Creative Works Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

One Poem a Week: Plague Poems Six Years On

Artist, writer and practical activist Nicky Saunter remembers weekly act of creative solidarity during the Covid-19 lockdowns: plague poems for plague times, reminding us that writing may be a solitary pleasure but sharing is an act of magic.

1,850 words: estimated reading time = 7.5 minutes

Writing poetry sometimes feels like a dirty secret — something many people do, but they don’t like to shout about it too much. Sometimes for fear of ridicule, sometimes because what they are writing may be more revealing than they are comfortable with. This may seem a strange sensation to those who have grown up in a world where social media expects you to bare all, to open your heart to strangers and to confess your deepest fears and emotions. But perhaps poets are a strange mix of being both shy of revealing themselves and yet needing to be truly heard and understood.

Those of us who write poems perhaps have moments of wistfulness about a time when poets could make a good living, were part of the glitterati, invited to the most happening soirees and making headlines in daily newspapers. These days it is only dead poets and the occasional poet laureate whose name is widely known, and few people are able to quote poetry at any length.

Yet poetry persists and pops up so often in times of stress and trauma, when understanding is needed and when reflection on a complex issue fails to deliver a simple answer. Occasionally someone young and cool on YouTube performs their own poem in response to an event in the never-ending newscycle. Like rap and song lyrics, these words cut through the image storm that is social media, and burn brightly. We recognise this ancient flame for what it is — someone speaking from the heart out into the world without knowing if anyone is listening or if people are listening, whether anyone will understand. Will they “get it”? Will they “get me?”

Plague poems

During the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, a small group of people who didn’t all know each other came together on a WhatsApp group (before we were all deluged in such groups…) to write One Poem a Week. The idea was to follow a theme that had arisen naturally in the world, from our experiences that week. As time went on, we sometimes took as a theme words or phrases from a poem written the previous week. These poems became a live chain of intersecting thoughts and ideas weaving through the airwaves. In the breaks between lockdowns, we published two slim volumes and got together to read live in front of an audience. None of us had done this before.

In 2026 the group still lives on, our weekly poems still punctuated by terrifying headlines, family matters, news of births and deaths, ideas for art, shared grumbles, photos of nature, music choices and more. The weekly arrival of poems straight from other people’s minds on a shared theme drop like ripe cherries saved from the birds — rare and delicious.

I would like to share here a handful of poems from across these years with a little about where they came from. Reading them again triggers incredibly strong memories and sensations from the time of writing, although many are also written themselves about times past. I have learned that writing them is a solitary pleasure but sharing them is magic and well worth the risk.

Plague poems: Showing a drawing, 'Circle of dance' by Nicky Saunter, 2026 — ‘Circle of dance’. Art: Nicky Saunter © 2026

The Poems

It is interesting how poetry kaleidoscopes time and brings to the surface long-forgotten moments in great clarity. In the Essex market town where our family went shopping in the 1970s was an old fashioned grocer’s shop called Bowtell’s, where men behind counters performed magic to my young eye, wrapping cheese without string or tape.

Wrap

Saturday morning at the grocers, men in white coats stand ready
Pungent coffee aroma drifts from the roaster in the window
And so the show begins - curtains up
At the great glass altar of cheese.

The squat cheddar king sits heavy on his throne
Releasing reluctantly an infant slice to the wire,
The stagehands respectfully separate the two
Placing the small block just once in the spotlight
Square in the centre of the greaseproof paper stage.

A magician has appeared, pencil behind his ear
A drum roll, the first fold; a gasp, the second fold,
The semi-nude block is turned blushing from our gaze
The cymbals clash - the final tuck, a secret learned
And it’s over with a bow
It’s a wrap.

Sometimes a news item fills you with such a powerful response that it becomes a real sensation in your own body. It can literally make you feel sick. Writing and empathy are strong partners.

Fried

I heard they fried a woman in Arizona
in a prison cage beneath the blistering sun
and I say blistering because that's what the metal cage did to her skin

can you begin to imagine that?

On my wrist I have a tiny burn mark
shiny, pebble smooth and beautiful now
it hurt like hell fresh from the oven shelf
where I left a tiny piece of myself.

What does it feel like to know that
whatever you touch is going to sear you, char your flesh like a tuna steak
(we are all from fish after all)
and will it smell like food or like me
how long will the metal hook pain last
as it grids my face, back, thigh or arm with the live pattern of cruelty

she didn't live - Marcia Powell
banged up for banging for money
but I remember her and so will you.

We took in an old staff rescue dog called Buster who enjoyed the next few years moving like an ageing mafia boss between the sofa, rug, bed and garden in a slow stroll and with a big smile on his face. There is nothing like a dog for teaching a restless soul how to see the moment.

