The Post-industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice: Material Memory 1443899372, 9781443899376

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The Post-Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice

The Post-Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice:

Material Memory

Edited by

Gwen Heeney

The Post-Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice: Material Memory Edited by Gwen Heeney This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Gwen Heeney and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9937-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9937-6

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ................................................................................................................................................ vii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................................. xi Introduction .......................................................................................................................................................... xiii Gwen Heeney Chapter One ............................................................................................................................................................. 1 Remembering the Gorbals: Public Art and Memory in the Post-Industrial Landscape Venda Louise Pollock Chapter Two .......................................................................................................................................................... 17 Creative Engagements with the Past, Aesthetics and Matter in Ruined Space Tim Edensor Chapter Three ........................................................................................................................................................ 27 After Coal: Reclamation and Erasure in the Great North Coalfield Ian Thompson Chapter Four .......................................................................................................................................................... 37 Post-Post-Industrial: Some Thoughts on Futureland, Photography and Landscape John Kippin Chapter Five .......................................................................................................................................................... 45 Conjuring the Sonic Ghosts of Industrial and Post-Industrial Spaces Danny Bright. Chapter Six ............................................................................................................................................................ 53 Curating in the Post-Industrial Landscape—Case Study: Ambika P3 Michael Mazière Chapter Seven........................................................................................................................................................ 63 U(nu)sed and Abused: Social and Political Potentiality—Material, Manufacture and Abandoned Sites Andrew Livingstone Chapter Eight ......................................................................................................................................................... 67 Risk, Edges and Making with Clay Megan Randall Chapter Nine.......................................................................................................................................................... 75 The Creative Potential of the Post-Industrial Landscape David Jones Chapter Ten ........................................................................................................................................................... 83 Blind Landings—Material Memory Jane and Louise Wilson Chapter Eleven ...................................................................................................................................................... 93 Wastelands and Weeds: Spontaneous Vegetation and the Experience of Place in Contemporary Berlin Rowland Byass Chapter Twelve ................................................................................................................................................... 101 Buddleias and Bithooras Andrew Burton

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Contents

Chapter Thirteen .................................................................................................................................................. 111 Marl Hole Neil Brownsword Chapter Fourteen ................................................................................................................................................. 123 Material Matters: Landscape is Everything—Material, the Anthropocene and the Post-Industrial Landscape Nigel Morgan Chapter Fifteen .................................................................................................................................................... 129 Encounters with a Colliery Landscape Michele Allen Chapter Sixteen ................................................................................................................................................... 135 Notes on Material Memory in Post-Industrial Landscapes—Holding on, by letting go: Topographies of the Obsolete Anne Helen Mydland Chapter Seventeen ............................................................................................................................................... 145 Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up Chloë Brown Chapter Eighteen ................................................................................................................................................. 149 Material Memory: Fumbling in the Debris Jeremy Welsh Chapter Nineteen ................................................................................................................................................. 157 Shadow, Light and Reflectivity: Material and Metaphor in the Post-Industrial Landscape Gwen Heeney Contributors ........................................................................................................................................................ 165 Index .................................................................................................................................................................... 169

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I.1 Gwen Heeney, Mythical Beast, Garden Festival Wales, Ebbw Vale, 1992, carved and extruded brick. Image: Gwen Heeney. I.2 Desolate valley site before the garden festival, Ebbw Vale 1998. Image: Gwen Heeney. I.3 Alberto Duman, Voto, Madeley Brick Factory interior, Ironbridge Gorge Museum, 1999, bricks and candles I.4 Jonathan Park, Light Installation, Landschaftspark Duisburg, Germany, 1991, architect Peter Latz. Image: Horst and Daniel Zielske. I.5 Jane and Louise Wilson, The Toxic Camera, 2012. Image: Jane and Louise Wilson. 1.1 Heisenberg: Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz. Oatlands Needs Pakora, 1999. Image courtesy of Matt Baker. 1.2 Heisenberg: Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz. Oatlands Needs Pakora (plaque), 1999. Image courtesy of Matt Baker. 1.3 Heisenberg: Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz, Gatekeeper, 2002. Image: Les Hill. 1.4 Heisenberg: Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz. The Artworks Masterplan, 2000. Image courtesy of Matt Baker. 1.5 Calum Stirling, The Wanderer, 2003. Image courtesy of Matt Baker. 1.6 Daphne Wright, Home Ornaments, 2002–2005. Image courtesy of Matt Baker. 1.7 Kenny Hunter, Untitled (Girl with a Rucksack), 2004. Image: Les Hill. 1.8 Liz Peden, Gorbals Boys, 2008. 2.1 Canalside 2.2 Textures 2.3 Desk 2.4 Letters 2.5 Pipes 2.6 Concrete floor 2.7 Paint and ferns 3.1 Colliery Guardian map showing mines in Northumberland in 1951 3.2 Colliery Guardian map showing mines in Co Durham in 1951 3.3 Ian Thompson, Rubble Mound, Mainsforth Colliery, Ferryhill, County Durham, 2015. 3.4 Ian Thompson, East Shore Village, Seaham, formerly Vane Tempest colliery. 2015. 3.5 Ian Thompson, Winding wheel monument, Ryton, Tyne and Wear, 2015. 3.6 Ian Thompson, Cage mining memorial, Easington, County Durham, 2015. 4.1 John Kippin, Dunstan coal – Staithes. 4.2 John Kippin, Fort George 4.3 John Kippin, Hidden 4.4 John Kippin, Tannery 4.5 John Kippin, Tuxedo Baltic 4.6 John Kippin, University Sunderland 4.7 John Kippin, Muslim Prayer Windermere 5.1 Inside an underground cable tunnel at MAGNA, Rotherham. Image courtesy of the author. 5.2 The steel trumpet where the sound emerges from underground, part of the Subterranean Sound Tunnel installation at MAGNA, Rotherham. Image courtesy of the author. 5.3 Graffiti inside the MAGNA building. Image courtesy of the author. 5.4 An abandoned maintenance shed at Tinsley Marshalling Yard, South Yorkshire. Image courtesy of the author. 5.5 The control panel for Subterranean Sound Tunnel. Image courtesy of the author. 5.6 A disused chalk quarry, West Sussex. Image courtesy of the author. 5.7 Chalk Pit performance interruption, WTF Arts Festival, Falmer, East Sussex. Photo by Kassia Zermon. Image courtesy of the author. 6.1 Launch of Ambika P3. Image and Copyright Ambika P3 University of Westminster. 6.2 Concrete Hall. Image and CopyrightUniversity of Westminster Archive. 6.3 Concrete in the Oceans. Image and Copyright, University of Westminster Archive. 6.4 Cable Structures. Image and Copyright University of Westminster Archive. 6.5 Cable Structures. Image and Copyright University of Westminster Archive. 6.6 From Floor to Sky 2010 . Copyright Ambika P3 and artists. Image: Michael Mazière. 6.7 David Hall, End Piece… 2012. Copyright Ambika P3 and David Hall. Image: Michael Mazière. 7.1 Andrew Livingstone, Surfeit 621, 2011, clay/brick, video projection and drawing. Image: Andrew Livingstone. 7.2 Andrew Livingstone, Surfeit 621 Figure, 2011. Image: Andrew Livingstone. 8.1 Entropy, 2009. Image: Megan Randall. 8.2 Megan Randall, Fuck the Police, 2012. Image: Megan Randall.

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List of Illustrations

8.3 Megan Randall, Fuck the Police graffiti, 2012. Image: Megan Randall. 8.4 Megan Randall, Entropy window, 2009. Image: Megan Randall. 8.5 Megan Randall, Entropy railway siding, 2009. Image: Megan Randall. 9.1 David Jones, Grenzerfahrung, Installation, mixed-media, Römhild, 2011. Image copyright David Jones. 9.2 The kiln-like crematoria in Buchenwald, and cast iron door furniture designed by Topf und Söhne. Image copyright David Jones. 9.3 Urns for ashes to be resold to the Jews. Image copyright David Jones. 9.4 David Jones, Grenzerfahrung (detail) urn and clay wedding rings. Image copyright David Jones. 9.5 David Jones, Grenzerfahrung (detail) Zusammenstücke, black clay. Image copyright David Jones. 9.6 David Jones, Grenzerfahrung (detail) Zusammenstücke, porcelain. Image copyright David Jones. 9.7 Clay rings left at Buchenwald. Image copyright David Jones. 10.1 Jane and Louise Wilson, Biville, Sealander, 2006, c-type print on aluminium with diasec. 180x180cms. 10.2 Digital pigment print of a production photograph from the Ealing Film Studios, from the Collection of the Stanley Kubrick Archive LCC London. 10.3 Installation view Tempo Suspenso, Jane and Louise Wilson CGAC, 2010; Measures Obsolescere, Bronze and enamel 198cm, 2010; Props And Dressing, 2010; four 31x24cm, 30x25cm, 31x24.5cm and 31x 25cm, black and white digital pigment prints Jane and Louise Wilson (stills from the Ealing Film Studios from the Collection of the Stanley Kubrick Archive, LCC London) Courtesy of Helga de Alvear Foundation, Caceres, Spain. 10.4 Still of Pripyat, Kiev National Film Archive, Ukraine 10.5 Still of Reactor no. 4, Chernobyl, 1986, Kiev National Archive, Ukraine 10.6 Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad, Nature Abhors A Vacuum IV, 2010, 180x180cms, c-type print on aluminium behind diasec. 10.7 Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad, Nature Abhors A Vacuum VI, 2010, 180x180cms c-type print on aluminium behind diasec,. 10.8 Jane and Louise Wilson, Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 1 (H-Bomb Testing Facility, Orford Ness), 2012. 10.9 Jane and Louise Wilson, Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 4 (H-Bomb Testing Facility, Orford Ness), 2012. 10.10 Jane and Louise Wilson, The Toxic Camera, 2012, Installation view, HD Film Installation dur. 21 minutes. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Commissioned by FLAMIN Productions. Co-produced by Forma Arts and Media Ltd with funding from Arts Council England. 11.1 Dry grassland perennials growing alongside railway lines in Berlin, August 2014. Image: Rowland Byass. 11.2 Tansy (Tannacetum vulgare), an aromatic weed of dry wasteground native to temperate Europe and Asia, growing alongside the path leading to Berghain, August 2015. Image: Rowland Byass. 11.3 Berghain, the nightclub housed in a former power station, viewed from the remnant of waste land to the south of the building. Weeds here include wild rocket (Diplotaxis tenuifolia). Now occupied by retail and distribution warehouses, the land between Berghain and the railway corridor to the south was formerly all waste land. August 2015. Image: Rowland Byass. 12.1 Andrew Burton, Brownfield or Buddleia Vale? 2014, Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent. Image: Glen Stoker 12.2 & 12.3 Andrew Burton, Brownfield or Buddleia Vale? (details) 2014, Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent. Image: Andrew Burton 12.4 Andrew Burton, Brownfield or Buddleia Vale? (detail), 2014. Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent. Image: Andrew Burton 12.5 Making Bithooras – Bithooras par haath pa Chaap, National Craft Museum, New Delhi, 2011. Andrew Burton, Panna Devi, Keso, Shiv Devi, Lakshmi, Bhagmali, Sharman, Vidya, Pushpa. Image: Andrew Burton 12.6 “Gobar mound”, Rajasthan, India, 2008. Image: Andrew Burton 12.7 Bithooras, Mandi Village, New Delhi, India, 2011. Image: Andrew Burton 12.8 Bithooras, near Gurgaon 2011. Image: Andrew Burton 12.9 Bithooras, near Gurgaon, 2011. Image: Andrew Burton 12.10 & 12.11 Making Bithooras – Bithooras par haath pa Chaap. National Craft Museum, New Delhi, 2011. Andrew Burton, Panna Devi, Keso, Shiv Devi, Lakshmi, Bhagmali, Sharman, Vidya, Pushpa (in progress). Image: Andrew Burton 12.12. Bithoora, near Gurgaon, 2011. Image: Andrew Burton 13.1 Surface outcrops of haematitic clays, Bradwell Wood, North Staffordshire. Image: Neil Brownsword 13.2 Former site of the Royal Doulton factory, Nile Street, Burslem, which closed in 2005 and was demolished in 2008. Image: Neil Brownsword 13.3 Chatterly Quarry, Bradwell Wood, North Staffordshire. Image: Neil Brownsword 13.4 Ibstock Brick’s Gorsty Quarry, Knutton, Newcastle-u-Lyme. Image: Johnny Magee 13.5 Etruria Marl, Ibstock Brick’s Gorsty Quarry, Knutton, Newcastle-u-Lyme. Image: Johnny Magee 13.6 Neil Brownsword, Face, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 13.7 Neil Brownsword, Track, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 13.8 Neil Brownsword, Burr, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 13.9 Alexandra Engelfriet, Slope, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 13.10 Alexandra Englefriet, Tools. Image: Johnny Magee 13.11 Torbjørn Kvasbø, Sketch, 2009 Image: Johnny Magee

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13.12 Torbjørn Kvasbø, Marl Hole No. 1, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 13.13 Pekka Paikkari, Clay Words, Marking Place with Meaning, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 13.14 Pekka Paikkari, Clay Words, Marking Place with Meaning, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 13.15 Johnny Magee, Marl Hole, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 13.16 Johnny Magee, Marl Hole, 2009. Image: Johnny Magee 14.1 Nigel Morgan, Essence, Esse is being and our being is reflected in the material landscape. Material Memory Exhibition, Newcastle University, 2014. Image: Nigel Morgan. 14.2 Nigel Morgan, Essence details, 2014. Inage: Nigel Morgan. 14.3 Nigel Morgan, Essence detail, 2014. Image: Nigel Morgan. 14.4 Nigel Morgan, Essence details, 2014. image: Nigel Morgan. 15.1 Michele Allen, Edge Water. Image: Michele Allen. 15.2 Michele Allen, Drain. Image: Michele Allen. 15.3 Michele Allen, Shining stream. Image: Michele Allen. 15.4 Michele Allen, Hive. Image: Michele Allen. 16.1 Spode Works. Image: AH Mydland 16.2 Spode Works, window view. Image: AH Mydland 16.3 Yeoungbin Lee, Office, 2012. Image: Bjarte Bjørkum 16.4 KELLY/MARHAUG, Chapter 2: Holding on by letting go, stills from performance. Image: Bjarte Bjørkum. 16.5: Jeremy Welsh, Stills from Tracings, 2013. Image: Jeremy Welsh. 16.6 Anne Helen Mydland, Spode Works: The Art Gallery - Present Terrain, no. 32, 2016. Image: Bjarte Bjørkum 16.7 Toril Redalen, Dust; Place and Skill. Image: Bjarte Bjørkum 16.8 Toril Redalen, Dust; Place and Skill. Image: Bjarte Bjørkum 17.1 Chloë Brown, Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up), 2013. 17.2 Chloë Brown, Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up), Installations in the Managing Director’s Office, Spode, Stoke-on-Trent, 2013. 17.3 Chloë Brown, Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up) Pete and Sue Dancing, 2013. 18.1 Jeremy Welsh, Tracings, 2013. Installation with video and 35 mm slide projection in the exhibition This Must Be The Place (Pick Me Up and Turn Me Round) at KINOKINO Centre for Art & Film, Sandnes, Norway. Image: Jeremy Welsh. 18.2 Jeremy Welsh, From the photo project Mazine, 2010. Image: Jeremy Welsh. 18.3 Photograph from Surnadal Billag, a former bus station now being converted to an art space in Surnadal, Norway. Image: Jeremy Welsh. 18.4 Covent Garden, London. Image: Jeremy Welsh. 18.5 An abandoned timber export facility at Utne, Hardanger, Norway. Images: Jeremy Welsh. 18.6 Forest trail in Hardanger and abandoned appliances in the street, Bergen. Images: Jeremy Welsh. 18.7 From an ongoing series of images documenting abandoned shopping carts. Image: Jeremy Welsh. 18.8 Derelict office building, Bergen. Image: Jeremy Welsh. 18.9 From the “Topographies of The Obsolete” workshop at The Spode Works, Stoke-on-Trent. Images: Jeremy Welsh. 19.1 Gwen Heeney, Shadow Stack Photographic series 2011. Image: Gwen Heeney. 19.2 Gwen Heeney, Light Reflections Original photographs in the Archie Bray Foundation 2007. Image: Gwen Heeney. 19.3 Gwen Heeney, Shadow Stack Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts 2007 /2011. Images: Gwen Heeney. 19.4 Gwen Heeney, Light Stack Latvia 2013. Image: Gwen Heeney. 19.5 Discarded bricks, Lode brick factory, Latvia. Image: Gwen Heeney. 19.6–19.11 Gwen Heeney, Development of cutting box from reflections in water on the brick fragments taken into the computer using SketchUp. Images: Gwen Heeney. 19.12 and 19.13 Gwen Heeney, Development of sculpture Reflections, Sønderborg, Denmark. Images: Gwen Heeney. 19.14 Gwen Heeney, Light Entombed, Topographies of the Obsolete Vociferous Void Exhibition, British Ceramics Biennial, Spode factory, UK. 2013. Image: Gwen Heeney.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would especially like to thank Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts Practice and the Postgraduate Research Fund for their support with the conference and publication and for the continued support of my two supervisors, Andrew Burton and Ian Thompson.

INTRODUCTION GWEN HEENEY

This publication grew out of the conference, exhibition and student-led symposium Material Memory: The Post Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice that I organized in 2014 as a PhD researcher in the Fine Art Department at Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne in the UK.1 The events were the university’s contribution to the much larger international research project Topographies of the Obsolete,2 initiated by the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway and involving a number of collaborating institutions, which included the Fine Art Department at Newcastle University.3 Topographies of the Obsolete included a number of residencies which took place in the abandoned Spode ceramic factory buildings in Stoke-on-Trent and an exhibition, Topographies of the Obsolete, Vociferous Void4 which was part of the 2013 British Ceramics Biennial, also staged within the derelict buildings of the Spode factory. The research project and subsequent exhibitions explored themes associated with site and the associated histories of post-industry. Its main strands of investigation included: “The Socio-Economic Post Industrial Landscape as site, The Globalized Landscape of Ceramics, The Human Topography of Post-Industry, The Topography of Objects/Archives and the Artist/Archaeologist and The Topography of the Contemporary Ruin”. (Mydland and Brownsword 2013, 2). Topographies of the Obsolete is unique in that it brought together a group of international, multi-disciplinary artists with very diverse creative approaches, but with one focus: to respond to and make work in specific post-industrial sites, in this case the disused Spode ceramic factory in Stoke-on-Trent. It also opened up the arena for critical debate and it was in this climate of intense research and exploration that I began to organize the conference, symposium and exhibition at Newcastle University. The key focus of this publication is to further debate the creative potential of material memory and its relationship to the post-industrial landscape as a site for creative practice which began in the conference. It brings together a broad range of disciplines which includes contemporary visual artists, art historians, cultural geographers, landscape architects, musicians and curators and provokes discussion through a number of different perspectives on themes such as transformation, loss, erosion, absence, collective memory and regeneration.

