Can we land on earth?

I have recently read ‘Can we land on earth’ an interview with Bruno Latour by Line Marie Thorson, which is resonating hugely with me, worth saying ahead because so I’m communicating with you through that lens in this post. It's been one of those affirmative reads for me. 

As an artist my ‘material’ is ‘matter.’ I also work with with a portion of our planet that Latour calls ‘Critical Zone ~ the membrane that goes a few kilometres up and a few kilometres down.’ 

 

Matter expands infinitely into nature; which is everything. This immediately causes in me a feeling of stretching dismemberment quickly followed by anxiety about reconnecting so that I may become re-entangled with other earth matter. I feel I must somehow learn to engage with this reentangling urge.

 

So I work with materials I find in the pre compost layer. This is the becoming-critical upper zone, the layer visible underfoot and overlooked. Searching for understanding of what it is to be entangled. Deliberately trying to move observation downwards to reveal human affectivity in the soil. 

 

Like Latour, I “take a field site and try to understand as much as I can.” My first project was the mass housing estates being built on top of greenfield secondary terracotta deposits near home. Then there was suburban to urban Coventry which was also subject to re-modelling. These projects remain ongoing. 

 

I’m a fan of focus over distance.  I think you can learn so much from close looking at what is quite near.  Latour speaks of the amazing differences between specific places: ‘When you are on the earth-system, every single kilometre, metre and centimetre is different, and they confront and enhance the heterogeneity of the critical zone.’ My material/matter is specific and local. I revisit and note how things change next to other things changing. 

 

Actually, the scale at which my observations operate are getting smaller and smaller. So you could say my material is shrinking, but at the same time I experience a personal stretching and expanding as my knowledge grows, and then a further shrinking as I realise my enmeshment as a living being in the earth system followed by expansion with conjecture at the ramifications of my choices working on that system.

 

It’s important for us to know where life is and how it is affected. 

Mainly working at ground level means I work with waste; plant, creature and human. Working through a project about urban litter, notwithstanding my anger and disgust, I formed a conclusion that every living thing drops things. 

 

Parts of bodies fall to the ground constantly within our ecosystem. 

What falls matters. 

 

What is dropped becomes indelibly connected to others – after all, the ground is our grand and ultimate point of contact with each other. Gravity brings us together. However, we must conclude that human beings have lost the knack of dropping. Where trees are experts, we fail.

 

Working with ground level means I frequently grapple with the aesthetic problem of the small and mundane in art, in a culture that like the big and shiny rather too much. And this is where I feel kin with Latour, who calls it the ‘representational crisis representing Gaia.’ I feel my work is part of a cultural movement towards ‘rediscovering earth – reinventing what it is to have soil – and learning to find our ground.’ Landing on earth and still looking down carefully.

Surveilling Place - Transcription

Since I didn't press record properly on one of my visits to the piece of land I’m currently studying I decided to visually map a recording of my prior visit. This is it below. 

I spoke a lot in the recording and it was impossible to resist transcribing directly. The closest I got to my original mark-making intention appears in the bottom right hand quadrant which is from when I was sitting on the bank of the brook watching midges in an air current above the water and listening to a pair of chiffchaffs sing their repeating song to each other - 'Chiff-Chaff' - as in their onomatapoetic name. The abstract dots turned out to look a little like the midges which were using updraft from the stream to circle back into their throng. I thought it might work as a drypoint.

Here are some of the first proofs.

The paper was a bit too damp at the bottom which is why the marks are fluffly and smudged. Although I liked this reference to water, overall they lack a balance between boldness and accuracy of mark making. 

Shortly after this I started a course in intaglio printing at Leicester Print Workshop and picked up some tips; I needed to scratch the plate on top of a harder surface rather than leaning the plate on cutting mat and when I re-cut it the results were much improved.

Next steps:

I'm really taken with this idea for exploring sensorial space to produce an abstract image as it is accessable and there is no really wrong way of doing it. I like drawing without a sense of impending failure! So I'm developing an experimental workshop to share it. 