Sleeping Dogs

how can it be that the snore
of a loved one fast asleep raises
deep in the night’s bestial dark
such ire, such stabbing murderous thoughts
and yet what soothing honey is gifted
by the rhythmic rasp
of a sleeping dog before the fire

Some images will never be forgotten even if we wish they could be. We sat watching footage of desperate people crossing the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas in the hope of something better, only to be trapped in a no-man’s land of makeshift shelters and endless paperwork.

Shell 

Someone’s home, such a tiny thing
Curled in marble coils of calcium
On the sun-warm palm of a child
Staring in awe at this seaside wizardry
How did they get here?
And where have they all gone?
Unique on a beach of millions
Like so many life jackets on Lesbos
Abandoned by seasick migrants
Sea, salt and air will out and
Shells become sandcastles
But life jackets are here to stay

Unbelievably, war has returned to Europe and Ukraine was fighting for its life. Elsewhere in the Sudan or Syria, people continued to hide from soldiers and fear their weapons and their lack of humanity. I think often about women and children, the elderly in these times of physical extremis.

War

Finger to her lips, shushing for life the curious toddler
Rocking the mewling infant to the safety of sleep
The last biscuit in exchange for stillness
Distraction from boots on the stairs
Metal and muscle crashing past
Please, please let them just pass
Not notice this door, paint peeling gently
Smell of cabbage poverty lingering
No men to see here, no threat at all
Just one sweating mother, shepherding
Her babies down the hall
Her Kalashnikov heavy but ready

Heat and fire were frequent themes as they came in waves across the world, increasing in their strength and threat to life. Sometimes a good story emerges from such fear and panic — as when local people came to the rescue when a community field went up in flames.

Fields on fire

One cigarette butt from a hairless lip
Is all it took to torch the hay
Strewn with care round tender trees
Searching still for sap root safety
(Aren’t we all?)
But even as the cinders sparked skyward
Supporters poured in a soothing flood
To extinguish the pain, splash laughter on flames
Buckets and barrows, old-fashioned really
But prompt and willing, that’s the key
The rest is nature’s job, rejuvenation
The total miracle of life from death

These two need no explanation, but simply arrived as people became both richer and poorer, warmer and colder. Short poems can be just as impactful as long ones.

The rich

I had a dream
In which
The rich
Became smaller
The richer they got
The Sunday times
Rich list
Was tragically
Eaten by
Their own
Overbred
Pet lapdogs

Cold

Should the half of the world too cold
Cuddle up to the half too hot
We might all be warm

Although strong emotions tend to start poetry into life for me, these can be positive: love, nature, hope, joy. It seems right in these trying times to finish with a couple of these.

Drenched

You know the first time you feel tropical rain
It makes you laugh, just hoot with laughter
The joke is on you, with your hopes of reaching shelter
Before the mighty heavens crack and broil
Time and wind stops, temperature dips
And we are drenched both to our slick skins
Between the car and the porch overhang
Metres that might as well be miles

Out in the yard with fat drops bouncing up red mud
The earth is alive with jumping water in slo mo
I leap and then you, splashing like tots
Mouths open to the pummelling sky
The rains have come, bringing life and food
Joy runs untrammelled down gutters and pipes
Bubbling hope, spurting fountains alive
And us too, dancing in disbelief.

Flow

There is a point of particular caramel calm
Before the shutter finally falls

And light commits indelibly to film
Every line and furrow of your beloved face

When focus is all, line and pattern
Form effortlessly into seamless composition

The quadrille of rustling silk falls quiet
A pause as distant music holds its breath

Freezing forever the tilt of a head, a raised arm
And in that decisive moment, I am in flow.

All poems © Nicky Saunter 2026.

Showing 'Crow power', art by Nicky Saunter, 2026 — ‘Crow power’. Art: Nicky Saunter © 2026

Find more

The One Poem a Week project resulted in Plague Poems: March April May 2020, by Andrew Simms, Nicky Saunter and Nick Robins. You can read more at Nicky’s website, Through The Round Window.

During that first lockdown, ClimateCultures invited members to send in something for our Quarantine Connection series, and you can read the 40 contributions we curated over eight weeks: images, poems, audio or video pieces, short stories, research snippets, event or exhibition programme, extracts from a longer piece — all helping us to fight feelings of isolation when our physical cultural spaces were closed or restricted for the usual sharing of art, knowledge and experience.

***

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say something about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Nicky – “Although I have used AI to create images in Canva, I found it too limiting and same-looking to use again and haven’t used it since. I used it to bring together some sources for research, but it didn’t come up with anything I hadn’t found myself.

“There are probably a million ways I might use it, but I haven’t yet found anything to take my dogs for a walk or recruit volunteers for local charities. No doubt it will come, but as yet it has simply taken my writing and research work and hasn’t added much for me to use.”

Nicky Saunter

A practical activist, campaigner, social entrepreneur and artist with a particular focus on communication, between people and between humans and the rest of the natural world.

