known for 2019’s Car Park Life. His new book is Unofficial Britain, about the 'first shoots of future...

Uncanny Landscapes #5 - The Belbury Poly   An interview by Justin Hopper with musician and record-label head Jim Jupp.    Jim Jupp records music as The Belbury Poly, and releases his own music as well as that of many others via the Ghost Box Records label he operates with designer Julian House. His latest record, The Gone Away, is a concept album based on fairy lore and touching on ideas of epheme...

Uncanny Landscapes #4 - Stein Farstadvoll   An interview by Justin Hopper with archaeologist Stein Farstadvoll.    Stein Farstadvoll is an archaeologist of the contemporary world working in arctic Norway and based at the University of Tromso. His work images vestigial and out-of-place objects that contribute to uncanny places: from an abandoned landscape garden to the military ruins of the area’s...

An interview by Justin Hopper with photographer Roei Greenberg   Roei Greenberg is an London-based Israeli artist whose photographs explore borders and boundaries, whether they are the ‘hot’ political borders of his home on the Israel-Lebanon border, or the subtle, implicit boundaries of the English picturesque. We spoke about his projects English Encounters and Along the Break; about contested la...

An interview by Justin Hopper with writer and artist JR Carpenter. We spoke about her project This Is a Picture of Wind - a digital exploration of wind and language, now in book form from Longbarrow Press; about weather, climate change and imperialism; about mapping invisible systems, and about Vahni Capildeo's poetic response to Picture of Wind. Links: JR Carpenter's This Is a Picture of Wind (di...

An interview by Justin Hopper with author and artist Angus Carlyle. We spoke about his books of let’s-call-them-air-quotes-Nature-Writing that both reflect his lifelong love of the genre and some of the conflicts at its heart. About running through the downs at night. About nature writing and indices, and mental health, and hangovers, and about the dadaist bureaucracy through which he approaches t...