Material Memory My own interest in material memory and the post-industrial landscape as site for creative practice had started many years ago when in 1992 I developed the 30-metre long Mythical Beast created from 30,000 bricks for the Garden Festival Wales, Ebbw Vale, in an abandoned South Wales Valley, once home to the Welsh Steel Industry. The bricks were cut and carved to respond to the light and shadow in the valley and also communicated both a sense of loss and regeneration. This year, 2016, as testament to the enduring effect regeneration can have on post-industrial landscapes, the Living Valley’s team at Ebbw Vale on the site of the original Garden Festival, which houses the Mythical Beast, entered their project Furnace to Flowers into the Grow Wild competition to work with Kew Gardens and BIG Lottery. The project won the competition to develop a flagship site in Wales that showcases native plants and demonstrates how they benefit people as well as wildlife. As part of this the Mythical Beast will also be restored and planted with wild flowers. Although initially the home of the Garden Festival Wales event, the regeneration of the Ebbw Vale site differs greatly from some of the more exuberant post-industrial sites globally, especially in Germany, where in 2010 the “musealization” of the German Ruhr valley, with its extinct mining and steel industries took on a much grander approach to regeneration: A gigantic modern cathedral of industry in the style of new objectivity, its form is fully functional and modern. Today, the former “forbidden city” of industry bursts with public life, arts performances, and industrial heritage tours. (Barndt 2010, 10)

1

The events were funded by a grant from the Postgraduate Research Fund and NICAP (Newcastle Institute for Creative Arts Practice). 2 http://topographies.khib.no/ 3 Other collaborating institutions included: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, The Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel Germany, Bucks New University UK, Nottingham Trent UK, Sheffield Hallam UK, ENSA Limoges and Geneva University of Art and Design 4 http://topographies.khib.no/media/1936629/vociferous void.pdf

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Introduction

Figure I.1 Gwen Heeney, Mythical Beast, Garden Festival Wales, Ebbw Vale, 1992 carved and extruded brick. Image Gwen Heeney.

Figure I.2 Desolate valley site before the garden festival, Ebbw Vale 1989. Image Gwen Heeney.

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In 1999 I had also organized a major conference and symposium, Creating the Yellow Brick Road, the core of which took place in the derelict Madeley brick factory in the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, UK. Here 12 international artists used brick to create artworks which responded to the interior and exterior spaces within the environs of the disused brick factory site. The Italian artist Alberto Duman created Voto, a temporary site-specific installation verging on performance located in what was once one of the oldest brick factories in the country, now a heritage site. “Sited in the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, it employs bricks and candles to create a kind of time based ritual both to celebrate and mourn a bygone era.” (Farrell and Heeney 2000, 96)

Figure I.3 Alberto Duman, Voto, Madeley Brick Factory interior, Ironbridge Gorge Museum, 1999, bricks and candles.

In order to put this publication into a wider context I thought it was valuable to get an archaeologist’s point of view on memory and the post-industrial landscape, as this is very topical within current archaeology research, especially the subject of heritage sites. The archaeologist Hilary Orange states in her book Reanimating Industrial Spaces, Conducting Memory Work in Post-Industrial Societies, that “The term memory covers a number of interrelated concepts spanning the individual, the social (or the collective) and the material” and that “the material properties of objects, landscapes, books or indeed monuments or buildings form examples of ‘Material Memory’.” (Orange 2015 16.) She explores cross-disciplinary approaches towards memory work and presents a range of papers from researchers working in archaeology, the arts, anthropology and geography. One of the main themes running through her book is the importance of heritage sites and preserving memory through the regeneration of heritage sites as museums. She talks about the language of memory: Memory in relation to industrial spaces can be framed as a cognitive process which is informed by interaction with other individuals, authorized and popular forms of social memory, and the thingness of memory: the memory props and materials and environments of industrial spaces can act as change agents within that dynamic process (Orange 2015, 16 17).

Case studies explore community engagement and the connection between archaeology and memory. Paul Belfords discusses heritage sites such as Blists Hill in Shropshire and how repurposing of sites for the public as museums can encourage “a hermetically-sealed view of the world” (Orange 2010, 35) and Peter Oakley “questions the possibility of “contrived dereliction” bestowed upon heritage sites (Orange 2015, 49). Kerstin Barndt, affiliated faculty member in the museum studies programme at the University of Michigan, states that

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Introduction As deindustrialization has transformed entire industries and landscapes, the post war industrial past has become an object of historical contemplation. As such, it has entered museum and exhibition culture, which in turn has begun to powerfully shape our sense of (post) industrial time. (Barndt 2010, 6)

In “Layers of Time: Industrial Ruins and Exhibitionary Temporalities”, Barndt explores post-1989 exhibition culture and states that “an essential part of heritage production is the conversion of industrial land and architecture into museums”, giving, in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s words, “dying economies and dead sites a second life as exhibitions of themselves” (Barndt 2010, 4) One major site of regeneration is the heritage park Landschaftpark Duisburg Nord in the Ruhr District, Germany, created in 1991 by the architect Peter Latz, covering a vast area of postindustrial landscape that once belonged to the German Democratic Republic. The site of the disused ironworks has been aesthetically turned into a site of memory to past industrialization. Here “flowering trees interweave with the bizarre framework of the blast furnaces and the windheaters to a fantastic image. So, by degrees, a fresh history and a fresh understanding of the contaminated site and of the landscape art have been developing”.5 One of these artworks on the site of the former blast furnace is the enormous neon light installation by the British light artist Jonathan Park.6

Figure I.4 Jonathan Park, Light Installation, Landschaftspark Duisburg, Germany, 1991, architect Peter Latz. Image Horst and Daniel Zielske.

Historically, the ruin and its association with material memory has always been an important subject for artistic interpretation. In 2014, the writer and critic Brian Dillon curated a major exhibition at Tate Britain, Ruin Lust. 7 Included in the exhibition was the work of Jane and Louise Wilson (keynote speakers at the Material Memory conference) who exhibited their 2006 photographs of the Nazis’ defensive Atlantic Wall. Ruin Lust explored historical and contemporary perspectives of the ruin and offered “a guide to the mournful, thrilling, comic and perverse uses of ruins in art from the seventeenth century to the present day”. Other works included in the exhibition were historical works by Turner and Constable, Graham Sutherland’s Devastation series 1940–1, which depicts the aftermath of the Blitz and Dean’s nostalgic film installation Kodak 2006 exploring the ruin of the image, as the technology of 16 mm film becomes obsolescent. The Tate states that this exhibition “explores ruination through both the slow picturesque decay and abrupt apocalypse” and shows the way artists “view ruins as zones of pure potential, where the world must be rebuilt or reimagined”. The Tate exhibition differed from the approach adopted by the Topographies of the Obsolete, Vociferous Void exhibition at the Ceramic Biennial, Spode Factory, Stoke-on-Trent in 2013, curated by Mydland and Brownsword. Here artists worked on various sites around the derelict factory and then exhibited the work on site making the connection to the post-industrial site, memory, and making. This could be seen as having links to Early Detroit Techno music of the 70s and early 80s which was particular to industrial Detroit. Here in a similar way to the Topographies project, artists and musicians inhabited the vast derelict factory spaces left by defunct industry. They created music using influence from industrial memories of “the vibrations of the drill, the clashes of steel upon steel, the beat of metal being forged and their reverberations through the cavernous factories and assembly halls” (Hamidi 2014, 7). Emily Eliza Scott in her pre-doctoral thesis at the University of California, Los Angeles, Wasteland Aesthetics: Art and the Postindustrial Landscape, 1962–72, argues that the emergence of the post-industrial “was evident in the 5

http://www.landezine.com/index.php/2011/08/post industrial landscape architecture/ http://en.landschaftspark.de/the park/light installation/light design 7 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats on/tate britain/exhibition/ruin lust 6

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production of new landscapes, new conceptions of landscape, and new crises of relation with land, to which artists shared an aesthetic response.” She contextualizes artworks created by these artists8 in relation to a precise sociohistorical moment, “namely the shift from industrial to post-industrial economies in the West, as well as longstanding landscape aesthetic traditions (e.g. the picturesque, the American technological sublime)”.

Chapters in this publication This publication consists of 19 chapters which examine diverse attitudes to Material Memory in the post-industrial landscape. I have not attempted to divide the publication into definite sections but chapters are grouped together to give an insight into connecting themes and there is more a sense of interweaving of ideas and debate. In Chapter 1, the art historian Dr Venda Pollock ponders the relationship between memory and the post-industrial landscape in the context of regeneration and reveals the complex dialogues between individual and collective or social memories and site and the contentiousness of inscribing memory into places. She gives some excellent new insights into the role of public art in post-industrial, often diasporic, communities such as the Gorbals in Scotland and discusses how “artists can intervene to permeate the past into narrative identities”. Focusing on some important case studies, notably the artists Heisenberg and Daphne Wright, whose artwork Home Ornaments “memorialized, probed and generated community itself”, she highlights the importance of artworks “which accept and reflect the complexity of community within regeneration.” In Chapter 2 the cultural geographer Dr Tim Edensor, keynote speaker at the conference, discusses the industrial ruin and its role as a sensory realm with its own chaotic aesthetic that contrasts with the deodorized “blandscapes” of the well-ordered city. He explores the sense of absence that pervades the ruin, proposing that bodies are more apparent by their absence and how discarded tools and machinery implicate loss of knowledge and skills. Photography has an important place in recording memory and this is evident in Chapters 3 and 4 by Ian Thompson and John Kippin. Ian Thompson’s research is unusual in that he comes from the point of view of a landscape architect turned photographer. He explores the erasure of mining heritage from the everyday landscape, and considers the way in which these altered landscapes have been received by local communities. He discusses a section of sites from across the Great Northern Coalfield, and compares a range of outcomes and conditions. He investigates why some sites have been transformed and the past celebrated while others have been abandoned or all traces of industry removed. He questions what information these sites hold about the consequences of an industry coming to an end. What landscape aesthetics have been in play and how did these mesh with the political and economic imperatives driving landscape change? John Kippin discusses his photography in Chapter 4, which pays allegiance to the traditions of pictorial landscape whilst reflecting upon issues within contemporary culture, politics and representation. He believes that art has an important function in engaging the world culturally and politically and his photography, like Thompson’s, is particularly focused on the North East. He looks at the issue of the North being the first to industrialize, and the first to de-industrialize, creating a broken environmental and economic legacy evidenced by deserted shipyards, coal pits and factories. He discusses his exhibition Futureland Now, a major touring UK show that did much to establish the currency of the post-industrial landscape as well as foregrounding photographic arts practice in a new light. In Chapter 5 the musician Danny Bright explores the role of contemporary sound/music composition and performance practice in the creative interrogation of ruined, disused, derelict, and repurposed sites of the postindustrial landscape and its social, cultural and sonic legacies. He discusses the potential of a “sonic ghosting” practice as a means to deliberately conjure apparitions, echoes and secondary sonic “images”, making them foreground and offer a sonic space in between present, past and future. The chapter draws on examples of recent work that engages with sites of the South Yorkshire steel industry and Sussex chalk industry to identify how a “sonic ghosting” practice can manifest itself, and the questions it raises about material memory, sonic legacy and the post-industrial landscape as site/stimulus for creative practice. Michael Mazière discusses his role as director of Ambika P3, the University of Westminster’s experimental space for international contemporary art and architecture, in Chapter 6. In Ambika P3, which was built in the 1960s as a concrete testing facility and converted in 2007, Mazière examines how large-scale post-industrial spaces can be activated by curatorial practices dealing with moving image practices. Through a number of case studies he explores how curatorial practice for film and video work can deploy the full spatial and architectural scope of post-industrial spaces within its commissioning processes. He looks at the space through a number of contexts: cultural, artistic and curatorial, production and exhibition, design and co-production, interpretation and selection. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 explore the role of ceramic installation as a political tool. Both Andrew Livingstone and Megan Randall discuss their creative practice through projects embedded within the post-industrial landscape. They investigate the value of site (abandoned) as a means for artistic production with reference to “material” and “manufacture” and explore how these create the potential for socially and politically engendered practice. In Chapter 9, David Jones examines the way ceramic installation can work as a collaborative project with the public, in this case 8

One such artist was Robert Smithson whose fascination with New Jersey’s urban decay and industrial areas led him to question the dynamic relationship between human beings and the spaces they inhabit. In his art, Smithson took these dilapidated industrial sites and used organic materials to create massive, archetypal sculptures that were infused with historical meaning, such as spirals, mounds, and circles. See: http://museumnetwork.com/robert smithson and the 1970s land art movement/ (accessed 31 July 2016)

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to respond to the destruction of humanity as experienced in the death camps of Buchenwald, Germany. Through his installation Grenzerfahrung made at the Römhild International Ceramics Symposium, Germany and exhibited in the unoccupied factory building belonging to the furnace manufacturer ELIOG in Römhild, he addresses the industrialized aspects of the death camps and how this gives a new significance to the post-industrial landscape. In Chapter 10 the artists Jane and Louise Wilson discuss their photography and film with particular focus on the petrified ruin of Pripyat. They discuss the role of photography in exploring the aftermath of man-made disasters and how the use of Kubrick’s yardstick can become a forensic and literal measure for the viewer. They make comparisons with their own photography as a means of recording transformation and that of the Ukrainian film maker, Vladimir Shevchenko, who captured the effect of radiation on film for the first time.

Fig I.5 Jane and Louise Wilson, The Toxic Camera, image 2012

A group of artists have used the land itself to explore memory, post-industrial heritage, politics and social and economic issues. In Chapter 11 the landscape architect Rowland Byass discusses the post-industrial urban landscape of Berlin, seeing it as unfinished and open ended, allowing wasteland sites to offer niches for natural and human ecologies and how this landscape has helped to forge contemporary Berlin’s distinctive sense of place against its tumultuous twentieth-century history of war, division, destruction and isolation. The sculptor Andrew Burton looks at two very different landscapes in Chapter 12. He explores his Brownfields residency at the Airspace Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent where natural, industrial and architectural fragments strewn around a typical brownfield site in the middle of the city are reclaimed and reconstructed into sculptures. He asks the question whether the “waste” spaces of towns are really wasted at all and what they can reveal about their previous occupancy – in this case the site of an extinct ceramics industry. He compares this with projects in India, discussing the way objects can embody and reveal their own history and explores the tension in India between pre-industrial and urban environments. In Chapter 13 Neil Brownsword discusses Marl Hole, a site-specific residency and film conceived and curated by Brownsword and filmed by Johnny Magee for the 2009 British Ceramic Biennial. He explores concepts of artistic dislocation within the context of North Staffordshire’s indigenous clay deposits. By stripping away the familiarity of the artist’s studio, tools, materials and working practices, Brownsword together with three international artists interrogates the articulation of clay in its geographic abundance through a range of ephemeral interventions and captures moments of fleeting curiosity, failure and discovery, reiterating a symbiotic relationship between human endeavour and a material which was once the basis of the area’s economy for over three centuries. In Chapter 14, Nigel Morgan talks about the land in poetic terms. He proposes that to really interrogate a substance it has to be discussed in terms of essence. He talks about the material of landscape – soil, seed, stone, wood and steel – and how materials reflect the processes of landscape: processes of extraction, manipulation and deposition. In Chapter 15, Michele Allen discusses her use of photography and video to explore the landscape of colliery lagoons, created to manage toxic mine water and spoil heaps in Newstead, Nottinghamshire in a process of regeneration after the coalfields closed. She focuses on the multi-layered quality of place, interviewing former miners about their experiences of work underground.

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In Chapter 16 Professor Anne Helen Mydland discusses, through a number of case studies, the research project Topographies of the Obsolete and the Vociferous Void exhibition in the Spode factory, Stoke-on-Trent, both initiated by Mydland and Brownsword, Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway. Focusing on the landscape of postindustry in Stoke, North Staffordshire, which had a flourishing ceramic industry for hundreds of years she investigates how ceramics and clay may be understood as both material and subject in contemporary art practice and how they may form and construct our understanding of the site. Chloe Brown, one of the artists in the Topographies of the Obsolete project discusses her video Dancing in the Boardroom (Turning my Heartbeat up) in Chapter 17. This was shown in the Spode factory as part of the Vociferous Void exhibition and at the Material Memory conference. She discusses the sanctity of the now abandoned Boardroom at the Spode factory, a place where traditionally the Managing Director and the Board would entertain buyers and guests and its reanimation into a ballroom with Northern Soul dancers. The work articulates with contemporary questions around site, dance and music as a way of addressing emotional responses to particular places and referencing, amongst many, Jacques Derrida’s ideas of Hauntology. Also part of the Topographies of the Obsolete research project, Jeremy Welsh, in Chapter 18, discusses sites of former productivity and the remains, remnants, debris and traces encountered therein, exploring this through photography, video and sound, often combined within installations. He presents his practice which involves long periods of visual research – collecting imagery and material, exploring spaces, making connections between things encountered by chance, often quite literally “fumbling in the debris”. In Chapter 19 I explore my own research, which is concerned with shadow, light and reflectivity as material and metaphor within the post-industrial landscape. I discuss artworks created on a number of post-industrial sites in Europe and the USA that reflect past histories and memories of site. I focus on my use of traditional technologies which pay homage to the loss of skills and knowledge on those sites juxtaposed with my use of new technologies, research and experimentation which offers the possibility for renewal of those sites through the placing of the artworks.