City Arcadia in Coventry is going to be redeveloped at the end of this year which is felt keenly amongst artists in the city because it currently contains precious exhibition space alongside various other small business, charities and community ventures who are going to lose their units. So, although the buildings have already been widely captured photographically, I think capturing a personal visual response to audible sensations of a space would be of value. I will publish that Eventbrite via Coventry Artspace and put the link in here when it is ready. 

Surveilling Place 2

On April 29th I decided to explore the part of Tachbrook Country Park I didn’t last time and try to find the footpath from Bishops Tachbrook shown on this OS six-inch 1888-1913 map to compare where the path starts now. 

It was sunny, warm and slightly muggy so as the air quality felt poor I walked there away from the main road through the three year old housing development at Tachbrook Mallory.  I've decided to audio record all of my visits so I started recording as soon as I hit the boundary at the alley joining Landor Road and finished it an hour later by Tach Brook.  I don't quite know what I'm going to do with all this sound - but at least I shall have it!

I did find a footpath eventually but I think the route might have altered quite a bit which explains the DC comment on Facebook over whether to make a decision to reinstate it. Later on it joined with the country park path across a dyke where there was this dilapidated single iron girder 'bridge'. I dithered a bit before crossing it because it had rusted quite badly but it was strong enough to hold my weight.

On the other side I sat by the brook for a time and watched the midges and the sunlight glinting off the water for long enough then walked around and up the meadow I missed out last time. To one side this is still occupied by development from the road right down to the dyke, separated off by a fence that splits in half a mysterious circle of blue posts, one of which had been decorated with a flowerpot.

By the fence I took a few photos of sculptural construction paraphernalia inside the development compound, including a group of digger buckets.

As soon as I left the border of the park I came across this bin overloaded with poo bags. It's obvious to me that dog owners are making an attempt to be tidy but the council has not kept up with them. It would be nicer if they could take the poo home with them!

Damage to land and habitat would be much harder to repair than prevent. Transfer of property deeds between the developers and the District Council needs to happen soon so that better waste facilities can be installed, otherwise this disgusting mess will spread, and ruin what is currently a fairly clean space.  

surveilling place

Tachbrook Country Park

I'm starting a new project connected to my Silverhouses project from 2018-19 which grew from exploring housing development near my home in Whitnash, on the Southern edge of Leamington Spa. It's 2022 now, the 4,000 new houses promised have now mostly been built and, at last, a strip of low-lying land around the periphery will be handed over to the District Council and made into a country park called Tachbrook Country Park. Pretty plans for community gardens, paths, playgrounds and scattered orchards have been published and signs warning 'Private Land Do Not Enter Until Land Is Transferred' have been erected next to already worn footpaths.  

I'm interested in human impact on land, on changing land use, on sharing / not sharing land with non-human lives, territory, boundaries, entangled lives, waste, litter, traces of human inhabitation. Silverhouses was inspired by anger and incredulity over imposition of human global capitalism on green belt land, and of litter and construction waste infiltrating it, and in that light this new activity seems conciliatory and hopeful. I wonder what I will find over the next few years. 

I spent 2 hours wandering around. Orienting myself and getting a view of a space. The terrain currently varies between grass-land and bog by the spinny and stream. There are three soak-aways providing clay-banked ponds - one of which is large. As yet these seem to be the only areas that have experienced much intervention and planting. There are a couple of mainly hawthorne, elder and blackthorne copses that look ignored - I can tell this by the lack of litter. Overall, except from by the hedge between the houses and stream that catches litter in the wind and is on the main dog-walking stretch, there is little litter. By the copses the land is squashy, almost like a moor in parts, which shows it hasn't been trampled much. I hope pathways can help keep it this way as these parts are rich in diverse life.

The stream also is clean, and clear with collapsed mature willow trees that are creating pools I suspect these were originally planted for whithy growing. There are rodent holes in the muddy bank. I suspect these are rat holes but need to do more research to confirm that.

This is one of the first properly warm days of spring and therefore there are lots of newly hatched butterflies - I spotted brimstone, tortoiseshell and peacocks - and lots of bees.