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ of Climate Crisis & Poetic Response

Poet Julian Bishop shares three new poems written in response to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where dissension between its famous fairy characters plays out in ‘distemperature’ and ruptures in the patterns of nature and affairs of humans.

1,480 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

The setting: The Bridge Theatre, London, 2019. The play: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A fabulously camp romp with a Beyoncé soundtrack and incredible acrobatics. Shakespeare so successfully updated, the same Nicholas Hytner production is revived in 2025. But of all the contemporary resonances, one of the play’s main preoccupations stood out for me as I sat in the audience swaying along to Love on Top at the end: climate change.

Rewind to Titania’s speech in Act II, Scene 1:

And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazèd world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension.
We are their parents and original.

The summer of 1594, shortly before the play was written, was famously cold and wet, with crops rotting in the fields and floods that wrecked bridges. But mark the last three lines of Titania’s speech — who or what is responsible for the progeny of evils described above but we, the audience, because of our dissension. The dictionary definition of dissension? A formal term for when a group of people who should be cooperating cannot agree on something. Sounds familiar?

I also latched onto the fabulous neologism ‘distemperature’, which surely deserves a revival, with its dual nods to political distemper and an out-of-sorts temperature — is there a better word to encapsulate our global predicament? Accordingly, I’ve used the word in several poems, including one of those you can read below.

Titania’s speech led me to explore Shakespeare’s eco credentials further and, sure enough, there’s ample evidence throughout the folio to demonstrate that he was aware of issues such as deforestation and the impact of expanding cities on the natural world. By his time, the forest of Arden was more patchy woodland thanks to the booming timber industry, used not just for house-building but England’s almost permanent war footing. A fleet to defeat a Spanish Armada demands a vast amount of timber and there’s no evidence of any active attempts to replant what must have been seen as an infinite resource.

Showig a 1914 Play poster for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Savoy Theatre. Public domain. — 1914 play poster for a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Savoy Theatre. Public domain.

Golden shovels — poems in conversation

The form I’ve chosen for my poetic response is the Golden Shovel, invented by the American poet Terrance Hayes. He responded to Gwendolyn Brooks’s short but classic poem We Real Cool by using a word from it at the end of every line of his own poem, The Golden Shovel — in order too, so you can read her poem down the right-hand margin of the page.

I also chose this form because it preserves the integrity of the original line and forces a very direct response. Of course, given this is Shakespeare, the language is often archaic, so I’ve had to bridge the difficult gap between authenticity and parody in how I use both syntax and language, probably not always entirely successfully. I also decided each poem’s title should come from a nearby line in the same play that relates to its theme.

Most of the poems are being written while I go for a run outdoors — I hold the relevant quote in my head and repeat it until it starts to generate a response. The tricky bit is waiting until I’m on an empty path to get the words down! There have been a few near-collisions but I’m lucky to live near Green Belt between London and the M25, which can easily accommodate an hour-long run through countryside.

I grew up in Wiltshire countryside which is gradually being eaten away by new houses, golf courses and the like, so these poems are also a kind of elegy as well. When I was a teenager, a friend and I used to catch the bus to Stratford-on-Avon after school on a Friday night and stay in a youth hostel so we could queue up at dawn outside the RSC to get returns for whatever was showing. I’d become obsessed by Shakespeare after my school took our class to a showing of Franco Zefferelli’s film version of Romeo and Juliet — I think it was the first time I became aware of poetry. By the time it came to O Levels (we studied Julius Caesar), I think I’d seen all the tragedies.

And unexpectedly, Macbeth proved initially to be the richest resource for possible Shovels. The setting for the play is a blasted heath, a place of fog and filthy air. After Macbeth murders Duncan — an unnatural act — nature goes haywire, with animals eating one another, appalling weather and at one point the Earth was fev’rous and did shake. It’s all fittingly apocalyptic but I’d like to think that there’s a more hopeful vision for the world than this, which brought me back to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The circumstances aren’t dissimilar, as Titania’s speech makes clear: she and Oberon are parents and original of the distemperature and chaotic weather by fighting over the custody of an Indian changeling boy rather than attending to their normal duties (whatever it is that fairies do). As the play has it: so quick bright things come to confusion.

The play’s plot mirrors this of course, with Bottom acquiring an ass’s head and mistaken identity almost leading to tragedy among the two groups of young lovers. Significantly, the latter confusion occurs because Puck picks a flower to make a potion — is it too much of a stretch to include this among the acts of environmental destruction too? But in this play there’s a happy outcome: the lovers are reconciled, as are Oberon and Titania, although theirs is something of a forced marriage. There are also plenty of celebrations of the natural world, most famously Oberon’s luscious ‘wild violets’ speech:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine…

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act II, Scene 1)

Showing William Blake's painting: 'Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. From William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream' 1786. Public domain. — ‘Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Wiliam Blake, 1786. Public domain.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream — echoing ecological disorder

So, what do I hope this project will achieve? Obviously, I’ll be looking to get some poems published but, more importantly, I’d like them to echo the broader ecological disorder observed by Titania, and indeed Shakespeare himself, when we see floods, fire and seasons alter as a result of our own actions. Just ten years separate the writing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its happy ending and Macbeth with its apocalyptic ending… Let’s hope we get to the end of The Tempest without having to sit through all the tragedies on the way.