So what for the future? “While the space of experience provides a link to a known but continuously shrinking present past, the horizon of expectation calls on an unknown, ever-expanding future.” (Barndt 2010, 1) The many artists, geographers, historians, landscape architects, curators and musicians that have contributed to this publication give valuable insights into the complex nature of the post-industrial landscape and its potential “as site for creative practice”. Dr Venda Pollock feels that creating artworks within communities which can be seen as “permeating the past into narrative identities, accepting many of these are yet to be formed” is particularly relevant for the Gorbals and I feel this also has wider implications for many post-industrial sites within Europe. Edensor in contrast sees the subtle nuances of everyday fragments such as abandoned concrete floor layouts and old adverts on the sides of buildings and the way they can contribute to the layering and building of narrative within the city as having equal importance to the commissioning of artists to create site-specific artworks within the post-industrial landscape of the city. The potential for creative practice within the post-industrial landscape is ever expanding and as with the Topographies of the Obsolete project, this research is ongoing and into its second stage. Many of the works created in the Topographies of the Obsolete were temporary and responded directly to the post-industrial landscape. This asks the question: is this purely temporary intervention which is inevitably more about developing the artist’s practice or does it have wider implications for providing permanent change within the landscape? In the case of Topographies of the Obsolete the Spode factory site has now become a centre for artists, housing artist’s studios, and a performance hub. This would not have been possible without the artist residencies which highlighted the potential for regenerating the post-industrial buildings as permanent centres for creative practice and giving confidence to funding bodies. On a monumental scale projects, especially in Germany, have used the post-industrial landscape to provide largescale theme parks using relics of its past industries to create artworks and spectacular light displays. However, the landscape architect Rowland Byass sees the serendipity of the urban wilderness as equally important and feels this has the ability to provoke the kind of contemplation that awakens our existence. In Chapter 11 he quotes Gray: “Struggling to change things around us, we forget that another kind of change is possible: an inner change, through which we can enter a richer and more spacious world that was there all along” (Gray 2013). This has also been the philosophy of the Garden Festival site at Ebbw Vale, where wild flowers and plants have been allowed to take over the landscape and sculptures over the past 20 years, allowing the site to evolve naturally without much intervention. Edensor would also agree with this sentiment saying that urban regeneration has obliterated historical traces, leaving ruins and derelict spaces to contribute to a “collage of time”. And Danny Bright would give voice to those ruins in the future through his Sonic Ghosting stating that it “is a deliberate creative act of conjuring that attempts to give the spirits voice, rupturing the present soundscape where they dwell in silence”. Siting artworks in the post-industrial landscape also has potential for political commentary by the artist and this has been expressed by both Livingstone and Randall. Randall produces artworks which “question the function of space and the desire to inhabit these spaces” whereas Livingstone comments on the aftermath of the 2007–8 financial crisis in Ireland. Jones’s installation Grenzerfahrung “brought home the ironic parallel between kiln-firing and the crematoria, (and gas chambers).” Jones makes no attempt to withhold a narrative which embraces the Holocaust within his very personal work in which the death camps are interpreted as industrialization on a grand scale. This is in

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stark contrast to what Barndt sees in many German exhibitions and heritage sites “where we can observe strong moves to rescue a past not touched by the catastrophe of the Holocaust and to provide narratives of common heritage that would leapfrog over the traumatic historical periods of recent history” (Barndt 2010, 8). In this way the post-industrial landscape enables freedom to express deep-seated personal emotions and political view points and may have relevance for many future situations which might include war and man-made disasters. The land itself has also featured strongly in this publication and Professor Andrew Burton sees a future where “Post-industrial sites are a context artists respond to because there is often a strong and immediate political and social narrative. Alongside this is the visual aspect, the romance of architectural decay: pleasure (visual pleasure) in ruins. If this has latterly been reframed as ‘ruin porn’, it’s hard to imagine that artists won’t continue to work in sites of ruination – grey walls and green ruins.”9 Photography is also seen as a means of commenting on the past to provide resource for future debate. Both Kippin and Thompson have brought to light the plight of the de-industrialization of the North East. Photographing the Great North coalfields, Thompson comments that the “mines were not so much tidied up as tidied away” and feels that the rapid removal of evidence of mining could be seen as a political act reinstating the fact that mining will never return to the North East. Thompson comments that Kippin’s work “recognises the traditions of pictorial landscape but interrogates the conditions that produce particular sorts of landscape, including … post industrial sites”. Kippin himself sees his images as “offering space for consideration, contemplation and reflection” and intends that they might generate discussion, especially exploring the landscape’s links to important subjects such as ownership, capitalism, consumption and exploitation. Jane and Louise Wilson with their portrayal of sites of man-made disaster such as Pripyat also see photography and film as important tools for looking at humanity through a focused lens and hopefully pointing to new considered futures through imagining “a future ruin”. Photography of the post-industrial landscape then has an important part to play in reimagining the future and possibly altering our view of its inevitable course. As I have discussed in Chapter 19, the placing of artworks into the post-industrial landscapes that inspire them, enables reanimation of those sites, and in Edensor’s words, conjures up “the forgotten ghosts of those who were consigned to the past”. Researching within the post-industrial landscape enables objects to be “interrogated through their tangible remains, historical analysis and by means of interviews with former workers” (Orange 2015, 55). Investigating traditional technologies inherent to those sites and reinventing them using new technologies to create artworks has the possibility of invoking within those artworks an examination of “past social relationships and how they were forged, mediated, and made meaningful during the everyday practice of material culture production” (Orange 2015, 160). Contemporary artworks then, can act as powerful signifiers to a forgotten past and important visual symbols of a new future.

References Barndt, K. 2010. “Layers of Time: Industrial Ruins and Exhibitionary Temporalities.” PMLA 125 (1): 134–41. http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1632/pmla.2010.125.1.134 Farrell, D. and Heeney, G. 2000. “Shaping Earth”, University of Wolverhampton in association with The Architects Journal. Gray, J. 2013. “A Point of View: The Doors of Perception.” http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22648328. Hamidi, S. 2014. “An Analysis of the Cultural Influences That Shaped Detroit Techno”. BA/BSc (Hons) Audio Production SAE Institute London. https://www.academia.edu/9811542/An Analysis of the Cultural Influences That Shaped Detroit Techno Mydland, A. and N. Brownsword. 2013. “Topographies of the Obsolete: Vociferous Void Topographies of the Obsolete Publications.” http://topographies.khib.no/media/1936629/vociferous void.pdf http://topographies.khib.no/ Orange. H. (2015) Reanimating Industrial Spaces, Conducting Memory Work in Post Industrial Societies. Left Coast Press, Inc

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This was a quote from a phone conversation with Andrew Burton 2016

CHAPTER ONE REMEMBERING THE GORBALS: PUBLIC ART AND MEMORY IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE VENDA LOUISE POLLOCK

In June 1999 a series of yellow posts and orange figures appeared on wasteland in the Oatlands area of the Gorbals in Glasgow. Six tenements that once dominated the site had been demolished and these new occupants were part of a temporary art project entitled Oatlands needs Pakora, the name taken from graffiti that once adorned the local chip shop (figs 1.1 and 1.2). The artwork sought to explore the meaning of this new “public space” for the remaining community. Residents drew maps of how they remembered the site, and from these memories posts with plaques were erected to mark where significant local places were thought to have been. The accuracy of their locations sparked intense debate and, consequently, new posts were erected. Further controversy ensued upon the installation of washing lines, in the same way as they would once have occupied the backcourts of the tenements. Local residents complained that it made them look like travellers and the installation was removed but, as noted by its creators Heisenberg (sculptor Matt Baker and architect Dan Dubowitz) this marked an important moment as the community took ownership of the site. The project culminated in a street party with the washing lines resurrected but hung with paper bags printed with photographs of old Oatlands borrowed from local people.

Figure 1.1 Heisenberg: Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz. Oatlands Needs Pakora, 1999. Image courtesy of Matt Baker.

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Figure 1.2 Heisenberg: Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz. Oatlands Needs Pakora (plaque), 1999. Image courtesy of Matt Baker.

Oatlands needs Pakora was the precursor to a series of public artworks to be created for the Gorbals area as it underwent virtually wholescale regeneration beginning in the 1990s, the third such redevelopment in just over a century. Having grown from a small village known as “Bridge End” into a community renowned for handloom weaving, by the late nineteenth century the Gorbals succumbed to the overcrowding and social deprivation that industrialization and urban expansion brought in their wake. Famously documented in the photography of Thomas Annan (1829–1887), Glasgow’s City Improvement Trust set out to eradicate slum dwellings in the city and, under the Improvement Act of 1871, the traditional cottage-style dwellings in the Gorbals began to be replaced with tenements. A delegation from the City Council had visited Paris in June 1866, the same month that the original City Improvement Act was passed, to see the effect of the comprehensive programme of redevelopment undertaken by Georges-Eugène Haussmann and returned with similar ambition for the transformation of the worst of Glasgow’s overcrowded slum areas into open streets lined with modern housing and with decent sanitation.1 Accordingly, the Main Street of the Gorbals, complete by 1879, boasted high quality tenements and elegant façades, including the Royal Princess’s Theatre by James Sellars which was fronted with a portico recycled from David Hamilton’s Union Bank on Ingram Street which had been demolished in 1876. The vista to Gorbals Cross terminated with a clock and fountain, designed by the City Architect John Carrick, master of the redevelopment programme.2 By the 1930s, the area’s diverse 90,000 population included Poles, Lithuanians, Irish and Highlanders, and was served by around 1,000 shops and 130 pubs. The vast influx of workers seeking employment in the nearby factories and shipyards, however, meant that by 1951 the census revealed endemic overcrowding, poor housing and high levels of social deprivation. The Gorbals was also blighted by a not inconsiderable reputation for gang violence, part-fact, propagated by fiction, notably McArthur and Kingsley-Long’s novel No Mean City ([1935] 1978) which charted the life of Razor King, Johnnie Stark. Again, councillors looked to France. Bolstered by a visit to Marseilles in 1947 where their eyes were opened to the sleek modernism of Le Corbusier, Glasgow City Council introduced a high-rise policy and used powers from the 1947 Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act to adopt a Comprehensive Development Area approach. The resident population was dispersed to new housing estates on the periphery of the city and in the Gorbals 19 high-rise blocks soon towered where traditional tenements once stood. The area’s saviour was seen as Sir Basil Spence, who was commissioned in 1959 to redevelop the Hutchesontown C area. Spence was a Modernist post-war architect who, reflecting the vogue for Le Corbusier, envisaged the Gorbals as a utopia of 1

It is fair to assume that, after this visit to Paris, the decision to commission Annan to conduct the survey of the Old Streets and Closes of Glasgow (Annan 1877; 1900) was inspired by Charles Marville’s extensive record of the transformation of Paris. 2 The remainder of the Gorbals redevelopment took nearly 20 years to complete, largely due to an economic slump in the late 1870s.

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Modernist living. Sadly, the planners failed to account for the Scottish climate, riddled with damp and decay and, with problems of social deprivation persisting, “Hutchie C” was demolished in 1993 as part of the latest revisioning of the Gorbals. Oatlands needs Pakora and the subsequent public art programme provide an interesting starting point to begin to ponder the peculiar relationship between memory and the post-industrial landscape in the context of regeneration. Through its process, which was the artwork, Oatlands needs Pakora made apparent the complexity in the dialogues between individual and collective (or social) memories, between place and site, and the contentiousness of inscribing memory into place. What I want to do here is move from the more familiar story of iconic artworks and cultural regeneration, and from a post-industrial narrative focused on an economic landscape and grounded in the repurposing of industrial buildings and site, to the generally neglected local, neighbourhood scale and to a relationship which sees art practices engaged in a more knotty process of leading and responding to regeneration, its masters and its forces, and to palimpsest-like places and diasporic communities, in order to provide an alternative view on materiality, memory and the post-industrial landscape. In this, attention moves from bounded and memorial sites of memory to everyday spaces, where, it will be argued, memory is in constant renegotiation even where artworks are integral and fixed. Through a case study of the Gorbals, I hope to suggest that considering the significance of art in relation to the issues of memory within the context of regeneration is a valuable means through which change in the city can be read.

Regenerating the post-industrial landscape “Let them eat cake” made no bones about it. But we say let them eat the hope deferred And that will sicken them. We have preferred silent slipways to the riveters’ wit. And don’t deny it - that’s the ugly bit. (Edwin Morgan, Extract from “Glasgow Sonnets v”, published in From Glasgow to Saturn 1973) The phased regeneration of the Gorbals took place as the concept of urban cultural regeneration was gaining traction. With the “Barcelona model” of urban renewal widely vaunted as the solution to catalyse the economies of beleaguered post-industrial cities, regeneration became dominated by the concepts of the “creative city” (Landry 2012) and “creative class” (Florida 2003). Cities across the UK fostered the development of cultural quarters (e.g. see Montgomery 2003; McCarthy 2006; Roodhouse 2010) and clusters (e.g. see Chapain et al. 2010; Cooke and Lazzeretti 2008; Evans 2009a, 2009b; Mommaas 2004) as they sought to reorientate their economies and identities. Skylines, riversides and canal paths in cities such as Newcastle and Gateshead, Manchester and Birmingham, were reconfigured by iconic architecture (e.g. see Miles 2005). Despite aspects of this being critiqued (Markusen 2006; Peck 2005), the rhetoric still holds much sway and place-making is now integral to the policy orthodoxy that seeks to enhance the global competitiveness of cities (Harvey 1989; Massey 1991). In Glasgow, a city with a reputation for reinvention, this agenda was proactively pursued through its hosting of the Garden Festival in 1988, attaining the European City of Culture accolade in 1990, and becoming UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999. Alongside the building of the Royal Concert Hall (1988–1990) and redevelopment of the Kelvingrove Museum (2008), its riverside has been transformed through the creation of the Clyde Auditorium (1997, popularly known as the Armadillo) and Zaha Hadid’s Museum of Transport (2011). Within a stone’s throw of the Clyde, and walking distance to the city centre, the redevelopment of the Gorbals shared this citywide vision for a reimaging as well as a reimagining. During this period, public art and urban regeneration developed an almost symbiotic relationship. On one level this was through the prominence of large-scale iconic artworks, most notably Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North (1998) whose Cor-Ten steel form rising above Gateshead symbolized the resurgence of the region’s fortunes whilst acknowledging its industrial roots (quite literally, as the Angel rises from the site of an old mine). While the Angel became almost emblematic for the potential of cultural regeneration and remains a potent symbol of transformation, it should be acknowledged that difficulties faced by more recent proposed iconic artworks perhaps signal that momentum for this particular trend has waned. Funding difficulties have stalled Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond’s Tees Valley Giants (of which only Temenos in Middlesbrough (2010) has yet been realized), Mark Wallinger’s White Horse (or Angel of the South) intended for Ebbsfleet, and The Star of Caledonia at Gretna, a collaboration between Cecil Balmond and Charles Jencks. That the envisaged works by Wallinger and Jencks/Balmond are billed as larger than the Angel of North highlights the import afforded to scale in the creative city script, albeit here possibly of ambition rather than realization. Public art was also deployed at an entirely different scale, however, in neighbourhoods, typically those that were seen as trapped within cycles of decline. In the Gorbals, the desire to revert to pre-Modernist architectural designs to create neighbourhoods with more public spaces, combined with the ambition for a mixed income residential community, reflected the belief that the material environment, and the process through which it was developed, could contribute to cultivating a sense of community. The rhetoric surrounding public art shared much of this new urbanism’s “social doctrine” (Brian 2005; Talen 1999), with local authority policies, not always evenly implemented, reiterating public art’s ability to address social exclusion, cultivate civic identity and pride, create meaningful public places, and develop sense of community and place (Hall and Robertson 2001; Pollock and Paddison 2010). Although

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this groundswell of advocacy rested on a poor evidential base (Evans and Shaw 2004; Mirza 2006; Selwood 2006), public art within communities was seen to be beneficial on two counts: it contributed to the reaestheticization and reimagining of place whilst, through process, it was deemed effective in bridging “old” and “new” places and carrying communities through what could be a challenging transition. As has been discussed elsewhere, New Labour’s overt instigation of its social inclusion agenda paralleled more critical attention being paid to participative or “socially engaged” art practices (e.g. Bishop 2006; Bourriaud 1996; Lacy 1995; Kester 1995, 2004) and public art practices became perceived as a means through which the softer, more intangible aspects of policy could be addressed (Sharp et al. 2005; Belfiore 2006; Belfiore 2012; Pollock and Paddison 2014). It is too simplistic to dichotomize for degrees of artistic autonomy and community engagement are increasingly blurring what might otherwise be seen as very different practices. Within regeneration, however, it is important to recognize the broader policy context in which practices at all scales are enmeshed. The incorporation of public art, or participation, within regeneration is not a neutral or democratic process, and neither is its use of memory. Forest and Johnson (2001, 48) contend that at points where political legitimacy is sought elites can take “a pastiche of materials at hand to create a coherent narrative of tradition, memory and history” and, although discussing more national monumental landscapes, this has validity at other moments of transition and transformation. In certain contexts, this approach can construct superficial heritage landscapes, which are in danger of cultivating “kitsch geographies” (Atkinson 2007) in pursuit of accessible identities. Writing on heritage, Atkinson notes that memory can be “a pliable resource: often exploited by interest groups offering ideologically laden histories to serve capital, tourism, or the local or national state” (ibid., 522). Similarly, within regeneration, memory is used to serve several masters and its evocation of, and inscription into, place is a deliberate process of remembering, forgetting, and re-presenting.

