Where Land Meets Sea: Coastal explorations of landscape, representation and spatial experience

This glossy, beautifully illustrated and exemplified book draws on research with communities and visitors to two areas in Ireland—the South Wall in Dublin Bay and the Maharee Pennisula on the south-westerly coast of Ireland—to explore human enfoldments with these landscapes, past and present. In summary, this is a book concerned with relations between ‘self and surroundings’ (p. 6), but, in particular, with a special type of surrounding: that of the coast. For Ryan, these edge spaces are ones of ‘heightened’ spatial awareness (p. 7) because they are zones of mobility, change, and flux—spaces in which subjects and objects are uniquely immersed because of the material, elemental qualities of constant reformation, emergence, and becoming. In attending to this shifting geo-physical space over the course of ten chapters, Ryan explores the usefulness and operationalization of the term ‘landscape’ and the complexities of representational and non-representational approaches to sense-making that ensue when we (research participants and academics) engage with such a theoretical concept and animated space.