Three Midsummer Shovels (from the beginning of the sequence):

Enter Oberon with his train

Once I knew of a bank where the 
nodding violets grew in a spring
hung with dewdrops; I knew the       
scent of wild thyme on a summer    
breeze and eglantine on hill, the          
wild dale and mead, bees chiding      
the roses… but then autumn and 
all the four seasons turned angry, 
mutating to a state of never-winter 
where dithering outpaced change.

Act II, Scene 1

Ill Met by Moonlight

Proud Titania attributed the moon, forgeries of jealousy and     
her Lord’s distemper for unsettling the weather, a thorough          
if touch fantastical midsummer flight of airy chiffony for this    
man-stamped disequilibrium she pitched as distemperature, 

citing hoary-headed frost in the fresh lap of rose, of which we 
are parent and original. It begs a question: if a fairy could see 
how all the distemperatured and discombobulated seasons 
changed their liveries, why on earth did humans fail to alter?

Act II, Scene 1

Wonder on, till truth make all things plain

In the age before distemperature and tempests, this
melodious plot of lichen’d oak and broadleaf’d green
was backdrop to every scene. So well-made, the plot
never changed. Years hence, what green props shall 
endure to grace our performance? What spirit will be 
left to emerge unseen from still’d wings? One day our 
tumbledown globe will host plays on an empty stage.

Act III, Scene 1

Poems © Julian Bishop 2025

Find more

You can find more of Julian’s poems at his website, Julian Bishop: Writing & Poetry and his previous ClimateCultures posts, We Saw It All Happen and On Green Verges.

The poem that gave this form its name is Terrance Hayes’s The Golden Shovel, which you can read at Poem Hunter.

Julian Bishop

A former journalist, environment reporter and tv news editor who writes poetry about eco issues and was runner-up in the 2018 Ginkgo Poetry Prize.

Queer creative, writer, artist, poet, witch and activist Indigo Moon shares ‘Only Star’ and other poems from a collection she created for her recent MA Environmental Humanities, showcasing the natural world and its changes over a human lifespan.

400 words: estimated reading time = 2 minutes

Each of these poems takes inspiration from the great American poet, Emily Dickinson, and how she allowed her imagination and dazzling insight to run free in her poetry. Each moment allows for deep reflection, creative wildness and empowerment.

Only Star - showing woodland, photography by Indigo Moon — Photograph: Indigo Moon © 2022

Crescendo

My brain has a song
that has no chorus,
just a multicoloured verse
where I ask the ravens
and dragonflies,
help me find where the crescendo lies.

The Wing

Silent is the wing
that flies north
to the power line,
where winds buckle
and rains are unkind
Clouds that travel
are as arcane as
volcanic ash
when there’s no eruption.

A Brush to Fingertip

Rhythm marauding
at the back rooms
cups a check,
brushes a lip,
their fingertip,
a grace to my outline,
a decadent sweet,
a most thriving constellation.

Threads

Birds, bumblebees, blossom,
Distract me now
or confront the wind
and tell it of home
Fair – in case of this thread
and glimmer peace in my sacred bed.

Doubt of Birds

Can you doubt – a flock of birds,
instinctual, their wings synchronised,
destination felt
by currents of wind and water
When this, you, I, becomes the bird,
we never want to walk again.

'Only star' - showing an estuary at sunset — Photograph: Indigo Moon © 2022

Find more

Three of these poems have featured in the pages for creative contributions to our Environmental Keywords series, where Indigo generously offered her responses to the words ‘Justice’, ‘Resilience’ and ‘Transitions’. And she previously contributed a poem, ‘Frozen’, to Day 16 of our Quarantine Connection series during the first UK Covid lockdown in 2020.

You can read Indigo’s previous post for ClimateCultures, I am Purpose — a short story evoking ideas of conversation with the universe to illuminate times of zoonotic pandemic and climate crisis and reflect on the presence of signals from within.

And you can explore Creative Being, the site and community Indigo created to inspire positive change and amplify marginalised voices, interviewing artists, writers and activists.

Indigo Sapphire Moon

An LGBTQ+ and neurodivergent writer, poet, artist and activist, exploring environmental themes to investigate how storytelling and language can help us conserve and nourish the Earth.