Remembering in the post-industrial landscape Partial transformations endlessly pull the dream forward into it - into what can never become memory even in the distance of its most famous stations. (Edwin Morgan, Extract from “The Ages”, published in The Second Life 1968) In an era of post-modern urbanism, or posturbanism, Mark Crinson (2005) has noted that the past is treated as something to be quoted selectively. Memory is a political process where the past is “selected, filtered and restructured in terms set by the questions and necessity of the present” (Jedlowski 2001, 30), and increasingly this is a present inflected with global ambitions and perspectives (Huyssen 2003). The way in which this has been manifest in the postindustrial landscape in the UK has most extensively, and evocatively, been explored by Manchester University’s Urban Memory in Manchester project and in selected essays within Crinson’s edited volume Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (2005). The project’s aptly titled Fabrications: New Art and Urban Memory in Manchester exhibition, which included work by Nathan Coley, Layla Curtis and Sarah Waring amongst others, encapsulated the project’s approach to Manchester as “a rich network of layered memories, concealments and fabrications” (Crinson et al. 2002). Reflecting Boyer’s City of Collective Memory (1996), for Crinson: “Urban memory can be an anthropomorphism (the city having a memory) but more commonly it indicates the city as a physical landscape and collection of objects and practices that enable recollections of the past and that embody the past through traces of the city’s sequential building and rebuilding” (Crinson 2005, xii). Uprooting memory from its concentration on bounded sites, Crinson and his contributors move through post-industrial landscapes encountering suburbs, interstitial spaces, symbolic representation in reclaimed and reconfigured industrial haunts, and the city’s very materiality. There is synergy here with Edensor (2005) who pays particular attention to industrial ruins, their disruptive temporality and ability to evoke a sensual and contingent sense of memory. A particular concern for Crinson is modernism, which Boyer said “blew apart the relationship between history and the city” (1996, 4). It is perhaps not surprising then that, for Crinson and his contributors, Walter Benjamin’s view of shock as a central facet of modernity is a recurrent motif alongside that of the fragment, which “was understood as having a dynamic role as a random element to do with moments and discontinuities” (Crinson 2005, xviii). This idea of discontinuity pervades contemporary consideration of memory and place. In Lieux de Mémoire (1984– 1992), a seven-volume meditation on French memories of the Republic and nation, Pierre Nora detects a rupture between the agrarian, peasant cultures, which for Nora epitomized a “repository of collective memory”, and modern French culture (Nora 1989, 7); this, in turn, provokes the need to consciously archive and remember. Through his volumes, now a keystone for consideration of memory in the modern era, Nora argues that we have lieux, sites, of memory because we no longer have milieux, environments of memory. He traces the shift from the construction of a canonical national identity to a more diffuse, eclectic and disparate exploration of identity (Nora 1996). In the traditional city, for example, monuments functioned as “rhetorical topoi” (Boyer 1996) that aimed to instil civic virtue and stir national pride. In these monumental landscapes often adorned with allegorical architectural forms, memory operated across and between spaces. The modern city has changed to the extent that there are no longer environments of memory but these statues could operate as “sites” of memory, which, by Nora’s definition, could be physical, or symbolic (including ceremonies or rituals), or functional (for example, dictionaries) (Nora 1989, 19). For Nora, these

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sites, which could be used to rouse emotion and claim to represent – and thereby construct – certain memories or views of the nation, had assumed increased importance because the contemporary condition meant that “real” memory had waned. We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left. Our interest in lieux de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory (Nora 1989, 7)

It is not surprising that such demarcated ‘sites’ have become the focus of much writing on memory, where attention has been paid to, for example, the complex ways in which monuments or architecture are constructed, understood, and responded to (e.g. Johnson 1995; Forest and Johnson 2001; 2002; Wheelan 2002; 2003), the differing perspectives that emerge in the reconstitution of collective memories (Graham et al. 2000; Johnson 1999) or memorial landscapes (Hayden 1995), and the difficulties of remembrance and contesting narratives (e.g. Withers 1996; Young 1993). For many writers this is entwined with analysis of the commemoration of major traumatic events and urban landscapes subject to the ravages of war, with trauma, difficult histories, and counter-narratives forming constant threads alongside the dialectics between memory and forgetting, and the individual and the collective. Atkinson (2007) has suggested that this tendency to focus on particular places and sites of memory, partly due to the influence of writers such as Pierre Nora and Maurice Halbwachs, poses a danger of “fetishizing” sites while neglecting the wider production of social memory throughout society and proposes: “One way forward may be to loosen the more strident aspects of this spatial fetishism in order to recognize the constant reconstitution of social memory in all kinds of spaces - discontinuous in some, overlapping in others, but never bounded exclusively within particular sites” (Atkinson 2007, 523). Interestingly, Halbwachs’ work is looser in its spatialization of collective memory, with a focus on the more everyday, shared spaces of the city; History is not interested “when nothing apparently happens, when life is content with repetition in a somewhat different, but essentially unaltered, form without rupture or upheaval” (Halbwachs 1980, 85). For Halbwachs memory was socially constructed and spatial: “The individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory” (Halbwachs 1992, 182; see also Eyerman 2004). Halbwachs elucidated: … place and groups have each received the imprint of the other. Therefore every phase of the group can be translated into spatial terms, and its residence is but the juncture of all these terms. Each aspect, each detail, of this place has a meaning intelligible only to members of the group, for each portion of its space corresponds to various and different aspects of the structure and life of their society, at least of what is most stable in it (1980, 130 31).

The sustainability of memories for individuals, however, was dependent on the persistence of the group; for example, a change in location would mean that “neither the group nor the collective memory remains the same” (ibid., 131). When the local environment is threatened, the effect can be profound: Were the relationships between streets, homes, and groups inhabiting them wholly accidental and short of duration, then men might tear down their homes, district, and city, only to rebuild another … But even if stones are movable, relationships established between stones and men are not so easily altered. When a group has lived a long time in a place adapted to its habits, its thoughts as well as its movements are in turn ordered by the succession of images from these external objects. Now suppose these houses and streets are demolished or their appearance and layout are altered. The stones and other materials will not object, but the groups will … The force of local tradition comes forth from this physical object, which serves as its image (ibid., 133 4).

Halbwachs was not alone, with Kracauer writing about Berlin in the 1930s similarly arguing that, amidst the pace of modern urban life, “perpetual change erases memory” ([1932] 1987, 17). These theories have obvious repercussions for memory in regeneration contexts where both the physical form and demographics of place are radically altered. In contending with this difficult landscape, it is useful to consider recent challenges that have been made to the place-bound nature of memory. For example, Misztal (2004) has argued that as place-bound memories fade, memory is typically articulated through disparate and fragmented “memory groups” stretched across space. Memories may be conveyed through objects and narrative in a diasporic process more apt to reflecting stories of migration, displacement and resettlement (Tolia-Kelly 2004). Memory is increasingly being seen as productive, something that moves beyond specific sites, and that is at times unsettled and displaced (Terdiman 2003; Crang and Travlou 2001; Moran 2004; Crinson 2005). This thinking is feeding into reconceptualizations of heritage sites where Landzelius (2003) has called for a “rhizome heritage” that accommodates multiple pasts and forestalls closure. Similarly, Boym (2001) advocates a “restorative nostalgia” which engages the past, and pasts, more productively in the present. This more diffuse, unbounded and productive sense of memory is useful when considering public art and its processes within the context of regeneration and how artists respond to a shifting, lived landscape. While it is tempting to see public art as “mediating elements in the recreation of […] place” in acting as “surrogates for a memory-timespace which can never be fully recovered” (Lovell 1998, 16), the situation is more complex. In the motives underlying its commissioning, public art is often “strategically mobilized by professionals” (Crinson 2005, xii), the communities to which it responds are often dispersed or not yet formed, the palimpsest landscape in which it is sited has a complex

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history and temporality, and in its realization what is remembered and what is forgotten can prove extremely contentious. The Gorbals provides a unique example through which these issues can be explored.

Dismembering and remembering the Gorbals A multi is a sonnet stretched to ode and some say that’s no joke. The gentle load of souls in clouds, vertiginously stayed above the windy courts, is probed and weighed. Each monolith stands patient, ah’d and oh’d. And stalled lifts generating high-rise blues can be set loose. But stalled lives never budge. (Edwin Morgan, Extract from “Glasgow Sonnets x”, published in From Glasgow to Saturn 1973) The Crown Street Regeneration Project (a consortium of Scottish Enterprise, Glasgow City Council, Communities Scotland, the private sector and the local community) was established in 1989 to oversee the development of a master plan for what, significantly, became rebranded as the New Gorbals. Devised by Piers Gough of CZWG Architects, the plan purposefully reverted to tenement-style living with combinations of flats and townhouses, and a range of local amenities including a supermarket, library, offices, local shops and a public park. This was followed in 1998 by the Queen Elizabeth Square (QES) master plan developed by Gerry Henaughen (Hypostyle Architects) which similarly sought to create a socially inclusive mixed neighbourhood, albeit within a broader programme of gentrification. There was a resolute move from monotonous streetscapes toward idiosyncratic developments by different architects, particularly in the QES phase. Enhancing this, percent for art was written into both masterplans but applied differently. In Crown Street the developers retained control and, lacking an overall vision, the public art commissioned usually took the form of sculptural relief panels which made loose reference to the area’s history. Tom McCartney, who became Director of the Crown Street Regeneration Project (CSRP) was instrumental in initiating the ambitious public art programme for QES. He felt that the first phase was piecemeal and resulted in “normal” public art, and so wanted a stronger process for the second stage (interview with McCartney, 2006). Oatlands needs Pakora was one in a series of temporary artworks responding to wasteland areas of the Gorbals realized as part of Glasgow’s year as UK City of Architecture and Design. Heisenberg’s process-led approach appealed to McCartney and they were asked to devise an artworks strategy for QES. At this time, Heisenberg were also creating the most distinctive artwork of the Crown Street phase, Gatekeeper (fig. 1.3), which, looking toward the QES phase, was a “statement of intent” (Heisenberg 2000a). As practitioners, Heisenberg had reservations about the grand rhetoric of masterplanning, particularly given the area’s past experience, and also the instrumentalization of artistic practice within regeneration (its “strategic mobilization”). In their Manual, Heisenberg referenced the “Divining Liver of Babylon,” which was an ancient method of divination called hepatoscopy where the liver was used to determine the will of higher powers in various facets of life, particularly wellbeing. This was a means to question the tradition of town planning and highlight the incongruity of asking artists to produce a rigid rather than responsive strategy. The visual masterplan (fig. 1.4) took the form of a series of CD-sized cards with quotes, images and historical facts from the area, in order to emphasize their contextual practice. They advocated a process-led approach, “following a dynamic and organic route that will change and adapt as it progresses” (Heisenberg 2000b). The percentfor-art monies from developers were directed into an independent trust fund, which was managed by the Artworks Programme, as it was named after the dissolution of Heisenberg in 2002, under the supervision of Turner Townsend Project Management. The reconstituted group, with Baker as lead artist, sought to create works realized through collaboration between artists, architect and the local community. The programme comprised three strands: integral, public realm and itinerant. Integral artworks were allied to one of seven housing developments and delivered through a collaborative design process with artists commissioned at the earliest opportunity and selected through an international design competition. Those in the public realm were geared to improve the quality of the environment and tended to be permanent works. Conversely, itinerant works were “experimental artworks which arrive unannounced and then move on - poetic terrorism” (Heisenberg 2000b). The reactive nature of the latter meant that they were commissioned directly by the lead artist, often at short notice. As well as artists engaging with various stakeholders, including the public, as part of their practices, Heisenberg initiated “the forum” to elicit broader community participation and provide a vehicle through which artists could engage with residents. The forum, designed to mimic the uniquely Glaswegian model of community-managed housing associations, was managed by a local artists’ group, the Gorbals Arts Project (GAP). Although the artists’ brief did not place a requirement on working with the community (artists were asked to respond to the social and physical context), this was a crucial factor in the selection of artists. As Baker (interview, 2006) explained: … we’ve taken on a range of artists, all of them see the context that they’re working in as very important and that doesn’t just mean where the sun comes from … It’s a whole emotional landscape of place and some people respond historically and some more contemporary or even in a future sense because a lot of the time they’re dealing with imagined, projected futures. … So the idea of context is absolutely essential.

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Figure 1.3 Heisenberg: Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz, Gatekeeper, 2002. Image: Les Hill.

Underpinning the Artworks Programme was a belief that the artists should be chosen on the basis of their practice rather than in response to a specific proposal and that, once chosen, the artist should have time to develop a work “whose outcome and final form is shaped by the process of producing it” without having ideas “compromised by a committee process.” (Heisenberg 2000a; Baker, interview 2006). As a programme with considerable budget, this process-led approach stood in stark contrast to trends for bringing in blue-chip artists to create specific works. As the “notorious” Gorbals made its transition to the revisioned New Gorbals, the social and physical landscape to which the artists had to respond was complex. Fragments of older developments persisted against an incrementally changing environment where areas of building site, wasteland and new build coexisted. Moreover, community involvement, particularly in the early stages, was problematic due to the area being a cleared site, except for some high-rise blocks, and there being no representative community body for the area (McArthur 2000, 58; Tiesdell and MacFarlane 2007, 429–30). This is where the itinerant, responsive strand of the Artworks Programme became particularly useful, but it did raise issues for the permanent works being derived for an as yet largely non-existent or not yet formed community. This was not the post-industrial landscape of repurposed factories and warehouses, revisioned riverbanks and cultural landmarks, but a neighbourhood whose fortunes and futures had been profoundly shaped by the processes of industrialization and deindustrialization and the ambitions of its City Fathers.

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Figure 1.4 Heisenberg: Matt Baker and Dan Dubwitz. The Artworks Masterplan, 2000. Image courtesy of Matt Baker.

Reimagining the Gorbals Old Gorbals flicked dust from his sleeve, sighed a bit and swore a bit, made for the stairs, out, looked back at the grand tower, gave a growl, and in a spirit of something or other sprayed a wall with DONT FORGET. (Edwin Morgan (2004), Extract from “Old Gorbals”, commissioned as part of Peter Smith’s Highlights art project, Artworks Programme, Gorbals)

Absence and displacement In consideration of the artworks,3 it seems appropriate to start with modernism, given its thorny relationship with both memory and the Gorbals. As part of the integral scheme of artworks the Polish artist Monika Sosnowska was commissioned to create a work for the final phase of the QES. Her previous work had interrogated issues of planning and power through architectural form. M10, which was part of Glasgow International in 2005, referred to the Polish system of housing being allocated according to predetermined spatial requirements. As space became a premium, however, living spaces were subdivided. M10 was a series of repetitious rooms, identically carpeted and wallpapered, which got incrementally smaller so that the viewer comes to a space too small to enter. It is a telling, somewhat absurd, comment on the failure of utopian planning. This sentiment was carried forward to her Gorbals project which, at first sight, appeared to be a series of abstract sculptural metal relief forms recalling perhaps Soviet avant-garde graphics or minimalist geometric forms. It is only on closer examination that, recalling Rubin’s vase, the word “Gorbals” can be seen spelt out in the spaces between the sculptural forms. Notably this is not the “New Gorbals” vaunted by the developers and planners, but simply “Gorbals,” therein emphasizing the power of association in the name. This is not, however, a nostalgic proposition, as Moira Jeffrey (2006) has noted; it is disruptive. Due to be sited on the periphery between the redeveloped area and existing housing, it was literally pivoting between old and new. As well as bringing 3

Select artworks have been chosen for discussion here. For further information on realized, and unrealized, artworks see Warwick (2006) and the archived website of the Artworks Programme. http://www.theartworksprogramme.org (accessed March 2016).

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the layered and difficult history associated with the name to bear, it also raised uncertainties about its future reputation. With each new rebuilding of the Gorbals proclaimed as an exemplar but failing drastically, Sosnowska queried whether the same fate awaited the current redevelopment. It also reflected the paradoxical nature of the Gorbals where conformity was never wholly reconciled with a community renowned for being non-conformist, and where a largely working class, socialist ethos met the aspirations of gentrifiers. Sosnowska presents “the Gorbals” as an absent presence. If modernism itself was eradicated from the Gorbals, and modernism had destroyed bonds with history, it is fitting for its testimony to be spectral. In this story of failed dreams, it is a strange irony that Sosnowska’s proposed work was not realized and as such remains a critical proposition, somewhat utopian in itself.

Figure 1.5 Calum Stirling, The Wanderer, 2003. Image courtesy of Matt Baker.

The evocation of modernism through failed utopianism is a disruptive motif in which an aesthetic of absence recurs. Calum Stirling’s The Wanderer (fig. 1.5) appeared in the Gorbals in December of 2003. Coinciding with Earth’s nearest approach to Mars in 60,000 years, an image of a Martian landscape from the NASA Pathfinder mission of 1996 was printed on a huge banner stretched across scaffolding on a partially constructed building. The proximity of Mars instigated a series of exploratory missions, including the ill-fated Beagle 2 expedition, and, just as the building of the Modernist high-rises of the Gorbals coincided with an era of space exploration, Stirling sought to create a critical space through which the emotions of hope, fear and trepidation could be considered. In echoing the contemporary language of urban advertising, the work was suggestive of the selling of (perhaps unattainable) dreams and, in light of this, tellingly, created a visual dialogue with the equally unpopulated rubble-strewn landscape of the building site. Edwin Morgan’s poetry from the 1970s likened the Modernist landscape of the Gorbals to Mars in its alien otherness and here Stirling, in this nuanced punctuation mark in the regeneration process, sought to evoke an unsettling sense of the uncanny. Till characterizes Berlin as “a place haunted with landscapes that simultaneously embody presences and absences, voids and ruins, intentional forgetting and painful remembering” (Till 2005, 8). The haunting for the Gorbals is less temporally marked with ruins due to its serial demolition but rather than literally reinscribe history into the landscape, artists use absence metonymically for the Modernist legacy. In recognizing modernism’s role in the history of place they provide a critical space for reassessment of modernism which acknowledges its importance in lived life.4 4

The affection for modernism amongst the local population was the subject of a series of works by Dan Dubowitz for an exhibition called Stirring the City which was held in the Lighthouse in 2001. The works Last order at Queens and Testimonies focused on the Queen Elizabeth Arcade, the last part of Spence’s development to be demolished. As part of the work, residents sat on an uprooted park bench and spoke of their memories of the site. On seeing the film, Tom McCartney commented: “I had no idea people cared

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Chapter One

Remembering inevitably involves a pervasive sense of loss. Bhabha, recalling Till’s intentionality, has referred to it as never “a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present” (Bhabha 1993, 63). The physical and social landscape of the Gorbals, characterized as it is by demolition and displacement, has an enduring but particular sense of trauma that stretches beyond its geographic boundaries. Layered within this its history is the ebb and flow of communities, home as it was to immigrant Catholic, Jewish and Asian communities before, now, being a refuge for asylum seekers. They joined a (geographically determined) community that was close-knit and, somewhat paradoxically, suspicious of outsiders. Many of the native residents themselves and, historically, their families had been dislodged from their homes and the area during successive periods of rebuilding. As with most places, therefore, the “community” was complicated, and that complexity clashed somewhat with the simplistic way in which the word was used within the rhetoric of planners and developers. Daphne Wright, whose practice typically involves sculptural installations accompanied by audio through which she seeks to interrogate narrative or use narrative as an interrogative technique, was commissioned to create an integral artwork but rather than situate a permanent piece she chose to create works which memorialized, probed, and generated community itself. Drawing on conversations with residents and tales told, Wright created a series of five Home Ornaments: an architect’s plan, a polyurethane cast of a 1960s building at the point of demolition; a porcelain guinea-pig complete with drinking bowl; a set of three small knitted cacti; a handembroidered silk parrot; and a gesso-framed intaglio print of an orangutan (fig. 1.6). Each has layered meanings – Guinea-Pig, for example, directly refers to the popular family pet for apartment dwellers, but more obliquely to the Wemyss Pig ornaments once commonly found in working-class homes but that have since become prized collectables, and also to the history of migration, as guinea-pigs hail from South America (Léith 2006, 121). Similarly, “Fidelma,” the title of the parrot “ornament”, is a Gaelic name with Irish roots, reflecting one of the main immigrant groups that was fundamental in shaping the area’s identity. The knitted cacti allude to the textile industry, a mainstay of employment for generations of people in the Gorbals, particularly women, but, notably, Wright’s ornaments were made in China. Home Ornaments gestured “both backwards and forwards in time, acknowledging a complex set of relations between loss and progress, impoverishment and regeneration” (Léith 2006, 124)

Figure 1.6 Daphne Wright, Home Ornaments, 2002 2005. Image courtesy of Matt Baker.

about it. I saw it, thought it looked like s**t, was trying to clean up the area, so I wiped it out.” (“Testimonies,” Scotland on Sunday, 19 Aug 2001).

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Figure 1.7 Kenny Hunter, Untitled (Girl with a Rucksack), 2004. Image: Les Hill.