I didn't come prepared to make a collection on this visit, instead I recorded all of my two hour walk - there is an excerpt on my Soundcloud - but I did rescue a 2m square bundle of HDPE caught in the hedge which may come in handy for a future work.

On my next visit I plan to carry out a square metre survey over a couple of different kinds of terrain.

All falling things

It seemed to make sense to try and combine a couple of threads of work back into one and I had these printed scans lying around.

 

I’m not sure of the mirror on the foam, or the foam. 

 

Actually the foam does relate to silver houses.

 

Maybe try embedding them into the foam.

 

Maybe the objects too. There’s a cyclical relationship to the ground.

Journal notes: Weird Embodiment. [edited]

Today I finished a first reading of Timothy Morton’s Weird Embodiment. I am wondering how waste objects factor in to the vast array of partial things in nowness – the everlasting moment sliding between past and future - in appearance and essence, ambiguous objects in the Mobius strip of reality. It would seem that we are fooling ourselves that objects ever go out of connection with us. 

“…things do exist, yet they exist insofar as they are shot through with nothingness.”  Is this an agnostic turn?

 

“Since there are no top, bottom or middle things, there is no whole of which things are all components. Thus things are

necessarily partial.”
"And if you want to think of amalgamations made of partial parts, these form and reform, in a never ending, therefore never beginning, always turning, mobius strip of time."

 

He has things to say on beauty and Spinach art which make me remember an old crit where I struggled to express myself. There was a hierarchy of beauty that I struggled against too. “Art as disgust maintains a standard of taste, if only in the negative, which is why it is constantly struggling against beauty, against the seduction of the aura, against determinacy and the constraints of form.”

 

I begin to re-see why I am attracted to litter and waste and see in those abject objects some of the attributes of beauty. Because in waste objects disgust and beauty are joined and the difference between them becomes nullified in the struggle, which holds you in the moment of beauty, oggling at surfaces and lets you see past that to the object. Which becomes a moment in itself defined by its relations to others, both a product of processes and series of past relations, and a cypher of moments where this entity is called non-entity / nothing now and yet holds everything in its past association and lurks in the future as a frame of reference but at the edge of the frame.

Conversing with human litter is to be transported to the past via nothing more than an action of discarding,  a leap into a void; a gap when an object moves on from relation with humans as a component part into a new non-human amalgamation, (what we might lazily call nothing). Like old skin, it's there, we just don't want to recognise it as ours.

Which is why litter always strikes us as strange, weird and therefore disgusting – and we impulsively draw away from it. Litter drawn back up and examined, such as art made with found objects or an archaeological dig presents to us a chance to experience a new altercation with nothing, and with the non-human amalgamations that are out of our sphere of experience. It’s like meeting an alien who was once your next door neighbour.

This is a close up image of a scraper stone surface showing the scratches on the worn side. 

I made a watercolour and pencil sketch of a piece of litter from the collection; a crumpled gold foil chocolate wrapper, the gold exterior flattened around the white paper interior that buds from the centre, unfolding like a pair of twisted grey lips; the lips of the chocolate eater split and ready to eat. The foil shimmers in the close bright light I set to cast a deep constant shadow from which to draw. If I move my view will move, and the foil will shoot off light from its many angles and my subject will not be still and my drawing will be more difficult to achieve. I must be still to control the shimmering. Hold myself constant in relation to the chocolate wrapper. 

I started to think of the foil folds as stone surface.

21 February 2021

“embodiment is not a case of being situated constantly and presently, but rather of shimmering or flickering.” T Morton ‘Weird Embodiment’

A growing project: salvaged silver-houses soil

July 2019. I sit here considering what to do about the weeds and splurging into tissues the remainder of a cold that kept me down all weekend.

The weeds are growing in soil that I 'liberated' from ground destined to complete a shiny new residential estate. A poetic reminder of its last wild moment when it was beautiful. Enthusiastically stealing from the developers a wealth of confetti in white-flowered Shepard's Purse and Thistle.

