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Patricia Townsend's Creative States of Mind is primarily a book about experience. How does one make use of experience? Townsend addresses this question through a fascinating account of her own uncanny experience of Morecambe Bay, the largest expanse of intertidal mudflats and sand in the UK. She was troubled by her encounter with the landscape; something was happening that she could not fathom. The disturbing feelings remained vague and unformed, resonating with associations beyond any conscious awareness or knowledge of the history of the estuary. Stirred by something in the world that she did not know her way around to make a work of art, she set about experimenting with photography and video animation. An impulse to something like a work put her under pressure and, in this case, the reach for meaning involved a deliberate use of various media, but also a less conscious sense of what felt right. The developing artwork was dependent on what worked for Townsend on both levels, conscious and unconscious; it had to be convincing. Eventually, she came up with the idea of animating a series of photographs of the channels of water in the sands, an idea that incorporated the not-yet-conceived aspects of her original experience. The idea was therefore realized in an artwork replete with traces (uncanny effects) of the disturbance at its origin.
Townsend went on to create a series of works that embodied the strangely familiar feeling that the threatening sand and the dangers of the Bay evoked in her; each new work elaborated further on her experience of this particular landscape. What, exactly, is happening here? What was it that caused Townsend to think and wonder in the first place, what was she given to
begin with? And how did she manage to work through her anxiety? Over the course of 11 brief chapters, Townsend presents at least three ways of interpreting her encounter with Morecambe Bay. As an anthropology of cultural forms and concomitant structures of feeling, the