Writing on artefacts in the British Asian home, Divia Tolia-Kelly (2004) has commented: “The refraction of connection to past places, stories and genealogies through material cultures collectively signal the absence of other people, places and environments” (Tolia-Kelly 2004, 322) Although inflected with loss, Wright’s ornaments sidestep an overt nostalgia or kitsch. Instead Wright seems to agree with Tolia-Kelly in that, “Material cultures, through their installation, are critical in the formation of new political identities, carving out new landscapes of belonging. These new contexts for material artefacts refigure the narration of the past imbued within them. Memory is an important political tool, grounding both individual memory and collective cultural heritage stories” (ibid., 315). Although ToliaKelly is referring to more specific identities related to material cultures, what Wright does is complicate identitynarratives through their conflation making them at once specific and generalized and therein pointing at that which might be shared. There’s a sense of what Tolia-Kelly, drawing on Toni Morrison, refers to as re-memory: “a resource for the sustenance of a sense of self that temporally connects to a social heritage, genealogy, and acts as a resource for identification with place” (ibid., 316). One ornament was inconspicuously placed in each of the new apartments in this particular development accompanied by a manual which provided care instructions and the history of the project, as well as acting as a validation certificate (think Wemyss Pigs). Those selling the apartments were also briefed on the history of the ornaments and relevance to place, with the idea that this mixture of oral, written and interpretative history would weave its way into the fabric of the residents’ lives and they, in turn, could weave it into their own lives, choosing to either take or leave the object when they moved. Re-memory is rarely something experienced individually but something inherited, and here it is social, operative in public space, creating some sort of suggestive intimacy with someone unknown through resonances of shared experience in everyday lives. Where absence is a recognized strategy

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for countering dominant discourse (e.g. see Young, 1993) what Wright provides is an alternative subtle counternarrative predicated on an elusive presence pointing to something that remains slightly out of reach, which can’t quite be brought to mind. This stands in stark contrast to the representational strategies adopted by Kenny Hunter in his Untitled (Girl with a Rucksack) (2004) (fig. 1.7), a statue of a young girl carrying a rucksack and a book who looks toward the Blackfriars Primary School in the Gorbals in a pose reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David (1501–1504) – a perhaps ironically permanent monument to transience and migration. Conversely, Home Ornaments are productive, quietly political, catalysts that accept and reflect the complexity of community within regeneration.

Fragments and asynchronous moments There is a question, however, as to whether this destabilization of the relationship between people and place detectable in these artworks and which Halbwachs saw as endangering the relationship between memory and identity, is simply symptomatic of the global condition, or an obfuscation of the problems surrounding place and community within regeneration, or representative of the way in which regeneration is implicated within the lives of communities going through the upheaval. Reinscription of memory into place, however, is problematic. In August 2008 a sculpture entitled High Heels (fig. 1.8) by Liz Peden, artist for the local Gorbals Arts Project, was installed at the corner of Cumberland Street and QES. High Heels consists of three bronze statues, each of a boy wearing high-heeled shoes which themselves are silver. Although faithfully modelled on three boys then living in the Gorbals, the work takes its inspiration from a scene captured in 1963 by the Italian-Scots photographer Oscar Marzaroli.5 The poses of the statues echo those of the photographed boys who appear to be playing in their mothers’ shoes on a tenemented street in the pre-Modernist era.

Figure 1.8 Liz Peden, Gorbals Boys, 2008.

Marzaroli’s photographs of Glasgow are best known through the monograph Shades of Grey: Glasgow 1957–1987 (1987) and two exhibitions at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre (One Man’s Photographs 1955–1984 and Shades of Grey: Photographs of Glasgow 1956–1985). Marzaroli never set out to purposely document the city in part or in its entirety, and as such his work differs from that of Annan and Marville, although inevitably all are tainted with nostalgia and are walking the difficult tightrope between poverty and a certain picturesque aesthetic. That there is an aspect of sentimentality in Marzaroli’s work is undeniable – in 1978 he directed and produced the film Dear Green Place with Michael Pavett, the title referring to an epithet for the city, and to the strains of “Dirty Old Town” (composed by Ewan McColl, sung by Peggy Seeger) the film unfolds through a series of Marzaroli’s stills, latterly of the Gorbals. The film ends with the narrator, in a commentary scripted by the Glasgow author and artist Alasdair Gray, musing over the two Glasgows: the city he grew up in was disappearing, the places of his childhood would exist only in memory, and the

5

See Marzaroli, Children on Street, Gorbals, 1963. Viewable at: http://www.oscarmarzaroli.com/gorbals.html (accessed March 2016).

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new Glasgow that was emerging was one his grandfather would not know. He questions whether the new Glasgow will be a better place for his children and whether they will love their Glasgow as much as he loved his.6 Yet, Marzaroli’s lens was arguably also a critical one. In images such as Gorbals with Southern Necropolis Beyond (1964) a vast area of cleared land was equated with the range of the cemetery beyond which, ironically, as a “city of the dead” seemed more alive than the Gorbals itself. The footprints where tenements once stood were a haunting reminder of the street-based system now being defied by figures crossing the wasteland. Familiar landmarks were lost and means of navigation disrupted. Taking the collection as a whole, whereas Marzaroli’s street photography shows the Gorbals as a lively place with children playing, women pushing prams to the “steamie” (washhouse) and people passing time “windae hingin” (leaning out of windows to pass the time of day), his images of the regeneration process tend to be uninhabited or to use figures to give a sense of disorientation or desolation. Often his images compared the traditional tenement with the soaring high-rise as in the pithily titled Miracle of the Gorbals (1964) where a tattered newspaper bearing that headline is fixed to a dishevelled wall in the foreground. This stood before a scene where cranes raised the new high-rise flats ever skyward whilst a tenement was razed to the ground. The headline referred verbatim to a ballet from the 1940s, choreographed by Robert Helpmann to a story by Michael Benthall with music by Arthur Bliss, which was, somewhat incongruously, set in the Gorbals. A despondent young girl commits suicide only to be resurrected by a Christ-like stranger who is then set upon and murdered by thugs due to their being alarmed by his mysterious powers. These themes of decline, rebirth and violence from the ballet play out wittingly across the image where exactly what the “miracle” was remained undetermined. There is not space here to unfold the complex relationship between monument, photograph and memory, that will be done elsewhere; suffice to say that Marzaroli’s photographs are themselves now sites of memory, turned into a symbolic entity by the community. Nora argues that modern memory “relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image … The less memory is experienced from the inside, the more it exists through its exterior scaffolding … Fear of a rapid and final disappearance combines with anxiety about the meaning of the present” (Nora 1989, 3). It could be said that High Heels, as a work, is symptomatic of this unease, and uses Marzaroli’s work as that exterior scaffolding. Both photographs and monuments have an anachronistic temporality, and it is perhaps this that makes the sculpture’s presence in the regenerated landscape grate somewhat. It is imbued with the nostalgia prevalent in the reception of Marzaroli’s work and recalling a pre-Modernist sociability perhaps perceived as eradicated by subsequent redevelopments. If thinking about the photographs as nodes that connect to a past not directly experienced but passed down through generations and across cultures, paralleling the idea of re-memory, then High Heels perhaps amplifies for many an association with a false memory, an artificial link to the sense of collective identity infused in the images. It is the memorialization of a false memory in that the photograph has captured for perpetuity a moment that might otherwise have remained indistinct to all others, or perhaps even including, the three boys and Marzaroli. In style the sculpture provides a point of visual security in an otherwise more challenging landscape, but in its literal reinscription and overt nostalgia there is a danger that it tends toward the “kitsch geographies” of uncritical and closed heritage-scapes. This is in marked contrast to Ken Currie’s Gorbals Faces (2001), not part of the Artworks Programme but commissioned by the New Gorbals Housing Association. Currie, one of the “New Glasgow Boys” to rise to fame from Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s, was concerned in that period with the effect of the urban condition on the human form. His Faces take the form of a series of mounted panels featuring ghostly, bruised and haunted-looking faces which are illuminated at night. They recall the darker episodes of the area’s history, alluding to substance abuse, gang violence and the leper hospital that used to stand there (gaining the area the epithet of the Gory-Bells referring to the bells the lepers would ring in the evening in thanks for food). The work re-inscribes into the landscape the more problematic stories of the area’s history that oppose the sanitized tales that regeneration narratives seek to recount. Currie’s work, in its ambiguity and evocativeness, raises critical questions about how we deal with problematic pasts and acknowledge them. The eradication – of Modernism, of difficult pasts, of problematic narratives – on behalf of masterplanners (who did not, for example, envisage any pubs for the New Gorbals) was something artists evidently could not ignore. What is key, is the means by which they tackled this; creating absent presences, conflating narratives, clouding histories and in this, while recognizing the importance of place, disrupting that relationship, were tactics used to critically reflect on the Gorbals. Rather than fragments providing shocks of recall, the approach was subtler with, paradoxically, discontinuity inherent as a means to generate, sustain and challenge narrative. Narratives of place, personal and public narratives, the stories we choose to tell ourselves and each other, those we embellish and those we choose to forget, are integral to understanding this post-industrial landscape.

Forestalling closure It groans and shakes, contracts and grows again. Its giant broken shoulders shrug off rain. (Edwin Morgan, Extract from “Glasgow Sonnets ix”, published in From Glasgow to Saturn 1973) 6

It is worth nothing that the tenor of this film is markedly different from Glasgow 1980 (1971), commissioned by the Films of Scotland and Glasgow Corporation and directed by Marzaroli from a scenario by Douglas Eadie. Glasgow 1980 focuses on the promise of Glasgow in the future, optimistically envisaging the city as modern and changing for the better.

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It is through the idea of narrative that we can most usefully understand the role that public art has played in the difficult landscape of the Gorbals. Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity is a useful thinking tool, referring to “the sort of identity to which a human being has access thanks to the mediation of the narrative function” (Ricoeur 1991, 73). For Ricoeur, narrative identity, whether of an individual or historical community, becomes the means of integrating history and fiction. He writes: “I believe we have an intuitive pre-understanding of this fusion. After all, do not human lives become more readable … when they are interpreted in function of the stories people tell about themselves?” (ibid.). Through regeneration processes, through the decimation of physical environments and the uprooting of individuals and their communities, it is arguably narratives of history and narratives of memory that provide continuity, each with a measure of fact and fiction. These narratives are inevitably fluid, multiple, disparate and told with varying degrees of volume, and therein power. There are the narratives of place and people to which these public artworks allude, and then there are the narratives into which public art is woven – those of the policy-makers, and those of the communities. For the Gorbals, its identity is sustained through a complex interweaving of place, personal and group identities, displaced from the physicality of the site itself. In 2002 the upper part of Heisenberg’s The Gatekeeper (2002) developed stigmata like wounds and staining on its right hand. As the national press whipped up a mild furore, in hushed tones residents linked the phenomena to the area’s “Patron Saint” St Francis of Assisi and the local Franciscan Friary. Now referred to as “our Angel”, the sculpture, appropriately originally conceived as a guardian figure influenced by Ernst Barlach’s Der Schwebende Engel (1927), has made its way into local myth and become part of place identity. Yet, visually, The Gatekeeper’s relationship with place seems tenuous and multiple possible readings could ensue, including that it is a piece of contemporary art deployed from the redevelopers’ gentrifying armoury. Its use of the figurative enhances its accessibility but its fundamental ambiguity, with allusions to migration and a somewhat spectral sense of becoming, forestalls any sense of closure. Baker has spoken of the artworks as a series of “cultural time bombs” or “questions posed by artists in response to the paradoxes of the Gorbals” (Baker 2006). The most successful of these works are those which do not seek to reinstate or memorialize a lost history or valorize fragments from that; rather they are those that use discontinuity and disruption as devices to place the past productively in the present. Rather than a layering of narratives or memories, there is a critical conflation as the artists intervene not to presume to create a brand identity for the “new” Gorbals but to permeate the past into narrative identities, accepting many of these are yet to be formed. This is both nuanced and quietly political as, often, the works manage to co-exist with, and indeed be part of, the meta-narrative of regeneration, while at the same time creating critical space for reflection on that very narrative, so integral as it has been to the identity of the Gorbals.

References Annan, T. 1877. Photographs of the Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow. Glasgow: Carbon Process Edition. —. 1900. The Old Closes & Streets of Glasgow. Photogravure edition. Intro. W. Young. Glasgow. Atkinson, D. 2007. “Kitsch Geographies and the Everyday Spaces of Social Memory.” Environment and Planning A 39: 521–40. Baker, M. 2006. Afterword, in R. Warwick (ed.), Arcade: Artists and Placemaking, 147–8. London: Black Dog. Belfiore, E. 2002. “Art as a Means of Alleviating Social Exclusion: Does it Really Work? A Critique of Instrumental Cultural Policies and Social Impact Studies in the UK.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 8(1): 91–106. —. 2006. “The Social Impact of the Arts, Myth or Reality?” In Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? edited by M. Mirza, 20–37. London: Policy Exchange. —. 2012. “‘Defensive instrumentalism’ and the legacy of New Labour’s cultural policies.” Cultural Trends 21(2): 103–11. Bell, D. 1997. “Paris Blues.” The New Republic 1 September, 32–6. Bhabha. H.K. 1993. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Bishop, C. 2006. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” Artforum, February. Bourriaud, N. 1996. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. Boyer, C. 1996. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainment. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brian, D. 2005. “From Good Neighbourhoods to Sustainable Cities: Social Science and the Social Agenda of the New Urbanism.” International Regional Science Review 28(2): 217–38. Chapain, C., P. Cooke, L. De Propos, S. MacNeill and J. Mateos-Garcia. 2010. Creative Clusters and Innovation: Putting Creativity on the Map. NESTA Research Report. Accessed March 2016. https://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/creative clusters and innovation.pdf Chase, M. and C. Shaw. 1989. The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cooke, P.N. and L. Lazzaretti (eds). 2008. Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Crang, M. and P. Travlou. 2001. “The City and Topologies of Memory.” Environment and Planning D: Space and Society 19: 161–77. Crinson, M. (ed.) 2005. Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. London: Routledge.

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Crinson, M., H. Hills and N. Rudd. 2002. Fabrications: New Art and Urban Memory in Manchester. Ex.cat. Curator, N. Rudd. Manchester: UMiM Publishing. Edensor, T. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg. Evans, G. 2009a. “Creative Cities, Creative Spaces and Urban Policies.” Urban Studies 46(5&6): 1003–40. —. 2009b. “From Cultural Quarters to Creative Clusters: Creative Spaces in the New City Economy.” In The Sustainability and Development of Cultural Quarters: International Perspectives, edited by M. Ledgner, 32–59. Stockholm: Institute of Urban History. Evans, G. and P. Shaw. 2004. The Contribution of Culture to Regeneration in the UK: A Review of the Evidence. London: London Metropolitan University. Eyerman, R. 2004. “The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory.” Acta Sociologica 47(2): 159– 69. Florida, R. 2003. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Forest, B. and Johnson, J. 2001. “Unravelling the Threads of History.” Accessed March 2016. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~crn/crn papers/Forest-Johnson.pdf. Forest, B. and J. Johnson. 2002. “Unravelling the Threads of History, 4. Soviet-era monuments and post-Soviet national identity in Moscow.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92: 524–47. Graham, B., G. Ashworth and J. Tunbridge. 2000. A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy. London: Arnold. Halbwachs, M. 1980 [1950]. The Collective Memory, trans. F.J. Ditter Jr and V.Y. Ditter, intro. M. Douglas. New York, Harper and Row. Halbwachs, M. 1992 [1950]. On Collective Memory, ed., trans., intro. L.A. Coser. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hall, T. and I. Robertson. 2001. “Public Art and Urban Regeneration: Advocacy, Claims and Critical Debates.” Landscape Research 26(1): 5–26. Harvey, D. 1989. The Condition of Post-Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hayden, D. 1995. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Heisenberg. 2000a. The Manual: Version 2.1. Commissioned by CSRP [unpublished]. —. 2000b. The Artworks Masterplan. Commissioned by CSRP [unpublished]. Huyssen, A. 2003. “Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory.” Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jedlowski, P. 2001. “Memory and Sociology: Themes and Issues.” Time and Society 10(1): 29–44. Jeffrey, M. 2006. “Somewhere Nowhere: Monika Sosnowska’s Gorbals.” In Arcade: Artists and Placemaking, edited by R. Warwick, 12–22. London: Black Dog. Johnson, N. 1995. “Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography and Nationalism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13: 51–65. —. 1999. “Framing the Past: Time, Space and the Politics of Heritage Tourism in Ireland.” Political Geography 18: 187–207. —. 2004. “Public Memory.” In A Companion to Cultural Geography, edited by N. Johnson, J. Duncan and R. Schein, 316–27. Oxford: Blackwell. Kester, G. 1995. “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art.” Afterimage 22(6): 1–15. —. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. California: University of California Press. Kirkwood, N. (ed.) 2001. Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape. London and New York: Spon Press. Kracauer, S. ([1932] 1987) Strassen in Berlin und Anderswo. Berlin: Das Arsenal Verlag. Lacy, S. (ed.) 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press. Landry, C. 2012. The Creative City: A toolkit for urban innovators, 2nd rev. ed. London: Routledge. Landzelius, M. 2003. “Commemorative Dis(re)membering: Erasing Heritage, Spatializing Disinheritance?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21: 195–221. Latz, P. 2016. Rust Red: The Landscape Park Duisburg Nord. Munich: Hirmer Verlag. Legg, S. 2004. “Contesting and Surviving Memory: Space, Nation, and Nostalgia in Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 481–504. Léith, C. 2006. “Home Ornaments.” In Arcade: Artists and Placemaking, edited by R. Warwick, 118–27. London: Black Dog. Lovell, N. 1998. Locality and Belonging. London: Routledge. Markusen, A. 2006. “Urban Development and the Politics of a Creative Class: Evidence from a Study of Artists.” Environment and Planning A 38(10): 1921–40. Marzaroli, O. 1987. Shades of Grey: Glasgow 1957–1987. Edinburgh. Massey, D. 1991. “The Political Place of Locality Studies.” Environment and Planning A 23: 267–81. McArthur, A. 2000. “Rebuilding Sustainable Communities: Assessing Glasgow’s Urban Village Experiment.” Town Planning Review 71(1): 51–70.

