Environmental artist Linda Gordon responds to Anticipatory history with reflections on personal memories, intimations of change — ‘places and objects within them become part of our personal inner world’ — and a recent example of her ephemeral art.
580 words: estimated reading time 2.5 minutes
You can read my original review of Anticipatory historyhere. And you can download the book’s introductory essay from the publisher’s link on that page.
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Are we, as Anticipatory history suggests, largely not culturally equipped to respond thoughtfully to environmental change, or to imagine our own futures?
The trouble is that places and the objects within them (natural or manufactured) seep into our consciousness and become part of our personal inner world, complete with its private collection of received stories.
Looking at Mark’s reference from the book, “Many of these changes… will register as subtle (or not so subtle) alterations in familiar landscapes…”, I remembered that many years ago, when I was living in East Sussex, someone living a few miles inland from the Seven Sisters cliffs demolished a World War II pillbox (a concrete machine gun emplacement) that was sited in their garden, in order to make his garden more pleasant. This was followed by a vociferous outcry from local people, and at first, I thought: “It’s his garden, and he can do what he wants!” Then I realised those people probably saw his act as part of their world being destroyed, and therefore threatening their sense of identity.
Not far from where I live now, is one of my favourite trees. Nothing particularly outstanding about it — but it is special to me because I return to it again and again in times of trouble. If it keeled over tomorrow in a gale, and died — I would feel a few moments sadness, and then accept it as a natural part of life’s processes. But if someone deliberately and illegally killed it, say, in order to cram in an extra housing unit for pure profit, I should find it extremely difficult not to react with outrage!
History and the present moment
It is my view that people’s wellbeing and felt experience should be respected and fully taken into account during times of change, and when planning ahead. (The same goes for other lifeforms too). However, I don’t currently believe that looking to history and story-telling, in itself, will do very much to help us to cope with “changing landscapes, and to changes in the wildlife and plant populations they support”. I tend to think it is more a matter of paying close attention to the present moment.
I like how the authors are taking an exploratory approach to this whole question, rather than attempting to formulate any rigid conclusions, and definitely think it is important to keep living with the question, and allow the intelligence of life itself to inform and guide our actions.
The photo is of an ephemeral work I made in Bucks Valley Woods, North Devon, at the end of September, at the time when all the sweet chestnut fruits were falling. The title is Time to Let Go.
An environmental artist making temporary works in the landscape as a way of re-connecting with life’s endless processes and essential unity and sharing this with others. Read More
Creative conversations for the Anthropocene
Want to share your response to my original review or to Linda's thoughts? Send in a mini-post of your own - and why not complement it with a piece of your own work or someone else's, as Linda has done? Or use the Contact Form to suggest a topic for ClimateCultures to explore as a conversation.
Filmmaker James Murray-White reviews Fire & Ice, an exhibition bringing together three artists who complement each others’ practice in a way that points the audience ‘to deeper connections with the base elements that underpin planetary life and consciousness’.
1,350 words: estimated reading time 5.5 minutes
GroundWork Gallery is dedicated to artwork directly focused on the environment.Previous exhibitions have looked at birdlife, trees, forests and the art of wood, and stone; and their first exhibition featured a specially commissioned piece using River Ouse mud by Richard Long, showing alongside work from his friend Roger Ackling, themed on sunlight and gravity.
It’s an art space that inspires and draws in, and I for one have become a huge fan of GroundWork and its ethos since I encountered it during that first show. Curator Veronica Sekules has created a unique space that brings environment-focused art to us all, from the ground up.
Fire and Ice continues the elemental theme and brings together a mother and daughter with a potter, using still and moving images juxtaposed with pottery to explore how energy is embodied in ice and fire and clay: what it means to humanity, as a thing of beauty and as an object of power, sometimes destructive.
Gina Glover’s still images take the viewer on an arc from the landscapes of Iceland, Greenland and Spitsbergen, showing wonderful glaciers framed as aesthetic, to a series titled Poisoned Water Runs Deep looking at fracking in the United States. The glacial images are in colour, and have an ethereal beauty, as art that we would wish to hang on our walls; and the fracking images — black and white, stark, cropped closely — dominate a whole wall. The controversy over fracking is well known — and we in the UK are seeing it come upon us right now. I’m hearing shocking stories of police and private security guards attacking protestors who are trying to prevent the fracking equipment being set up on land in Lancashire. A friend of mine has been hospitalised after peacefully protesting but being violently pulled and dragged from the public roadway.