Rewilding — Slantways

Writer Philip Webb Gregg shares a new poem exploring rewilding as a sideways step into a stranger world, resisting simplifications of ‘progress’ and the gains and losses of our current model, even as we seek to change it.

1,100 words: estimated reading time 4.5 minutes

Re.Wilding

we will eat meat still dressed in fur, feather
and claw. we will give darkness again a place in our bodies. all sickness shall
be cherished, allowed sweat, gland

and pore wherein to thrive. we will run after each other in the dead
of night – blood on our tongues. penicillin shall be

crucified upon the hill
and forgotten.

our men will wander, blind and bludgeoning, opening
debates with bubbling streams and the burnt-out husks of trees, forming
conclusions with starlings, finding

answers, as they always
have, in the spit of their palms.

our children will die, of course, crushed between
their mothers’ thighs. but it won’t matter, because our women
will know at last what it means to be free.

our teeth will rot and hang slack in our jaws. we will neither know
the names of the stars, nor of each other. but we will hold

each other, nonetheless. nameless and gasping. we will discover again
the truth of words that have no place in our hot
human skins. and with these words we will say, as we die: this is how

it should be. this death
was given by the wind. life shall feast on ash and

the only love
shall be
the love of dirt and
rain.

the air will be clear and the rivers white as our bones and we will breathe. for the first time, in so long. we will breathe. our hearts will be drumsticks in the hands of painted, matted shamans. long dead languages will suddenly spill from our lips like drool, like regurgitated food. like laughter. the wild stones that hold up the sky will kiss and kiss and kiss until they are bent-over bleeding-mouthed and all of a sudden, the clouds shall crash to the ground, heavier than we ever thought they possibly could be. there will be no patterns any more. only perfect, perfect humanity

and disappointed chaos.

Rewilding - showing the painting, 'And the beast which I saw', by artist Luisa-Maria MacCormack — And the beast which I saw.
Artist: Luisa-Maria MacCormack © 2020 www.luisamariam.com

Rewilding — neither forward nor backward

This poem started as all good poems do — in a state of agony. I was lying prone in a chair, mouth gaping wide, feeling infinitely fragile as I stared up into the eyes of my torturer cum-saviour who operated without remorse amid my pitiful moans. That’s right, I was at the dentist.

And it struck me, as I walked out with a numb jaw and much lighter wallet, unable to speak or barely think past the painkillers, that humanity had never had it so goddamn good.

All my life I’ve believed, no, I have known, that this society (by which I mean Western, capitalist society) is a lie. A con. A dream of progress, behind which sits the ugly nightmare of perdition. I know this because of my childhood. My mother who is an activist. My father who was a poet. The community I grew up among, and all those I’ve met along the way have only served to intensify my distrust of the current system and the certainty that it must, and shall, change.

Not that you need a hippy childhood to come to this conclusion. The truth of it can be seen by looking out the window, reading a thermometer, or simply watching the waves rise. But maybe it is also true that I have too often overlooked the benefits of progress.

How many lives have been saved by science? How many children born? How much pain averted? And shouldn’t we be grateful for all that we’ve been given? Yes, of course we should. But we should also acknowledge all that we’ve lost. The secret ways. The hidden ways that too easily kindled and charred when the light of logic shone into the wallowing shadows of faith. The idea of ‘not-knowing’ is not a bad thing. In fact, there is salvation there, in the humility and the hugeness of the world.

The idea of rewilding is not to progress by going backwards, but instead to take a step sideways, into a greener, stranger sense of ourselves and the world. This poem is a satire on everything we have gained and everything we have lost. It is an invitation to take that step, neither forward nor backward, but just a little bit slantways.

Find out more

We are grateful to artist, and tutor of art history and drawing, Luisa-Maria MacCormack for the image which accompanies Philip’s poem. It comes from her series ‘And the Beast which I Saw’.

As well as Philip’s previous posts for ClimateCultures, you can also read his contribution to our Quarantine Connection series: his story, What We Find in the Guts of the Bodies that the River Gives Us, appeared on Day 2 of this special 40-day series of new and archive material from ClimateCultures members during Covid-19 lockdown.

In his essay for the Dark Mountain Project, Where the Wild Things Aren’t, Philip reflects on his experiences living in London after a childhood in rural Spain: “If we allow ourselves, we may begin to notice that nature is everywhere, just as it always has been. And it is possible to feel like a part of a wider world, even here. There are birds perched on blackened chimneys and squirrels running across abandoned railways. There is a wound of green cutting across the grey pavement. There are trees which explode with life in spring and then wilt into sleep in autumn. The breeze is still cool in summer. In winter, the cold takes no notice. The rain doesn’t care. And that, to me, is at the core of what the wider world stands for. The lesson we can take home, into ourselves, is that nature is the essence of beautiful indifference. Like gravity. Like the sun. Like the earthquake or the wildfire or the drought. These things are neither cruel nor loving, they merely are. And seeing them, sensing them, should remind us that we are no different. Though we build structures between us and the real world. Though we divide and separate and rift. We should remember that we have the outside within us, regardless of cities or walls. We ourselves are liminal, able to inhabit both worlds at once.”