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McArthur, A. and H. Kingsley-Long. 1978 [1935]. No Mean City. London: Corgi. McCarthy, J. 2006. “Regeneration of Cultural Quarters: Public Art for Place Image or Place Identity?” Journal of Urban Design 11(2): 243–62. Miles, S. 2005. “‘Our Tyne’: Iconic Regeneration and the Revitalisation of Identity in NewcastleGateshead.” Urban Studies 42(5&6): 913–26. Mirza, M. 2006. Introduction to Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? edited by M. Mirza, 13–19. London: Policy Exchange. Misztal, B. 2004. “The Sacrilization of Memory.” European Journal of Social Theory 7(1): 67–84. Mommaas, H. 2004. “Cultural Clusters and the Post-industrial City: Towards the Remapping of Urban Cultural Policy.” Urban Studies 41(3): 507–32. Montgomery, J. 2003. “Cultural Quarters as Mechanisms for Urban Regeneration. Part 1: Conceptualising Cultural Quarters.” Planning Practice & Research 18(4): 293–306. Moran, J. 2004. “History, Memory and the Everyday.” Rethinking History 8: 51–68. Morgan, E. 1996. Collected Poems 1949-1987. Manchester: Carcanet Press. —. 2002. Cathures: New Poems 1997-2001. Manchester: Carcanet Press. Nora, P. 1989. “Between Memory and History: les lieux de mémoire.” Representations 26(7): 7–25. —. 1996. “Era of Commemoration.” In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 3: Symbols, edited by L.D. Kritzman, 609–37. New York: Columbia University Press. Peck, J. 2005. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(4): 740–70. Pollock, V.L. and R. Paddison. 2010. “Embedding Public Art: Practice, Policy and Problems.” Journal of Urban Design 15(3): 335–56. Pollock, V.L. and R. Paddison. 2014. “On Place-making, Participation and Public Art; The Gorbals, Glasgow.” Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability 7(1): 85–105. Ricoeur, P. 1991. “Narrative Identity,” trans. M. Muldoon, Philosophy Today 35(1): 73–81. Roodhouse, S. 2010. Cultural Quarters: Principles and Practice. Bristol: Intellect. Selwood, S. 2006. “Unreliable Evidence: The Rhetorics of Data Collection in the Cultural Sector.” In Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? edited by M. Mirza, 38–52. London: Policy Exchange. Sharp, J., V.L. Pollock and R. Paddison. 2005. “Just Art for a Just City: Public Art and Social Inclusion in Urban Regeneration.” Urban Studies 42(5): 1001–23. Stewlew, H., H. Prigann and V. David. (eds) 2000. Ecological Aesthetics: Art in Environmental Design: Theory and Practice. Berlin: Birkhäuser Architecture. Talen, E. 1999. “Sense of Community and Neighbourhood Form: An Assessment of the Social Doctrine of New Urbanism.” Urban Studies 36(8): 1361–79. Terdiman, R. 2003. “Given Memory: On Mnemonic Coercion, Reproduction and Invention.” In Regimes of Memory, edited by S. Radstone and K. Hodgkin, 186–201. London: Routledge. Tiesdell, S. and G. MacFarlane. 2007. “The Part and the Whole: Implementing Masterplans in Glasgow’s New Gorbals.” Journal of Urban Design 12(3): 407–33. Till, K. 2005. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tolia-Kelly, D. 2004. “Locating Processes of Identification: Studying the Precipitates of Re-memory Through Artifacts in the British Asian Home.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29: 314–29. Warwick, R. 2006. Arcade: Artists and Place-making. London: Black Dog. Wheelan, Y. 2002. “The Construction of Destruction of a Colonial Landscape: Monuments to British Monarchs in Dublin Before and After Independence.” Journal of Historical Geography 28: 508–33. —. 2003. Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, Iconography and the Politics of Identity. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Withers, C. 1996. “Place, Memory, Monument: Memorializing the Past in Contemporary Highland Scotland.” Ecumene 3: 325–44. Young, J.E. 1993. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER TWO CREATIVE ENGAGEMENTS WITH THE PAST, AESTHETICS AND MATTER IN RUINED SPACE TIM EDENSOR

In this chapter, I discuss how industrial ruins solicit affective, imaginative and sensual engagements with the past, experiences that accompany interactions with a wealth of diverse materialities and alternative aesthetic arrangements. I begin by suggesting that these encounters with derelict spaces and ruinous substances are not simply constituted by mere academic conjecture but are part of the multiple practices that centre upon ruins. I subsequently explore the fertile sensory impacts of moving through derelict factories, mills, workshops and warehouses that provoke unfamiliar sensations and invite a more child-like interaction with matter and space. I then more specifically explore the multiple material forms that emerge in ruined industrial spaces, before investigating the peculiar, ever-changing aesthetic qualities that may be witnessed. Finally, I focus on the ways in which, in defamiliarizing and critically interrogating the normative arrangements of the world, these ruinous characteristics cajole an alternative encounter with the past, one at variance to commodified and official forms of heritage. Though official political discourse often construes ruined industrial buildings to be devoid of practical use, dangerous or worthless while they crumble or await redevelopment, they are sites for a multiplicity of activities. These may be primarily practical, for instance, as ruins serve as sites for parking cars, retrieving useful building materials or dog walking, not to mention sites of shelter for the homeless. They are also venues for more pleasurable leisure pursuits, including active sports such as mountain-biking and climbing, and are spaces in which to consume drugs or alcohol, or engage in sexual activity away from the surveillant gaze of authority. They may be sites that host adult parties and offer plentiful materials with which children may build dens as part of the provision of opportunities for play. A frequent outcome of the unregulated characteristics of large interior surfaces is that they serve as a canvas for the creative work of graffiti writers, who produce “masterpieces” across expansive walls. Besides the intrusions of humans, they afford plentiful prospects for non-human organisms. Plants and fungus colonize the cracks and damp surfaces available, birds source nesting materials and safe sites in which to rear their young, and rodents, foxes and other mammals colonize what were once realms organized and ordered by humans. These varied uses confirm that ruins offer a range of affordances that attract people and non-humans, underlining their sensory and material qualities, attributes that are further transformed by the actions undertaken by these diverse agents. Further consideration about what lures people into industrial ruins raises the possibility of entering a sensory realm that contrasts with the often over-regulated world that lies outside. In designed and over-coded malls, heritage districts and housing developments, regulated soundscapes, tactilities, smellscapes and visual scenes predominate. Uncluttered spaces and master-planned aesthetics reduce visual diversity and the occurrence of odd and striking surprises. Aromatic “blandscapes” prevail across deodorized environments, and similarly, auditory techniques carve out “acoustic order”. (Tonkiss 2003, 304). Tactility is also regulated so that smooth surfaces prevail on walls and floors, so that bodies are undisturbed in performing seamless linear movement towards clearly demarcated destinations (see Edensor 2008). Accordingly, in the modern production of urban environments, the body is entrained to habitually experience a highly conditioned sensescape, replete with values about efficiency, a lack of distraction and the privileging of certain sensory experiences. For instance, a visual alertness towards commodities and advertising is encouraged while other sensory stimuli are repudiated, such as the disruptions afforded by strong smells and loud noises, and what is construed as excessive clutter. In these ways, the city becomes a highly ordered realm in which through the distribution of the sensible, the senses are conditioned to unreflexively apprehend highly predictable milieux (Rancière 2006). In this context, industrial ruins offer material settings in which all of these sensory norms are violated, revealing the antiseptic ordering of the ordinary built environment as well as the regulation of our own sensory experience. Unless it is preserved in a state of arrested decay, the ruin changes as it decays and falls apart, and so it is continually productive of changing sensual effects. This includes an ever-changing smellscape through which ruins can be considered as something of an “aromatopia” (Drobnick 2005). Powerful aromatic sensations in ruined spaces testify to normal banishment of strong botanical, industrial and decaying smells. Damp plaster, rotting wood and the often overpowering aroma of certain plants such as buddleia and the scent of pigeon droppings may suffuse space, and this might be supplemented by more acrid smells of burnt wood, damp plaster and decaying organic matter. The scents of industry also linger in the material remnants of ceramic, chemical or metallic production. Sonically, silence is often amplified: to walk through large abandoned industrial spaces offers a contrast with the noises of schoolchildren and traffic beyond the ruin. The constant background hum of the city diminishes, a quiescence that generates the working

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soundscape within that has now vanished forever. But in addition, an awareness of a quite delicate soundscape may emerge, one replete with creaking doors, sparse birdsong, the rustling movements of creatures and dripping water. It is through the haptic senses that the experience of the industrial ruin is most dramatically contrasted to that of the rest of the city (Edensor 2007), for the spatial recontextualization and condition of objects draws focused attention to their material qualities. This reveals the matter out of which they were made and foregrounds the sensuous work that was involved in their manufacture, provoking awareness of our alienation from the material worlds of desensualized urban space, the restricted sensory engagement perpetrated by the constant maintenance of space through removing excess matter and polishing surfaces. In the ruin that is falling apart, we may move amongst a clutter of multiple objects and fragments that successively distract and repulse. Moreover, we must stoop, bend and climb over or around stuff. As Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke assert, such an experience “can touch the most visceral registers of the self - it can trigger responses and affects that remind us of the body’s intensities and multiplicities” (2003, xiv). Visitors may wander along dormant production lines and on top of obsolete machines, spin round in office chairs, slide down chutes, ascend ladders and fire escapes, climb into attics or descend into murky cellars. Movement is unfamiliar, as are encounters with unfamiliar things and their affordances. Silken sheen or velvety textures, polished surfaces and smooth flooring are replaced by the rough, splintery textures of rotting floorboards, crunchy shards of glass, mouldering paper, rusting steel, decomposing fabric and moss and saplings. Such materialities invite touch, and are freely available to pick up, throw, smash or pull apart. This tactile engagement with things can release a flood of neglected sense-making capacities. These pleasurable forms of matter are joined by less enjoyable stuff such as viscous puddles of grease, piles of asbestos or concrete pits filled with oil and water, forcing the body onto the defensive. Thus the body may recoil or open up to the abject and pleasurable forms of matter that are prohibited in more regulated space. Accordingly, there are manifold opportunities to engage with the material world in a more playful, sensual fashion than is usually afforded. For in ruins, things can be destroyed and strewn around expressively in contradistinction to realms in which objects are typically beheld at a distance and may not be meddled with. In most ruins, windows have been smashed, doors ripped off hinges and piles of debris set alight, testifying to what might be considered to be a viscerally and sensually exciting engagement with matter usually prohibited elsewhere. Elsewhere, the visual is usually the dominant sense, shaped by an aesthetic control that privileges focus on key aesthetic themes, brands and objects. The windows and interiors of retail spaces, museum display cabinets and homes situate objects a proper distance from each other, where they are placed against uncluttered backgrounds and labelled to claim the attention of shoppers, visitors or neighbours. Difference is domesticated and contained, and excessive elements removed in the continuous keeping up of stable appearance. Such aesthetic codes are part of the mundane organization of matter, informing a common sense approach to ordering matter. Ruins profoundly violate such aesthetic schemes, with the mingling of usually dissimilar categories amidst general disarray as things move away from their assigned locations. Accordingly, unaccustomed or uncategorizable sights can jolt the gaze of the visitor, and a distanced visual apprehension is not feasible when attention must focus upon surrounding obstacles. As Latham puts it, this environment fosters a way of looking and experiencing the world in which the eye does not act to hold external objects in a firm contemplative gaze … it is a way of looking that feels its way round that place it finds rather than fixing that place with a distancing look … [it is] intensely tied up with the other sensations of the body (1999, 463).

In ruins, the normative arrangement of things is contested by other emergent aesthetics with which we are often unfamiliar, contributing to an encounter with materiality that confounds usual understandings and feelings. The process of decay rapidly acts to metamorphose the substance, surface and textures of the stuff out of which a building is composed. Painted walls peel away in random patterns, creating an ever-changing medley of colours as successive layers appear after years of concealment. Rain and wind quickly distress surfaces in the absence of maintenance, contributing to a prematurely distressed patina, and flora and fungi augment the range of hues and consistencies. Plaster blisters and crumbles, uncovering lath and bricks, and wires and pipes burst out of their confines. Concrete floors start to sag and fragment and layers of wooden decking laid on top may assume the form of static waves as water seeps underneath. Such degeneration tends to produce unplanned and unpredictable aesthetics, so that the standardized elements that industrial production endeavours to manufacture become individuated. Formerly indistinguishable products, stacked in loading bays but never to be exported out into the world for sale, each rot in distinctive ways. As things fall apart, absences announce themselves. Gaps appear as items are plundered or decompose, prompting speculations about what was there, with a geometric patch of much brighter paint or wallpaper revealing the loss. This redistribution also violates the usual material ordering of the city, the ways in which objects are carefully placed at an appropriate distance from each other and positioned against uncluttered backgrounds so that they cannot mingle. Through such organization, the excessive sensual and semiotic effects of objects can be purified to single meanings and purposes – as museum exhibits, commodities or ornaments. Such an arrangement eclipses mystery and “stabilises the identity of a thing” (Thomas 1991, 4). However, in ruins, things become repositioned by happenstance and become unfamiliar and enigmatic in their new locations, instigating conjecture about how they arrived there. Recontextualized in this way, cast adrift from its assigned setting, the unanticipated sculptural qualities of an object may emerge, its form accentuated, and this may be more pronounced as it becomes bent out of shape by unknown agencies. Rather than

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Figure 2.1 Canalside

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Figure 2.2 Textures

posing as utilitarian artefacts, things can appear as sensuous, peculiar forms or resemble archaeological vestiges. Whether alone or mingling with other objects, they conjure up fantastic, mystical or absurd events. This oddness can be exacerbated when things that would not expect to become companions appear together. These wild things and chaotic materialities, no longer subject to continual attention to prevent them from becoming matter out of place, contributes to a further aesthetic quality, whereby objects form strange juxtapositions and compounds, odd combinations that disrupt normative meanings (Edensor 2005a). Such combinations present a cryptic company of forms, textures, relationships and meanings, and make the world look more peculiar than it did before. In addition, as the artefact becomes unrecognizable as a discrete thing with clear borders that mark its separateness from the rest of the world, matter starts to mingle chaotically. Usually, we see little of the entropic processes that reduce matter to tiny particles because we consign that which has been labelled as useless or obsolete or excessive to dumps or landfill. In the ruin, however, all kinds of things become colonized by life forms. Trees sprout through concrete, fungi populate rotting timber, plants grow around crumbling brickwork, birds nest in old sheds and boxes. Occasionally, extraordinary aggregations constitute temporary compounds on objects’ passage to dissolution. These often unidentifiable forms of matter are supplemented by the host of material entities scattered across derelict industrial spaces that are entirely unfamiliar to those lacking knowledge of manufacturing processes. Would-becommodities lie dormant in loading bays or on conveyor belts, unfinished and enigmatic, without the addition of other components. Unknown machine parts, tools, liquids and solids spread across abandoned shop floors, and oddly shaped residues and off-cuts resulting from production contribute to a glut of mysterious forms and strange forms of matter. The absence of the occupants of these industrial spaces who would have been wholly familiar with these materialities testifies to the disappearance of the knowledgeable and skilful practices that were habituated to working on, assembling, sorting and selling these things. Signs of the bodies that inhabited these spaces, sensing their functional environments, moved easily across familiar rooms in which different stages of production were carried out,

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are everywhere in ruins. These bodies are apparent by their absence next to the silent machines, workbenches, filing cabinets and unplugged telephones that remain. Discarded tools implicate the embodied skills of workers, conjuring up the habitual grasp required to wield heavy implements or the operational skills that emerged from the intimate hybridity of worker and machine. What is becoming debris, or is already in a distressed state, was once enfolded into the mundanity of a shared everyday or work and sociability. Even where objects of production are absent, cryptic words scrawled on walls and posters that itemize components and models linger to signify the loss of applied knowhow.

Figure 2.3 Desk

These things stimulate a kind of remembering that acknowledges the passing of the industrial production and its embeddedness in place but also recognizes the alterity of the past. The encounter with these objects and materialities offers a historical experience which is sensual and imaginative (Edensor 2005b), in contradistinction to the potted histories, information boards and authoritative guide books that tend to proliferate at designated heritage sites. Such attempts to banish ambiguity and order the history of places are disturbed by disorderly spaces such as the ruins I have discussed. The ghosts who reside in these ruins do not rest quietly. If we look carefully, such ghosts seethe through most cities, in those spaces that are more marginal, in attics, garages, underground, in car boot sales, in edgelands and wastelands. Though desires to maintain order are dominant in most settings, it is a fantasy to believe that such ordering can be total. Instead, peculiar items and forms of matter lurk in less regulated spaces, “a spectral, interstitial residue” which haunts dominant ways of seeing and being (Stewart 2002, 356). So although it is often over-coded and over-regulated, the city contains countless scraps from which alternative stories might be assembled. As Michel de Certeau asserts, “stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris” (De Certeau and Giard 1998, 107).

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Figure 2.4 Letters

These more intense affective and sensory engagements with matter in ruins stimulate a critical awareness about the diverse properties of the objects encountered, and of the relentless ordering that secures the stability of the material worlds that we inhabit most of the time, practices that prevent such ruinous effects. The key practices that prevent material decay and erasure are the largely unheralded endeavours of maintenance and repair. Accordingly, a ruin may be defined as a building for which maintenance and repair has ceased because decisions are made that such structures possess no current or future value (Edensor 2016). In highly ordered settings, the rhythms of maintenance, cleaning, inspection and treatment are incessant. Heating engineers, pest-controllers, lighting designers, electricians, plumbers, tilers, glazers and double-glazers, air conditioning workers and lift repair workers continuously restore systems that have failed, and even more critically, cleaners sweep away the debris and dirt of the day that if left unchecked would exercise ruinous agencies. Such practices of repair and maintenance provide a powerful illusion of material durability. Yet because pervasive maintenance is an impossibility, and though ruination is most evident in derelict space, incipient ruination is found everywhere, though its material manifestation is highly uneven and this is dependent upon the values attributed to particular architectural styles, technologies of industrial production and geographical locales. In certain cities that have not succeeded or have been only partially successful in producing economic restructuring and regeneration, obscure material fragments, strange remnants, and distressed matter, as well as larger constellations of ruin, pervade the landscape. Such materialities especially linger in less unheralded urban spaces: back alleys, alongside canals and across railway embankments, in terraced and local authority housing areas. While such signs are often conceived as signifiers of anomie, stasis and decadence, they can be interpreted otherwise as offering a sensual and immediate encounter with the past that is denied elsewhere where urban regeneration has obliterated such historical traces. These remnants make obvious Kevin Lynch’s contention that the city is subject to continuous recomposition through the accumulation of overlapping traces from successive periods, each trace contributing to a “collage of time” (1972, 171).

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Figure 2.5 Pipes

Figure 2.6 Concrete floor

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Figure 2.7 Paint and ferns

Cobbles burst through the asphalt on roads that have not been resurfaced for years, conjuring up a vanished world of horses, carts, and stables. Weeds sprout on the sides of buildings and a wider variety of plants grow more profusely on wastelands and in the unkempt spaces between buildings. At sites where recently abandoned industrial sites have been cleared of their buildings, concrete ground floor layouts extend, and are supplemented by other fragments of walls, power supply and more obscure functions. On the sides of buildings, old adverts remain, sometimes illegible

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and sometimes championing a long-vanished enterprise or product. Such everyday fragments and traces add to the historical, sensual and aesthetic qualities of the city. Though rarely heralded, signposted and interpreted by heritage professionals, the absences they signify can be sensed, conjectured about and affectively communicated. They are not the subjects of official or expert accounts. Instead they supplement, and perhaps challenge, these narratives in offering a different engagement with the past, offering some compensation for post-industrial cities that have failed to attract much inward investment.

