Nature, art, and aesthetics

Though much of geography today makes little explicit reference to either art or aesthetics, both are nevertheless key to the emergence of the discipline as a modern mode of inquiry into nature. Artistic practice, using diverse mediums, has helped physical as well as human geographers think through and convey the import of particular landscape features, while aesthetics has underpinned a multisensuous engagement with the environment through an expansive form of fieldwork. As the discipline continues to tease apart the meaning of nature as a complex object of analysis, so it has engaged more with cross-disciplinary debates on the immersion of bodies, including that of the researcher, in a postnatural world. In the process, geographers have found common ground with practitioners in the arts and humanities who are interested in the meaning of landscapes, certainly, but also in the sensuous, emotional, and affective dimensions of research as a mode of engagement with the world.