Fellow ClimateCultures member James Murray-White is a member of XR Rewilding, which explores and advances rewilding — of the land, of the human — within the context of Extinction Rebellion. You can see a short description and video from James at Campfire Convention, and there is a public XR Rewilding group on Facebook.

Philip Webb Gregg

A writer of ephemeral things for beautiful places, exploring the disconnect between human nature and nature nature, and grappling with themes of faith, folklore and narratology.

Beneath What Is Visible, A Vast Shadow

Photographer Oliver Raymond-Barker uses an innovative take on the camera obscura to uncover visible and invisible networks and complex histories embedded in a Scottish peninsula whose water-and-landscape is home to nuclear arsenals, peace activists and pilgrims’ spiritual traditions.

2,720 words: estimated reading time 11 minutes

Last November, I joined other artists presenting work as part of Planetary Processing, a gathering for whom photography is a mode of speculation on geological, celestial and bodily systems. I showed prints and text from my latest project, Trinity.

I created this body of work during residencies at Cove Park arts centre in Scotland, where I could engage with the unique ecology of the Rosneath peninsula: the landscape itself, the networks visible and invisible that have been imposed upon it and the complex histories embedded in its fabric.

Beneath land and water

The peninsula is dominated by the presence of HMNB Faslane and RNAD Coulport, the home of Trident, the UK’s nuclear deterrent. Existing alongside these sprawling sites are the small, temporary constructions of itinerant activists — locations such as the Peace Wood bear traces of their occupation.

Trinity references the early Christian pilgrims that voyaged to remote corners of the British Isles, such as Rosneath, in search of sanctuary; peregrini who sought to use the elemental power of nature as a means of gaining spiritual enlightenment. However, it also alludes to the contemporary use of the land — promised into the service of conflict, boundaries delineated upon the surface that pay no heed to its deep geological history.

I made these images using my own ‘backpack obscura’ — a custom-built camera obscura designed to allow me to capture large format images in remote locations. A light-tight tent, it uses rudimentary materials and a simple meniscus lens to project the desired image onto the floor of the camera. As well as being my means of image making, it also served as my shelter from the elements.

After two extended stays on the peninsula I felt I had enough material to begin the editing process. However, I soon realised that conveying the depth and breadth of what I had experienced was going to be difficult using image alone. The idea of creating a publication seemed the perfect solution as a means of expanding and extending upon my work. I feel the combination of critical and creative texts really help to locate the imagery whilst also providing a platform from which the reader can access the project.

Image shows cover design of Trinity, a book by Oliver Raymond-Barker. Design by Loose Joints. — Trinity, by Oliver Raymond-Barker. Book design by Loose Joints © 2019

What follows, with some of the images I took, are edited extracts from the two texts that have been provided for the book: Not Negative, an essay by Martin Barnes, Senior Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and Trinity, writer Nick Hunt’s creative memoir of his stay in 2002 at the peace camp near to the naval base that’s home to Britain’s nuclear deterrent of three Vanguard-class submarines equipped with thermonuclear warheads, where he engaged in several direct actions against the base.

Not negative

an edited extract of an essay by Martin Barnes

Most photography deals in detail, giving the illusion of facts, and with that, an instant understanding. In contrast, these images convey in their evocative obscurity only a steadily gathering comprehension. Raymond-Barker creates a sequence of repeated motifs that gather force and meaning because of their claustrophobic insistence. Branches, foliage and sky dominate, interspersed with mountainous terrain, bodies of water, security fences and eerily empty buildings. Punctuating the procession of glimpsed black and white impressions are shocks of colour: burnt orange, butane blue and blood red. Together, these images appear like the mental flashbacks of a person who is attuned to the animal, seeking survival, hunted in the half-light. Crucial to the arresting aesthetic and meaning of Raymond-Barker’s photographs is his pairing of contemporary concerns and production with basic nineteenth-century analogue techniques, notably paper negatives, which hark back to the origins of photography. In the analogue age, the technical processes and language used to conceptualize photography inhabited a liminal and alchemical space. Unique and ‘latent’ images were formed in light-sensitive silver salts on the surface of metal, paper, glass, and later, plastics. Rituals of the darkroom allowed those images to conjure multiples in the form of positive prints emerging into the light.

Photographer by Oliver Raymond-Barker — Photographer: Oliver Raymond-Barker © 2018

In sidelining negatives to a functional and more subservient role in relation to the positive prints, the artistic and physical uniqueness of the negative remained unexploited. Yet, until they are printed, negatives contain significant untapped potential, like a charged battery waiting to be connected. Moreover, negatives are direct witnesses, actual chemical evidence, still, silent, traces and links to the time and place witnessed by the photographer and channelled onto a light-sensitive surface.

