Neverends: art, music, text
Memory in, through and around land
I was fortunate to have an invitation for the preview of this exhibition which took place last Saturday. As with most previews, this was as much about socialising, networking and talking to the artists as looking at the work and another visit will be needed to really absorb it all.
This was collaborative commissioned work in response to areas of North East Lincolnshire. Artists were:_
- Judith Tucker and Harriet Harlow - drawings and poetry
- Linda Ingham and David Power - painting, music, film and participation
- David Ainley - place-based work
There was also work by Martin Parr, Brian Alterio, Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, Jane Harris, Birgit Skiold and Andy Goldsworthy.
Neverends is a consideration of the ways in which personal, industrial and recreational memories linger in place.
In Far and Near Linda Ingham and David Power explore our expressions of Continual Bonds to Absent Others from their studies of memorial benches. The work is participatory, including a bespoke bench dressed with contributed memorials, and includes film, music and visual art.
Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker present poems and drawings for Outfalls from their collaborative work on the Louth Navigation. They are interested in the relationship between the original River Ludd and the canal itself as its industrial past becomes absorbed into semi-wilderness, creating niches for local flora and fauna in its culverts, bridges and locks.
David Ainley's work is concerned with 're-figuring the landscape' through ambitious painting practices; his work refers to mining, poetry and cultural geography and is created through a number of particular time-consuming processes which echo his subject matter.
This exhibition excites me as I feel that in many ways it relates to my own work where I depict footpaths. I feel sure that the land, and especially paths, must hold memories of those who have gone before. I am also interested in 'micro-wilderness'. I have recently re-read Robert MacFarlane's Wild Places in which he attempts to visit, and sleep wild in, as many of the great wilderness areas of the UK as he can. Towards the end of the book he re-appraises his vision of wilderness. No longer is it the great wide open spaces. He quotes Paul Nash who spoke of the 'unseen landscapes' of England. 'The landscapes I have in mind', he wrote, are not part of the unseen world in the psychic sense, nor are they part of the Unconscious. They belong to the world that lies, visibly about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived; only in the way that they can be regarded as invisible.' MacFarlane himself writes 'I had started to refocus. I was becoming interested in this understanding of wildness not as something which was hived off from human life, but which existed unexpectedly around and within it: in cities, backyards, roadsides, hedges, field boundaries or spinnies.' (MacFarlane, 2007.pp 226-227). The famous mountaineer, W.H. Murray, also wrote of the same experience as long ago as 1951and had the same sentiments. 'Through the very uncertainties of of our climb my mind became unusually observant, embracing many simple things that commonly pass unregarded. While searching for a handhold the eye would alight on a blade of grass peeping from a crack, and see the amazing grace of its fluting, the fresh brightness of its green against the rock; and although the joy was that of one second the memory lived on.' (Murray, 1951, p.62) I was reminded of these things whilst reading the notes from the exhibition by Tarlo and Tucker: '...the canal itself as its industrial past becomes absorbed into semi-wilderness, creating niches for local flora and fauna in its culverts, bridges and locks.'
I was also inspired by the inclusion in the exhibition of work by Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, both of whom I have referenced in my Body of Work and Contextual Studies. As my Body of work embodies both walking and wilderness, I can see potential for futher developing the work by walking the length of the Louth Navigation and repeating photographically what Tarlo and Tucker did with words and drawing, focusing on 'micro-wilderness'.
MacFarlane, R. (2007) The Wild Places, Granta, London
Murray W.H. (1951) Undiscovered Scotland, Dent Publishing, London
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