Glover’s work makes the damage to the land and atmosphere clear, but it is also the future damage that reveals itself: as one example, fracking taking place on North Dakota farmland, with cows grazing nearby — the animals, the grazed land, the water, and the soil and sky all being irreversibly polluted. This is necessarily political work, and needs to be seen. At an event on using climate change imagery recently, run by the NGO Climate Outreach at the London Reuters Office, I saw a provocative presentation by Canadian photographer; Robert van Waarden has taken this investigation one step further and photographed and interviewed those living on the fracking line as it criss-crosses the US. His images show the human face of this issue: Glover’s work emphasises the environmental issues which this chaotic rush for energy produces.
The experience of these contrasting images close by on the ground floor gallery is stark. They are interspersed with Jessica Raynor’s work: her images and footage present energy in its active form, as tantalising to humans; perhaps like ‘fool’s gold’, ever elusive and drawing us further into its secret. I loved the dynamic dissection in 365 Faces of the Sun: 365 images of the sun flickering before us and drawing us in to its magic and power.
Raynor’s work, she says, comes out of an inquisitive response, “reacting to nature through wonder.” I was also drawn in by her video work Conversion, which shows the burning of a bale of straw, looping backwards and forwards. It represents creation, blooming and death, and her work in total is reminiscent of the best of ideas shaped within the films of Stanley Kubrick
There’s a surprise on the way up to the upstairs gallery, where another of Rayner’s images hangs. The Wood-Pile is a graphite drawing of wood chips, used in the production of biomass. I love the reference to Robert Frost’s poem:
“I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labour of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay”
– The Wood-Pile, Robert Frost
Upstairs, Hilary Mayo’s pottery dominates the room. As the son of a potter, I’m biased towards this art form, and usually have to be restrained from my inner instinct to reach out and caress clay, as my youth was spent playing with wet and dry and fired clay, the tools and wheels and assorted craft involved in making. I love the way that slip drips down the vessels, marking a lighter territory upon the darker hues seen as landscape through Mayo’s physical vocabulary.
Mayo’s work was made after a trip to Iceland, and follows the contours and colours of that land, encrusted and dipped upon pottery forms, made as vessels. The power of energy bubbling up underneath that land, spewing out in geyser form, spills out onto Mayo’s clay, and represents force and passion, light and dark entwined. Her large-scale piece, Deliquesce sits in the window of the ground floor gallery — or more accurately, squats, like a hewn tree root, powerful and watchful.
Mayo cites an important quote by Walter Benjamin as her influence: “History lies before the eyes of the observer as a petrified, primordial landscape.”
Also upstairs, facing Hilary Mayo’s pottery, Gina Glover shows Melt, a series of 12 circular aerial images of the Greenland ice sheet. GPS references for each image are shown on each. Glover has made an almost perfect artistic record here of the fact of glacial melt, a crucial climatological indicator. Climatologists estimate that were all of this ice to melt, the world’s oceans would rise by approximately 23 feet. Groundworks Gallery, Kings Lynn, and most of East Anglia up to where I write this in Cambridge — the flat fens — would be under water.
The three artists complement each others’ practice within their unique disciplines, and have been brought together in Fire & Ice in a way that points an audience beyond the simple constraints of human understanding to deeper connections with the base elements that underpin planetary life and consciousness. These artworks ridicule human obsessions with energy creation, and connect us to the beauty and deeper power of the raw elements of this planet.
Note: James is an Artist-Associate at GroundWork Gallery. He filmed an event there on 28th October — facilitated by environmentalist Tom Burke OBE — at which the three artists gave presentations about their work. The film will be available on the GroundWork Gallery website soon — and you can see a promotional film James made for the gallery.
Find out more
You can see more of the exhibition Fire and Ice exhibition – which runs until 16th December 2017 – and the work of GroundWork Gallery at their website. GroundWork has recently won the highly prestigious Nick Reeves Award for Art & Environment, awarded by the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management’s Arts and Environment Network.
A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit Read More
Questioning power? Space for creative thinking...
'A thing of beauty and an object of power' is how James refers to the embodiment of energy in ice and fire and clay on show here, and our connections through art to planet, culture to nature. How might human and more-than-human powers play out for you in a creative response to our energy concerns?
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Environmental artist Linda Gordon responds to Anticipatory history with reflections on personal memories, intimations of change — ‘places and objects within them become part of our personal inner world’ — and a recent example of her ephemeral art. 
‘Time to Let Go’ Photograph: Linda Gordon © 2017 www.lindagordon.org.uk
‘Melted World’
‘Poisoned Water Runs Deep’
‘365 Faces of the Sun’
‘The Wood-Pile’
‘MEANDER I’ (hand built stoneware)
‘Volcanic Black Container’ (stacking set)