So far I have grown mainly baby Dock Weeds and a very long and searching Field Speedwell. A flat, round and fluttery leaved buttercup that didn't like growing in a pot also upped and then died.

I want to make a print to celebrate them. So I'm drawing on tracing paper to overlap them and see what shapes there are.

3 July.
Slowly cutting out a complicated stensil. This will be the top layer in a strong opaque colour. But it has to be done first so I know where all the other shapes need to go.

I'm still clearing out and amalgamating all the studio things I had to bring back from college into my house. This quite a large task! Nevertheless, I've managed to squeeze a space for making and drying prints into my bedroom. It's nicer to work on the table downstairs with a view of the garden but at least I don't have to tidy stuff away so often.

I'm planning on using a range of printing techniques and I will end up with a range of prints on paper that probably have a few differences. Lino relief printing I'm used to, screen printing not so much. I haven't tried to combine them before, so we will have to see how it goes.

I have a some Permaset Premium ink on order and I'm interested to see how that works on plastic. It's water-based but will print on unpermeable surfaces so I'm hopeful it will be more successful than anything else I've tried recently.

Undetectable Peices - BRICK

Last summer I dug up a Leamington brick in my garden.

I was curious, and a little googling turned up a brief history of Leamington Brick Company. The location of the former kiln and clay pit is now near the centre of town. I also learned there was nothing left of the buildings and little obvious earth-workings, but I had some spare minutes so I went to see.

Nothing remains apart from a road name: 'Kiln Close'. There's a grassed park, Villiars Street Park; no more than some trees, a circular path and a play area enclosed by housing.

The houses were built with a different brick to mine; lighter, patchy and orange, whereas mine are more uniform in colour, although they vary brick to brick from light pink to blushed red and burnt purple-brown. My place was built in 1957, and, seeing as the brick company ceased to trade mid-century, it's fair to assume the brick I dug up could have been one of the last to be fired.

This is the park:

Panoramic view makes it look bigger and more dramatic than it does in reality, still, it's strange to think of this small park as once being an industrial landscape. It doesn't seem the type; it looks too subdued, and as if it's always been here.

Changing land use is the story of western capitalist progress though. At one time Warwickshire was dotted with brickworks using the clay deposits within the swathe of Mercia Mudstone that stretches in a curve across the UK from North East to South West and which underlies much of the West Midlands. So just West of Campion Hill, there once would have been several large one or two storey brick buildings and at least one tall, smoking kiln chimney. At one time probably notable in the landscape but now completely erased. Perhaps the claypit was exhausted, or the business no longer viable as bricks became available cheaper elsewhere. Maybe it was more profitable to sell the land for housing. 

In the twentieth century much of the UK's manufacturing was replaced by service industry. Land use follows this, for as a park this land now services the leisure requirements of the nearby population.

I'm interested in this town's growth. Since I am witnessing it expand before my eyes right now, somehow it makes sense to trace the story of its growth backwards too. Although little trace remains of Leamington's brickworks, another, at Napton on the Hill, outlasted it by decades. Although it too is gone, the site is visible. Although local consultation is underway for building 80 more new homes on its brownfield-classed site, so that may be worth exploring soon.

Silver Houses - Work

(Persimmon) Silver House

Silver House. Photoshop.jpg v2
Polar B&W created from original, then mask filled with photoshop transparent background pattern firstly in grey and white then black and white, transposed with Silver House in Pantone 572 with Observation Station in Pantone 163.

deceptive perception?

Perhaps our problem is faulty perception? I glanced up from the computer screen to idly consider what a moment of arrival would be like for a civilisation such as ours, which is occupied with progress, only for my eyes to focus involuntarily on an object in the middle-distance across on the other side of the street. So now there is a displacement in inverted colours: a light-shadow superimposed up and to the right-hand side onto what I now see: the formerly unseen object. Here is an impression of a green glowing chimney beneath a cloudy sky. I am simultaneously seeing the object and my memory of it. And the memory is rapidly fading. As a memory and representation of a thought, this could be a fading presence of a civilisation.