Landscape, Materiality, and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century

This session invites contributions that investigate the entangled relationships between landscape, materiality, and representation in the long nineteenth century. While landscape has often been examined through symbolic, nationalistic, or pictorial frameworks, this panel foregrounds its material dimensions—both as subject and substance—and asks how they shaped artistic and cultural production during this transformative period. How did the physical qualities of land, earth, and environment inflect visual representation? What tensions emerged between landscape as material presence and landscape as mediated image?

Bridging art history, material and visual culture, human geography, and environmental humanities, this session seeks to integrate phenomenological approaches (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Casey), material and object-oriented ontology (Bennett, Harman), and geographical theory (Ingold) with close visual and historical analysis. We are particularly interested in how the materiality of land—its textures, substances, and transformations—was registered, abstracted, or resisted in the practices of representation across diverse geographies, media, and artistic traditions during this period.

Contributors might consider:

• The material construction of landscape images: grounds, supports, pigments, and surfaces
• Representing geological time, land use, or extraction industries
• Earth as medium: pigment, sediment, and organic matter in artistic practice
• Artistic responses to ecological degradation
• Indigenous and non-Western modes of representing land and territory
• The role of materiality in 19th-century cartography or land surveys
• The visual rhetorics of land ownership, enclosure, and displacement
• Intersections of land, labor, and class in visual culture

We welcome proposals engaging with both canonical and understudied works that rethink landscape through its material and representational operations.