"Quadrants on Dartmoor"
Section MS10, Freya Spencer-Wood
Keywords: landscape, spatial politics, performance, film
Quadrants on Dartmoor examines Dartmoor as a landscape structured through social, legal, and cartographic systems that regulate access and use. The Ordnance Survey map acts both as a representational medium and an administrative instrument, through which lived terrain is rendered into fixed coordinates. The project enacts this translation physically, with the artist’s body functioning as a surveying tool, measuring quadrants and performing the map’s abstractions on the ground. The walks take place on land owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, which controls 29% of Dartmoor National Park, where grazing, military activity, conservation, and recreation intersect. On this land, access is unevenly distributed across a landscape frequently understood as natural and open. Dartmoor’s mapped grid functions not just as a tool for representation, but as a material mechanism that conditions access to land and the terms under which space may be occupied and used.