References De Certeau, M. and L. Giard. 1998. “Ghosts in the City.” In The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking, edited by M. de Certeau, L. Giard and P. Mayol. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Drobnick, J. 2005. “Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions of Art and Architecture.” In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, edited by D. Howes. Oxford: Berg. Edensor, T. 2005a. “Waste Matter – The Debris of Industrial Ruins and the Disordering of the Material World: The Materialities of Industrial Ruins.” Journal of Material Culture 10(3): 311–32. —. 2005b. “The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23(6): 829–49. —. 2007. “Sensing the Ruin.” The Senses and Society 2(2): 217–32. —. 2008. “Walking through ruins.” In Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, edited by T. Ingold and J. Vergunst. Aldershot: Ashgate. —. 2016. “Incipient Ruination and the Precarity of Buildings: Materiality, Non-human and Human Agents, and Maintenance and Repair.” In Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Spaces, edited by M. Bille and T. Sorensen. London: Routledge. Hawkins, G. and S. Muecke. 2003. “Introduction: Cultural Economies of Waste.” In Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, edited by G. Hawkins and S. Muecke. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. Latham, A. 1999. “The Power of Distraction: Distraction, Tactility and Habit in the Work of Walter Benjamin.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17: 451–73. Lynch, K. 1972. What Time is this Place? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Rancière, J. 2006. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum. Stewart, K. 2002. “Scenes of life/ Kentucky Mountains.” Public Culture 14(2): 349–59. Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, PA: Harvard University Press. Tonkiss, F. 2003. “Aural Postcards: Sound, Memory and the City.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by M. Bull and L. Back. Oxford: Berg.

CHAPTER THREE AFTER COAL: RECLAMATION AND ERASURE IN THE GREAT NORTH COALFIELD IAN THOMPSON

I was once a landscape architect involved in land reclamation. Now I am a photographer, looking at derelict, reclaimed and redeveloped land, and I see it all with different eyes.

Pathology When Lee Hall, writer of Billy Elliot and The Pitman Painters, first came back to his native Tyneside after time at Cambridge University and in America, he was surprised at the difference he found in the landscape: The slag heaps were grassed over, the winding gears were nowhere to be seen, and when we spoke to people they said, “Oh, that was the first thing they did.” There was a cultural cleansing of the entire area. They made it impossible for the industry to be brought back. (Hattenstone 2014)

The closure of the deep mines, a process which had been underway for decades, but which was accelerated by the defeat of the National Union of Miners in the strike of 1984, was swiftly followed by the reclamation of their sites. This programme is often described in official documents as an unalloyed success. The National Audit Office’s Regenerating the English Coalfields (2009) praised work by the Department for Communities and Local Government which reduced the proportion of derelict land in coalfield areas from 25 per cent in 1998 to 11 per cent in 2007. Fiftyfour sites out of 107 had been put “back to working use”, either as public space or to enable private development of a total of 2,700 homes and 1.1 million square metres of employment space. The programme, said the report, helped to make former mining areas “more attractive places to live and work”, but it added that “many remain among the most deprived areas in England”.

Figure 3.1 Colliery Guardian map showing mines in Northumberland in 1951

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Figure 3.2 Colliery Guardian map showing mines in Co Durham in 1951

The official message, therefore, is that the physical reclamation has been successful, while economic regeneration has been harder to achieve. But in the process, most of the above-ground evidence of this once massive industry has been erased. Writing about similar conditions in the South Yorkshire coalfield, the ecologist and theologian John Rodwell (2008) stated: The absence of lineage in landscape may thus be as important as exile from it, such that disjunctions can uproot us even if we do not ourselves move. Now, in individuals, we would regard memory loss as a pathology worthy of concern, our care, and of medication, yet little attention is being given to the extent to which community memory goes unprompted in landscapes devoid of reminders.

Moreover, research by Katy Bennett (2013) has shown how regeneration agencies have stripped coal mining from promotional material, deliberately underplaying the area’s industrial past. It is as if forgetting is governmental policy.

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Complicity Who was Lee Hall referring to when he said that “they” made it impossible for coal mining to be brought back? He seems to imply that the same Conservative government that had beaten the National Union of Miners wanted to erase all traces of the former industry from the landscape. I suspect that a good PhD could be written on the subject; but it is also evident from the historical record that derelict mines were being reclaimed in the decades before the Miners’ Strike. Getting rid of derelict land was an imperative for local Labour politicians who saw it as a blight on their communities and an obstacle to attracting the sorts of investment which could provide jobs for their constituents. While all of this was going on, I was a landscape architect, working initially for Tyne and Wear County Council, then later for Gateshead Metropolitan Council. Both authorities employed multi-disciplinary land reclamation teams which included civil engineers and landscape architects and I was involved in various ways with reclamation work. At the time, it all seemed very virtuous. After all, hadn’t J.B. Priestly eloquently described the squalor of the northeastern landscape in his English Journey (1933) and suggested that he’d never seen a place more in need of tidying up? The reclamation teams were doing just that, and surely that must place landscape architects on the side of the angels? I still believe that the remediation of often dangerous and toxic sites was worthwhile work, but over time I have become more critical of the profession to which I belong, in part because I have been a teacher of landscape architects for over 20 years and have had ample opportunity to reflect on the values and underlying assumptions that a training in landscape architecture passes on. John Rodwell criticizes the “unchallenging domesticated versions of the environment that are produced by landscape designers” for being the kind of non-place which is, in anthropologist Mark Augé’s phrase, “curiously everywhere and nowhere” (Augé 1997) and I am afraid that some of the reclamation work undertaken in the coalfields could come under that description. The good PhD I mentioned earlier might also question the funding regimes that were in place for reclamation work, because I suspect that the budgets did not always stretch much beyond spreading soil, seeding grass and planting trees.

Edgelands When I trained as a landscape architect in the late 1970s, one of the bits of jargon bandied about was “the urban fringe” or sometimes “the urban-rural fringe”. Sites on the fringe were generally denigrated by planners, architects and landscape architects as neither good town nor good countryside. The attitude was that “something should be done about them”, generally meaning that they should be physically tidied up. This might mean that they should be prepared for development or it could mean that they became places managed for recreation. In Britain the Countryside Act of 1968 opened the way for the creation of “country parks” on the edge of built-up areas. These were places, usually managed by local authorities, where visitors could enjoy an informal, rural atmosphere without having to go deep into the wider countryside. Turning former industrial sites like chemical factories, pit heaps or quarries into country parks was stock-in-trade for my generation of landscape architects. But even while I was working on such projects, I had some doubts. There are two ways of transforming a landscape. One is to physically change it, through processes of clearing, scraping, earthmoving, planting, building, and so on. The other is to change the way it is perceived, which might not call for any heavy machinery at all. After all, artists such as William Gilpin, Francis Towne and J.M.W. Turner and poets such as Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge brought about a complete change in the way that mountainous scenery was perceived and valued in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Just such a revision of taste seems to be underway. The environmental writer Marian Shoard coined a new name for these fringe landscapes in an essay entitled “Edgelands” which was published in Jenifer Jenkins’ Remaking the Landscape. Here is part of Shoard’s description of this kind of landscape: Often vast in area, though hardly noticed, it is characterised by rubbish tips and warehouses, superstores and derelict industrial plant, office parks and gypsy encampments, golf courses, allotments and fragmented, frequently scruffy, farmland. All these heterogeneous elements are arranged in an unruly and often apparently chaotic fashion against a background of unkempt wasteland frequently swathed in riotous growths of colourful plants, both native and exotic. This peculiar landscape is only the latest version of an interfacial rim that has always separated settlements from the countryside to a greater or lesser extent. In our own age, however, this zone has expanded vastly in area, complexity and singularity. Huge numbers of people now spend much of their time living, working or moving within or through it. Yet for most of us, most of the time, this mysterious no man’s land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists. (Shoard 2002, 117)

Shoard thinks there are reasons why the edgelands “could and should follow the suburbs from the dark pit of universal disdain into the sunlit uplands of appreciation, if not acclaim”. She was one of the first writers to find positive values in their chaotic, unplanned messiness. The edgelands are the places where unneighbourly uses like sewage farms, motorway interchanges and car-breaking yards are sited and she admires their naked functionality, which is the antithesis of the polite, tidy, picturesque norms prevailing elsewhere. She notes that ecologists have found that derelict land can be rich in wildlife and that the subversive possibilities of interfacial land explains why children often value it more than other groups, as it offers an unfettered and stimulating place to play. In his book Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005) the geographer Tim Edensor celebrated the neglected sites of

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industrial ruins, observing that these places offer an aesthetics of disorder, surprise and sensuality, as well as opportunities for playful and transgressive activity. He is concerned lest planning policies which favour new development eradicate such evocative sites. Shoard had also been troubled by this possibility. She wrote that what was “threatening for this landscape, which relishes what other landscapes vomit up and which laughs at current notions of taste, are attempts, also underway, to castrate it by turning it into the sort of landscape considered more desirable”. Shoard saw the paradox in getting planners involved in the edgelands, yet nevertheless thought this needed to happen: “In the context of the edgelands, we need to see the planner not as the shaper of an entire environment but as a handmaiden, who helps along a universe he or she does not seek to control.” Ultimately she thought that what was needed was for artists to kindle an interest in the edgelands, so that they become places that are respected and appreciated for what they are. Black and white photography, television, film, sculpture, painting and poetry could contribute much. Some artists have painted features of the interface as well as scruffy landscapes occurring elsewhere, such as shacks and broken down fencing, but it would be good to see the development of an interest in the interface per se by individual artists or groups of them (Shoard 2002, 144)

Figure 3.3 Ian Thompson, Rubble Mound, Mainsforth Colliery, Ferryhill, County Durham, 2015.

In the decade which followed publication of her essay, two poets who had grown up in and around the edgelands of Manchester and Liverpool, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, responded to this call to arms. They borrowed Shoard’s neologism for the title of their 2011 book Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness. The edgelands for them were not places of alienation. They remembered them from childhood explorations as a kind of Arcadia, and as poets in a lyrical English tradition they were drawn to celebrate such sites as scrapyards, sewage farms, landfills and ruins, rather than to be repulsed by them. My interest in former coalmines owes something to all of this. I set myself the task of surveying the former coalfield photographically to find out what had happened to the sites of the former pits. This mission overlapped with the sort of explorations undertaken by Edensor, Farley and Symmons Roberts, because many former mine sites, perhaps the most interesting ones, remain derelict. Places like Mainsforth Colliery in Ferryhill, Co, Durham, abandoned in 1968, Heworth Colliery, near Gateshead, shut in 1974 and Fenwick’s Pit, between Backworth and Earsdon in North Tyneside, closed since 1973, are redolent of the pathos of redundancy, but they are rich in textures and detail. As Edensor has noted, the process of decay individuates objects. As they become rusted, crumbling or broken, they become unique and brim-full with character. They also bear the marks of their own histories, around which narratives can be woven. Many processes, natural and human, have worked on these places since the last shift

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of miners left. The buildings at Heworth are covered in graffiti and the words “The Zone” have been painted on a chimneystack, a relic of a period when the site was used for paintball games. Buildings at Mainsforth Colliery, near Ferryhill, became home to a business selling giant tyres, but now that enterprise has also gone, though tyres are dropped across the site as if abandoned after a gargantuan game of quoits.

Erasure Sometimes objects on site can suggest whole histories. My favourite is a pile of brick rubble, also at Mainsforth. It is fairly evident, looking at the constituents of this heap, that it was once a building, probably bearing a strong family resemblance to other buildings on the site. Why was this one demolished, and the others left? Perhaps it had become too dangerous, too likely to collapse upon an interloper. The perimeter fence was breached long ago and the site must be a playground for local youth as well as a magnet for photographers, urban explorers and psycho-geographers. Demolition was not the end of the process, however. It merely accelerated the speed with which nature was repossessing the site. The rubble has been colonized by pioneer species such as foxglove, willow-herb and birch. The whippy trees look as if they have been growing there for about five years. A board by the main gates says that the site is for sale for housing development, but if the houses don’t come, the woodlands will, and the ruins of the buildings will be cracked apart by roots and smothered in mosses and leaf mould. When nature takes back a site, it is usually possible to see what it once was. That is often not the case when the site is reclaimed and redeveloped. First the site will be cleared, buildings demolished and the rubble carted away or buried. Gargantuan scraper machines may remodel its contours. Roads will be laid, foundations built, topsoil spread. On the Durham coast, just north of the town of Seaham, there is a newish housing estate, well designed in its way. The former colliery has become the location for the upmarket East Shore Village (fig. 3.4). The quality of the detailing and planting in the external spaces tells me that a landscape architect was certainly involved, and the site is scattered with a series of artworks collectively known as Jewels of the Sea, their forms inspired by microscopic sea creatures. There is very little to connect this new place with the mine that used to stand there.

Figure 3.4 Ian Thompson, East Shore Village, Seaham, formerly Vane Tempest colliery, 2015.

Precedents The year 1975 is generally acknowledged as a turning point in landscape photography. It was the year of the New Topographics exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in New York. Subtitled Photographs of a ManAltered Landscape, the show featured the work of a number of upcoming photographers who had turned away from the traditional pursuit of transcendental beauty in supposedly natural landscapes (exemplified by Ansel Adams) and

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chosen everyday landscapes of suburban sprawl and unromanticized industry as their subjects. The exhibition included the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher who continued to add to their typology of industrial buildings throughout their careers. An element in the Bechers’ motivation was the need to document these buildings before they were lost from the landscape, because they recognized that heavy industry would soon be disappearing from Europe and North America. Their images eschewed picturesque devices as they attempted to portray structures in as neutral and unsentimental a way as possible. Their images owe something to the practices of archaeological photographers whose principal aim is to present artefacts in all their detail. Their typologies included factory halls, cooling towers and gasometers, but also several sets of winding towers (England 1966–97; Germany 1968–97; Germany 1972–83; Germany and France 1965–1982; Germany and France 1967–83; Belgium, Germany and France 1965–96; Pennsylvania 1974–78). They also carried out more extensive photographic surveys of individual mines, including the Friedrich der Grosse Mine, Herne (1978) and the Waltrop Mine, Waltrop (1982), both in Germany’s Ruhr region. The Bechers were clearly interested in the same sorts of places that interested me, but they got to them while the mines were still in operation, or at least before they had been demolished. Although the idea of a typology of reclaimed sites appealed to me, it presented too many problems, not least that there was very often nothing remaining to train my camera upon. However, in the course of my project, I did photograph a number of memorials to pits that had closed and I approached them in a way somewhat similar to that of the Bechers. Memorialization is a compelling subject in its own right and one that I might return to in future work. The attempts to memorialize the mining industry, paradoxically, reveal the extent to which it has been expurgated from the landscape. In Britain, John Davies, a landscape photographer belonging to the Amber Collective in Newcastle, photographed industrial and post-industrial landscape in black-and-white using a large-format camera. Like the Bechers he eschewed the picturesque approach; Liz Wells has said that he pursued an “anti-pastoral pictorial” (2013, 170). His reputation has been built on this. In particular, he was commissioned to undertake a survey of the Durham coalfield which was first shown in 1983, a year before the momentous strike of 1984. Although he photographed pits that were still working, his images showed both the impact of mining upon the landscape and foreshadowed the rapid decline in the industry that would follow the miners’ defeat. I did not wish to replicate Davies’ photographs, which in their monotone starkness seemed to belong to an age that has passed. This was one of the reasons why I opted to work in colour; another was that I wanted to represent the “greening” (either by man or by nature left alone) of these former industrial sites. Another influence was the American photographer, John Pfahl, whose Waterfalls series was shown in 1992. Pfahl took scenic views of picturesque waterfalls but used a lens wide enough to show neighbouring industrial buildings, such as disused mills and warehouses. Part of the appeal of waterfalls is that they appear to be natural, but Pfahl showed that they have often been yoked to industry. In some of his pictures there is a dissonance between the romantic pastoralism of the waterfall and the functional utility of the industry. Another photographer of uneasy post-industrial sites is Richard Misrach, who has worked in the American West and is celebrated for his pictures of nuclear test sites and bomb craters. Here again, there is a dissonance between the pictorial beauty of the landscapes shown and what we know, or read from cues in the images, of his subject matter. The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky works in a similar way, though his photographs of disturbed and polluted landscapes are often sublime and/or beautiful (in the eighteenth century meanings of these aesthetic terms). Burtynsky might be thought to use aesthetics to draw viewers into consideration of the harm done by human agency, though he is also vulnerable to the charge that by aestheticizing the degradation of landscapes, he makes the processes that degrade the landscape more acceptable. This is a dilemma at the centre of all post-industrial photography, including my own. Nearer to home, I was influenced by the work of one of my tutors, John Kippin, particularly his series Futureland (1989), Cold War Pastoral (2001) and North and South (2007) and Futureland Now (2012). Kippin’s work recognizes the traditions of pictorial landscape, but interrogates the conditions that produce particular sorts of landscape, including militarized landscapes and postindustrial sites. He often photographs a resonant object, such as a wrecked aircraft, a ship or an abandoned piece of machinery, within a landscape, drawing attention to the object by placing it centrally. I did not set out to imitate his approach, yet I found, when looking at contact sheets or reviewing my images on screen, that I had sometimes done the same and that these had a particular power. I came to see them less as landscapes but more as portraits of objects within a landscape to which they were related.

Survey I knew that I would not have time to locate and photograph every coal mine site there had ever been. The Durham Mining Museum maintains a website (http://www.dmm.org.uk/mindex.htm) which gives access to a wealth of information, including a series of maps published in 1951 as part of the Colliery Guardian’s “Guide to the Coalfields” which covered both Northumberland and Durham and also collieries in Cumberland. These maps (figures 3.1 and 3.2) identified all of the pits that were active in 1951, a number in excess of 300. They did not include pits that closed prior to that date and so some of the pits which feature prominently in mining history as the sites of notorious disasters were not included, such places as Felling, Heaton Main and New Hartley, for example. The year 1951 struck me as an appropriate starting point as it would allow me to follow the post-war decline in deep mining and the general deindustrialization of the North-East of England. I was born in 1955, so this momentous sea-change in the fortunes and character of the region has taken place within my own lifetime.

