” People call me a philosopher or a scientist, a poet or an artist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten or ignored. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with the curious gaps between things. I build my world from the shards and fragments of the half-remembered. I am really more of an alchemist than anything else..“
B. G. Nichols is a writer, researcher, and visual artist based in rural Aberdeenshire. When writing about Scotland and the North country of the UK , he uses the alternym, Bran Graeme Nairne. His written and visual works are predominantly informed by marginalised landscapes and places of loss, particularly in his home territory, and around the British Isles.
Nichols is the founder, and Editorial and Creative Director of AnMór Studio, a small collective of individuals dedicated to creating and disseminating written and visual work relating to landscapes lost, abandoned, forgotten and mythic. AnMór Studio currently publishes the bi-annual journal, Echtrai, a unique publication which has slowly grown in reputation since its inception in 2021.
The Land Incanted is Nichols’ “book in process” ; an ever- growing, discursive assemblage of fragments, incantations, aphorisms, text-trails, formulae, word lists, and short form essays that will eventually be collected and brought together in this definitive work, a work that documents the thoughts, ideas and sense impressions of a writer described by his peers as an “extraordinary, incantatory writer of ethereal meditations on the landscape” , a “forward-thinking nature mystic” , and a modern day ‘shaman’ – Nichols refutes all of these categories, but admits to having a ‘divergent’ mind – a restless, open, roaming inquisitiveness that allows unfiltered access to landscapes of loss, where place and time converges, where voices and fugitive presences from our deep past intrude and elide in a hybrid form, situated somewhere between the incantatory, the visionary, and the historic, spilling forth from a fertile imagination, overflowing with ideas.
This website was designed to document his ongoing works and research, portions of which will appear as a hybrid written and visual work that might one day appear collectively in book form. Nichols/Nairne has previously released fragments of The Land Incanted in publications such as Echtrai Journal, Ernest Journal, Voices in a Lane, – and online with The Clearing at Little Toller, The Learned Pig, Unofficial Britain , and others.
Here, and over the coming year 2023/4, we will bring together published and unpublished works, out-takes from the archive, and selections from his exquisite hand -produced editions published under the name Place Editions between 2011 and 2020. Some of the previously published writings have been revised and amended , ready for future publication – this is a rare glimpse into what is proving to be a life-defining assemblage of unique and idiosyncratic documents.
For copyright control, permissions of usage, commissions, and enquiries, please use the email address below. All work is © copyright protected by the Designers & Artists Copyright Society 2022
“..not for nothing are these texts dubbed “incantations”, or they might equally be classified as “enchantments”, (both sharing the same etymological root), where words, arranged in perhaps unorthodox ways become symbolic of unseen levels; and the sense of place, rather than being externally “experienced”, is being internally “spoken”, encrypted in a poetic language of allegory and symbolism. In his world, it is not the lyrical nature of text, nor narrative that is significant, but the associative thinking that sets up a mesh of semi-abstracted interconnections in which language instigates and participates in the sign for one thing and the metaphysical invocation of the other. ..”
Excerpt from a catalogue introduction to the Radical Landscapes Exhibition, Taunton, 2019. Curated by Camilla Nelson/ Singing Apple Press.
(opening quote adapted from Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke)
Email contact: echtraijournal@aol.com
The Land Incanted [ Earth & Memory ] 