Photograph by Oliver Raymond-Barker 2018 — Photograph: Oliver Raymond-Barker © 2018

For the images in this book, Raymond-Barker created a ‘backpack obscura’, a modern portable version of the camera obscura used by artists since at least the sixteenth century. In his construction, a light-tight tent is pitched in the landscape and a 70mm lens and mirror extended outside it projecting an image of the surroundings on a white groundsheet on the floor. Once the composition is decided, in the darkness, he unrolls a sheet of resin-coated paper and places it on the floor to capture an exposure of some fifteen seconds. During the exposure, he is intent, sometimes ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ the paper. Such methods are conventionally reserved for darkroom printing from negatives, to block or increase light in selected areas, enhancing or reducing contrast and softening edges. The tree canopy above the tent is often the natural subject. The latent image is formed on the photographic paper and will not be visible until later when he returns to process it in his darkroom in Penryn in Cornwall, many miles away. At night, he may sleep in the tent where the image he has captured on the site also lies temporarily dormant.

Some of the black and white paper negatives Raymond-Barker makes remain unique images. Others become the basis for black and white positive ‘contact prints’. However, Raymond-Barker also achieves some tints by combining his negatives with colour photographic papers and processing. He embraces as authentic and integral to the process what might conventionally be seen as faults: water damage, scratches, and uneven development and exposures.

We may intuit from the uncanny appearance of these photographs that the location they depict is a landscape full of echoes; that it holds a deep history resounding with the ominous undercurrents of the present. It enhances the work to know that these Scottish landscapes are at a location likely to have been near the sites alighted on by evangelist monks from the early Celtic church. By stark contrast, it is also the area close to the present-day Clyde nuclear submarine base at Faslane bay. It is a place of bleak and sublime natural beauty in which helicopters and police boats are reminders of an awesome destructive power that lurks beneath the water. The protesters’ nearby peace camp consists of homemade structures, humbly defiant in the face of military might.

Lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney, describing a fearsome threat hiding in the woods and waters, seems apposite:

A few miles from here
a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
The water burns …

Raymond-Barker opts for a similarly poetic approach in his image making and storytelling. The charge of his pictures lingers like a half-remembered dream.

Trinity

an edited extract of an essay by Nick Hunt

He approaches from the south, a small man in a ragged robe. He comes carefully through these woods. There is no razor wire. Sunlight and shadows slide off him, spiderwebs break silently. The skeletons of dead leaves cling to his rough hair.

Behind him is the Irish Sea, cold and grey, with white-capped waves. On the rocky shoreline lies an abandoned coracle. Crabs have made their homes in it. Its willow ribs press on its skin. He will not need it now, for there is no return.

He traces the long line of the loch, stitching himself into the land. Around him is an interweave of oak and ash and pine. He picks his way through tangled thorn. There is no smooth road. Beyond the trees a wet wind blows over open water.

—

It rises up from deep below. Its shoulder breaks the surface. Water thunders from its flank. The daylight makes it gleam. For long months it has been submerged in darkness and in secrecy, nursing its destructiveness. It has seen the bottom of the world, the undersides of ice floes. Now its weight is buoyancy. It surfaces to claim the air.

Beneath what is visible is a vast shadow.

—

The call goes up just after dawn. I stumble from my tent. People are staggering around, pulling off their sleep-warm clothes. I spill coffee on myself. Someone blows a trumpet. The loch is hidden by the trees and I can’t see what the others have seen. There is something I’ve agreed to do in this eventuality but I do not know what it is. My brain is still stunned with sleep. Then I know again.

People are running to the loch. I follow without shoes. We leave the camp, cross the road and stand upon the lapping shore. There are no police around. There is no time to think. From the wet heap at my feet I select a thick black skin and drag my legs into it, heave it over my chest and arms, being flayed in reverse. It is clammy, tight and cold. Its smell is like an old tomb. We wade into icy water clad in neoprene.

He passes dwellings in the trees. Bivouacs and benders. Turf-roofed huts and tents. The camps of charcoal burners. Through the smoke he glimpses them, the gentle outcasts of these woods. Those who fled from villages. Those who are misshapen. He sees them gathered by their fires telling stories, singing songs. He blesses them as he walks by. They do not notice him.

Behind him are the gilded robes that he shed for plain sackcloth. His hand exchanged a crosier for a staff of blackthorn.

These woodlands end against the shore and he walks the pebble beach, the wind harsh upon his skin, following the undulating highlands with his eye. A seabird turns in the air. There is a stink of wrack. He could build a chapel here but something tells him to walk on, away from the long water with its access to the sea. He does not trust those depths. That shadow in the water.

—

The grey waves part on either side of its gliding topmost fin and join again behind, leaving no trace of its passing. It monstrous mass keeps pace below. Seabirds keep their distance. As it slides towards its home it scans the confines of this sound, reading depths and distances, alert to any obstacle. Its brutal, sleek intelligence seems evolved and not designed.

In its wake, a flying machine hangs and buzzes watchfully.

There were glaciers here once that tore strips from the land. Then the sea flooded in. It travels in their absence.

—

The first steps into coldness hurt, the next ones not so much. The water grips my legs, my thighs, my chest. I start to paddle. At first we cluster in a bunch but soon the swimmers scatter out. Spectators gather on the shore, shouting exhortations.

The low horizon of the hills goes up and down beyond the waves. Small waves slap against my mouth. I concentrate on breathing. The water feels very dense, made sluggish by the cold. This is not my element. The distance feels hopeless.

Far out, a noisy helicopter turns slow circles in the sky. It must be half a mile away. Below it I can see the shape of something great and dark.

He wanders enraptured, ruptured. The sunlight breaks upon him. On the shore he falls to his knees with the immensity and stares upon the awesome light that floods the shadows of the world. The god of love is everywhere. It is all a marvel. He closes his dazzled eyes and the world appears in negative, the black sky and the white trees, the incandescent veins of leaves, the bleached water opening to some great revelation. A vision flashes in his mind of blank structures on the shore, hard-edged and unknowable, working to some vast and terrible design. The revelation fills him but he cannot understand it. When he opens his eyes again, everything is as it is. The trees, the stones, the small waves are fixed in their positions.

—

It registers nothing of these things. Nothing penetrates. Its mind, if it has a mind, is as blank as a stone. It has almost reached its home. Its velocity starts to slow.

—

We doggy-paddle, thankful but defeated, back towards the land. As I focus on the shore I see a man stooping there. Water flows from his cupped hands. He gazes somehow through me. I think about solid ground, warm clothes, a welcome fire. When I look again he is no longer there.

Note from Nick Hunt inside Trinity, a book by Oliver Raymond-Barker. Book design by Loose Joints © 2019.

Find out more

Planetary Processing took the form of a six-month artist-led peer forum, funded by Artquest and hosted by The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

A fully designed mock-up of Oliver’s photobook, Trinity, was shortlisted in the 2019 Kassel Dummy Award. “This year we again invited all photographers worldwide to take part and to send us their unpublished photobook mock-up. In total, 362 photobooks from 37 countries from all over the world were sent in.” The book will travel around the world for the next six months for various exhibitions.

The book was designed by Loose Joints: “For this sprawling publication we used an interplay of papers, sizes and colours to re-structure Barker’s immersive images, which are made using a backpack-mounted camera obscura to make and print photographs in situ. The result is a swirling mixture of tones and sensations…”

In his essay, Martin Barnes says, “There is something powerfully primal about Oliver Raymond-Barker’s most recent photographs. Passages of flaring light, blurred boundaries and hard shadows mix with vaporous swirls and smudges. They give the impression of an eye-opening from slumber onto a world that is not yet fully formed, a realm that is intuited rather than understood … Raymond-Barker’s artistic practice is linked to the early experimental phase of photography, reclaiming the negative as an idea as much as an image that immediately conveys something familiar yet otherworldly. In this and earlier work he is primarily concerned with the intersection between history and landscape. His method is to embed himself in a specific location … by walking on a lone pilgrimage. He allows time and the alternative ‘camera-less’ photographic methods he employs to open up ideas and issues in the terrain, a working practice that he describes as ‘getting to the core of a place’. … His subject is the atmosphere of the place, its spiritual history across time, and an uneasy combination of awe in nature with the nascent threat of an unfathomable destructive force.”

Nick Hunt (a fellow ClimateCultures Member) adds in a note to his piece that “St. Modan, the son of an Irish chieftain, renounced his position as an abbot to live as a hermit in the 6th century. His relics are kept at Rosneath Church on the shore of Gare Loch.”

The full texts of Martin’s and Nick’s pieces, Not Negative and Trinity respectively, are available at Oliver’s website. Oliver’s previous post for ClimateCultures, Beyond Tongues: Into the Animist Language of Stone, explores his encounter — on a climb in a Welsh slate quarry — with a world beyond our normal modes of communication and a route away from modern separatist language.

In his essay, Martin Barnes refers to the Anglo Saxon poem Beowulf, the account of that hero’s encounters with the monster Grendel, who terrorised humanity from his lair beneath the shadowy mere. For a discussion on an alternative imagining of Grendel and Beowulf and the perilous meeting of worlds, see Bringing Our Monsters Back Home, my review of John Gardner’s 1971 novel, Grendel.

Oliver Raymond-Barker

An artist using photography in its broadest sense - analogue and digital process, natural materials and camera-less methods of image making - to explore our relationship to nature.