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A brief reconnaissance suggested that these 300 collieries had met many different fates: some, like Vane Tempest, had become housing estates, while others are now business parks, or country parks with lakes and woodlands. One former pit heap is now a ski slope, while the site of a former pithead baths is now the location for the Angel of the North. I decided that I would attempt to visit and photograph 10 per cent of the locations identified in the Colliery Guardian maps. When doing qualitative research sociologists often talk about “sampling for range”, the idea being to capture as wide a range of conditions as possible, rather than attempting to produce statistically representative data. I set out to do something similar, planning my trips to visit as wide a range of different types of site as possible, and also to visit a variety of geographical and topographical locations within the coalfield. Part of my purpose would be to document a significant chapter of landscape change. The project would consider whether these reclaimed sites are “non-places” or whether they have developed distinctive new character. In the beginning it seemed that some of the former pit sites might be difficult to locate, particularly if there had been wholesale reclamation or redevelopment. I was able to supplement the information from Durham Mining Museum with historical O.S. maps from Edina Digimap, which was particularly helpful because it was often possible to trace the growth and decline of a particular pit. I bought a handheld GIS, thinking that I might have to locate the positions of shafts and former buildings on site. In fact I never used it because I discovered the capabilities of the much more user-friendly Google Maps. Once I had the pit location from the historical O.S. maps, it was generally very easy to locate sites using the aerial photography on Google Maps. Reclaimed pit heaps have a characteristic vegetation texture which is easy to identify. In most cases the sites were bounded by or close to public roads, so it was usually possible to carry out some desk-based reconnaissance using Google’s Street View before physically visiting the site.

Findings I was able to meet my target of photographing 10 per cent (i.e. 30) of the sites identified on the 1951 maps, though only 17 images were selected for my MA portfolio. Since then I have returned to a handful of sites to re-photograph them with a large-format camera. While undertaking this work several things became much clearer. The first is that there is a considerable range of physical outcomes for abandoned pit sites. Some of those I visited had been comprehensively reclaimed and turned into a different kind of landscape entirely (e.g. Silksworth, which is now a municipal sports complex with an artificial ski slope). A number had been grassed over and turned into country parks, with various degrees of management and different levels of use (e.g. Rising Sun). At a few (e.g. F Pit in Washington, Woodhorn) buildings have been preserved for heritage purposes, though the spoil heaps have been reclaimed. One site, at Eighton Banks, has achieved iconic status, because for 16 years it has been the location of Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, a sculpture which is now as much a symbol of the region as Durham Cathedral or the Tyne Bridge. My second observation is that there are characteristic features which occur across the range of sites, connecting them in a skein of family resemblances. The typical memorials (figures 3.5 and 3.6) are an aspect of this, but one also finds old colliery buildings converted to new uses (a riding school, a scrap yard, a builders’ merchants), a characteristic scrubby vegetation on old spoil heaps, galvanized palisade fencing, low hills that almost blend with the surrounding landscape (but not quite). Photography is able to draw attention to these similarities. At a time when the industrial past of the region is being erased and forgotten, a collection of such images allows viewers to reflect not only on what has changed, but also what such sites still hold in common. Photography can record what is apparently solid, but also what is fleeting. Taken as a whole, the images show that landscapes are never “finished” but always in process. My work overlaps with Edensor’s to the extent that many of the sites I have photographed remain in a ruinous condition, but I was always interested in reclaimed and redeveloped sites as well. All of these sites, whether derelict or redeveloped, are ambiguous. What are we to make of a dilapidated building which is used for both destructive play (vandalism) and creative play (graffiti)? What should we think of a comfortable housing development which contains no references to or traces of the history of the site upon which it sits? Where my work differs is that it is focussed upon the post-mining history of the sites, including any reclamation or redevelopment which has occurred. Arguably the defeat of the miners in the strike of 1984 accelerated the rate at which the deep mines were closed. For a mixture of motives, many of the traces of mining were erased. On the positive side, pit heaps which might have been unsafe or unsightly were removed. On the negative side, the rapid removal of the evidence of mining could be seen as a political act, a statement that mining would never return. There was also a push for economic redevelopment and it was felt, across the political spectrum, that the remnants of mining were unsightly and created a bad impression which would deter inward investment. One way of understanding the fates of these sites would be to divide them into categories: derelict, reclaimed, redeveloped, and remembered. Another would be to name the variety of processes which have brought about their current conditions: abandoning, leaving, clearing, erasing, fencing off, cleansing, repairing, hiding, changing, transforming, improving, preserving, celebrating, remembering etc. The work I have done thus far has reinforced my view that the mines were not so much tidied up as tidied away. While it was important that the pollution and the dangerous dereliction were removed, perhaps a lot more of the industrial heritage of the region could have been retained. This is certainly the way things have been done elsewhere, particularly in Germany’s Ruhr valley, where, for example, the old steelworks at Duisburg Nord has been kept and turned into a landscape park (see Kirkwood 2001). To an administrative or business-focussed mind, it might seem that the redeveloped sites are more valuable than those which remain derelict, but as Tim Edensor’s research into the use of abandoned industrial sites for recreation and play

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suggests, there are many different ways of valuing and finding meanings in these sites and a redeveloped site can be a good deal more sterile than one which has been left to the forces of nature (Edensor 2005). As Edensor has written on his website “British Industrial Ruins”: These ruins are largely understood especially by bureaucrats, city promoters and planners as offensive to the character and aesthetics of the city. The sooner these scars on the landscape are demolished and swept away, effaced in the name of civic order, the better. They are matter out of place, a continuing rebuke to attempts to render urban space productive, smooth and regular.

As a landscape architect, I was often on the side of smoothness and order. Yet Edensor also says that: “ruins are places in which the visible and the invisible intersect, full of signs that they are haunted. Following the ghosts enables us to identify the traces of the forgotten people and places, and in so doing we are able to form alternative stories and memories about neglected areas of history.” I find myself in sympathy with these sentiments.

Figure 3.5 Ian Thompson, Winding wheel monument, Ryton, Tyne and Wear, 2015.

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Figure 3.6 Ian Thompson, Cage mining memorial, Easington, Co Durham, 2015.

References Augé, M. 1997 [1995] Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Bennett, K. 2013. “Emotion and Place Promotion: Passionate About a Former Coalfield.” Emotion, Space and Society 8: 1–10. Edensor, T. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. London: Berg. —. n.d. “British Industrial Ruins.” Accessed 09 June 2016. http://www.sci-eng.mmu.ac.uk/british industrial ruins/ Kirkwood, N. 2001. Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape. London: Taylor and Francis. Farley, P. and M. Symmons Roberts. 2011. Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness. London: Jonathan Cape. Hattenstone, S. 2014. “Lee Hall: Spielberg, Scargill and Me.” Interview in The Guardian, Monday 10 March 2014. National Audit Office. 2009. Regenerating the English Coalfields. Priestley, J.B. 1997 [1933]. English Journey. London: The Folio Society. Rodwell, J.S. 2008. “Forgetting the Land.” Journal of Christian Ethics 21(2): 269–86. Shoard, M. 2002. “Edgelands.” In Remaking the Landscape, edited by J. Jenkins, 117–46. London: Profile Books. Wells, L. 2013. Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. London: I.B. Taurus.

CHAPTER FOUR POST POST-INDUSTRIAL: SOME THOUGHTS ON FUTURELAND, PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANDSCAPE JOHN KIPPIN

Since its initial conceptualization the idea of a “post-industrial landscape” is an enduring one. It aligns the collapse of modernism with a contemporary re-evaluation of Positivist philosophies (as the defining movement of the late twentieth century) and provides a useful platform from which to consider the positioning of landscape as an art practice and as a cultural palimpsest, providing visual evidence of our economic structures, culture imperatives and of society in general. On the ground, much of what constitutes “post-industrial landscape” has matured into something resembling a post-post-industrial landscape, a condition that struggles to synthesize form and function in a meaningful way when compared to the relatively straightforward iconic images of industrial design and function. This new landscape is the province of the developer and the unfettered free market economy and it aligns more readily with high modernism viewed together with earlier technocratic ideas manifest in the post-world war era and developed by successive governments throughout the so-called “white-hot era of new technologies” in the 1960s and 70s. How, then, to consider and to represent these major developments within a visual arts context? What might these considered responses be? Is a response important and appropriate, and how do we make it coherent, accessible and interesting, through the various media that we favour?

Figure 4.1 John Kippin, Dunstan coal

Staithes.

When I first approached making images in the North-East, the representational legacy had been a nostalgic view of working-class life and a celebration of the industries native to the North of England, such as coalmining and shipbuilding. This tradition grew to prominence in the Victorian era both through local painters such as William Bell Scott and photographers such as Lyddell Sawyer. This mode of representation is still strongly evident, and is characterized through populist painters such as Bob Olley’s images, displayed on the Metro system, of “Andy Capped”

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workmen ably supported by an invisible “her indoors” – I am not comparing the quality of the work here, merely the subject matter and an unfortunate (and, I am sure, quite unintended) legacy of the excellent Ashington school of painters. In some ways, this approach had echoed the Socialist Realism so favoured by the Soviet Union particularly during the era of Stalin. Much of this photography was a celebration and an appreciation of local, mostly workingclass culture, but was, in the main, nostalgic in its worldview and its effect. Photography in this period tended to follow along such stylistic guidelines and when exhibited, was invariably small scale and monochrome offering little to excite the eye and less to stimulate and to engage the intellect. Undoubtedly much of this photography was instrumental in informing the public but the aesthetic strategies employed were rooted in the technology and documentary approach outlined by people such as John Grierson and Humphrey Spender in the 1930s. I had been one of the new generation of fine art students who had attended art schools in the sixties and seventies and believed that art has an important function in engaging the world culturally and politically. This was mediated and manifested by adoption of emerging aesthetic strategies such as conceptual art and performance art as well as adapting the new media of photography and film for concerns more traditionally linked to painting and sculpture. The exhibition Futureland was an attempt to change the way that the North of England had been represented and to focus on a whole set of new issues. These new issues were developing as a result of the Conservative government of Mrs Thatcher (although it would be wrong to think that she was their sole reason for existence). The deindustrialization process happened quickly, almost before there was really an attempt to reflect upon what was occurring and to understand what its consequences might be. As the North was the first area of the UK to industrialize, so it was the first to de-industrialize, leaving in its wake a broken environmental and economic legacy evidenced by deserted shipyards, coal pits and factories.

Figure 4.2 John Kippin, Fort George.

A new landscape had emerged, a post-industrial landscape readily visible around our previously industrialized centres. The governments of the day moved speedily to erase the evidence of what went before. It was always going to be a sensitive reminder to its inhabitants of the rapid removal of a way of life for many and the government moved quickly to eradicate most of the industrial remnants as they were concerned that worker’s takeovers would become an issue for them and things might slip out of their control. Futureland became a way to look at these events and to frame them in order to encourage reflection of the region in a new critical and reflexive context. The result was an exhibition

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that borrowed from the legacy of artists such as John Martin and John Constable and (looking further back) the Dutch landscape paintings of the seventeenth century and sought to re-examine the representational legacy evident within landscape (which was considered to be “non-political”) and to establish this subject matter as a critical one – something that could invoke the spirit of Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash, whilst at the same time more directly addressing important political, social and economic concerns, and opposing the dominant mode of representation of neo-romanticism developed as a response to the English Lake poets made popular by prominent photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

Figure 4.3 John Kippin, Hidden.

At the time of writing any photographic magazines available in the local newsagents will focus largely on how to create and to appreciate the beauty of a highly romanticized approach to landscape, particularly where digitization can intensify the “natural” beauty of its subjects through compressing tones and super saturating its saccharine colours with the application of digital “improvements”. In the 1970s, there existed the prevailing idea that photography in the “documentary style” had some claims to objectivity and truth, indeed the term “documentary” came to mean something that was authentic and un-mediated (the term “documentary” was never applied to images of landscape) but what had emerged was a challenge to this rather simplistic view and a new kind of documentary photography began to emerge that was avowedly subjective (as opposed to its earlier “objective” status). The new style foregrounded commentary and opinion of its subjects. It did this by virtue of challenging the representational orthodoxy of photography and through the wide-scale introduction of practices previously considered to be within the province of painting, such as colour, large-scale imagery, narrative, and installation, together with the emergence of new materials and texts alongside a developing body of theoretical and critical material such as TenEight magazine. It also engaged the public not just through exhibition, but included book works and publicly sited works together with a range of new publications. The exhibition Futureland was developed by myself and (now Professor) Chris Wainwright with the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. It was intended as a vanguard operation that introduced the construction of the landscape as a focus to explore a number of key political and cultural concerns and to focus them through the mirror of landscape and its traditions alongside offering a challenging aesthetic view and new ways of working within the broad umbrella of photographic practice at the time.

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Figure 4.4 John Kippin, Tannery.

Photography has always concerned itself with representation and with social realism as a large part of its ontological destiny. Its public face and usage is perhaps better understood by most than that of its comparatively recent existence within a fine art, gallery context. Contemporary public sculpture belongs to another tradition and when located within the visual context of the post-industrial landscape offers a reclaiming of ownership and a shift of territories from one class association to another and a refocusing of imperatives within the existential environment. It is perhaps a part of a necessary re-branding and consideration as we move into a post-post-industrial reality. The new landscapes are the landscapes of ownership and financial power, of developing infrastructure and globalization together with the compartmentalization of our lives as we increasingly define discrete public and private concerns and struggle to position our Northern cities within a contemporary economic reality that has seen epic growth in London and the South-East but relative stasis in the North and in Scotland. London has de facto detached itself from the rest of the UK, and its world super-city status is an embodiment of modern global capitalism where production and consumption have become isolated. Fewer and fewer young people, and those with families, are able to sustain themselves and remain within the capital but themselves become economic migrants. A national housing shortage and soaring rents are forcing the issue. The UK, once the centre of a great empire, struggles to accept its new, reduced position in the world and is torn asunder by its tendency to little englandism. It is hardly surprising that in Scotland, nationalism seems an attractive substitute for an elite southern-focussed government that is increasingly irrelevant in places such as the North of England and Scotland and it is unsurprising that many would find common ground with those favouring selfgovernment north of the border rather than in the south of England, not to mention solidarity with the rest of Europe. For the North, it will take not just an improved rail network (faster to London!) to change its fortunes, but a sustained focus and investment in its economic future and well-being. Sometimes it seems that the only real growth currently occurring is in the university sector following the onset of fee-paying students… Futureland Now is an exhibition and book publication (Wells 2012) initiated in partnership with the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle (Sept 2012–Feb 2013) published by the University of Plymouth. The project involved Professor Chris Wainwright and myself, as arts practitioners, together with Professor Liz Wells from the University of Plymouth and Dr Mike Crang from the University of Durham as cultural theorists and commentators. Through this exhibition and publication together with a conference held at the Laing Art Gallery, we collectively explored new ways through which to consider the representation and understanding of the post-industrial environment and its associated condition. Futureland Now was a re-visit to an earlier exhibition at the Laing that was made at a time when the major impacts of de-industrialization were being felt, particularly in the North-East of England but also, to a lesser degree, around the UK in general. This exhibition was a major touring show that visited many parts of the UK and did much to establish the currency of the post-industrial landscape as well as foregrounding photographic arts practice in a new light.

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Figure 4.5 John Kippin, Tuxedo Baltic.

Both of these events were funded by the Arts Council (for which I am extremely grateful). Many works from the exhibitions are now in major collections such as the British Council, The National Media Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Then, as now, the work consisted of mostly large-scale colour photography that used the British tradition of representational landscape painting and appropriated much of its language. It referenced John Martin’s paintings of the sublime landscape together with the shattered psychological spaces painted by Graham Sutherland. At all times the projects strove towards using innovative forms and ways of re-considering our relationships to places and spaces and to the landscapes that we create through art practice and thinking of ways that these images might be engaged by contemporary audiences. The original exhibition included images that were displayed as billboards and Futureland Now comprised photography, billboard images, moving image and sonic works. It also incorporated a significant conference at the Laing Art Gallery that was the result of an important partnership between the University of the Arts, London and the Universities of Durham, Plymouth and Sunderland and Tyne and Wear Museums. The journey for photography has been spectacular. The German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is perhaps the central figure in discussing the unique capacity within photography that has enabled it to become a truly mass medium, but even his appreciation of its potential did not anticipate the current situation where moving from the mechanical “analogue” world of Benjamin to the digital image. The commercial exploitation of the photograph has developed exponentially with trillions of photographic images being made every year and available to us all in the developed world online. Now we are all (frequently unknowing) contributors to the commercial online appropriation of the world, and to care about such concerns as exhibition spaces can seem folksy and arcane, but to individuals such as myself are nevertheless central to the quality of our lives and experiences. Hubert Damisch described (admittedly analogue) photography as “the process of rendering observation selfconscious” (1994). He argues that the true content of a photograph is invisible and that in this photography is closer to painting and music. This ontological framework at the heart of Futureland is definitive in its approach to subject matter and to why photography is seen as the appropriate medium for this work. Such images are intended to offer a space for consideration, contemplation and reflection. They reveal the presence of time, frequently developing narratives that change over an extended period. It is intended that they give pleasure through their aesthetic structures and strategies and that they create ambiguity and engagement (as with music). It is further intended that they present and describe the narrative intentions of their author (in as much as this is possible) and that they might generate discussion and be viewed within the context of other works offered for exhibition.

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Figure 4.6 John Kippin, University Sunderland.

The term post-industrial has been used to describe a particular period in our history. To those of us who can even remember the industrial era with its exploitation, dangerous working practices and the growth and development of the nuclear family and the development of wealth within our society, it is not always helpful in understanding that which has replaced it – the so-called “knowledge” economy has not created knowledge or wealth for all. It has led to development of a “super elite” and a celebration of ultra-capitalism, most of which the vast majority of people have little access to and even less understanding of. These are the challenges that we need to consider. The engagement with the landscape as a place in which society and culture is reflected and organized is a central one and it continues to be important to engage with a visual representation of our landscape that explores its links to ownership, capitalism, consumption, exploitation and globalization whilst at the same time considering its bio-diversity and ecology and how we might consider new imperatives towards sustaining it in the transition to a post-post-industrial representation regardless of whatever we eventually end up calling it.

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Figure 4.7 John Kippin, Muslim Prayer Windermere.

References Chandler, D. (ed.). 1995. Nostalgia for the Future. London: The Photographer’s Gallery. Damisch, H. 1994. The Origins of Perspective. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press. Wells, L. (ed.) 2012. John Kippin and Chris Wainwright, Futureland Now. Plymouth: University of Plymouth Press

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CHAPTER FIVE CONJURING THE SONIC GHOSTS OF INDUSTRIAL AND POST-INDUSTRIAL SPACES DANNY BRIGHT

Walking along the dirty, wet-floored cable tunnel there is a sense of presence. In fact, there are many senses of presence, or the sense of many presences. We crunch and slop along, the sound of our out of time steps pinging along the walls, not quite making it back to my ears complete. Just as my eyes must adjust to the dark, punctuated by wavering torches or the occasional still-operational work light, my ears must adjust too, the threshold of my hearing shifting with each space we occupy. There are discarded crisp packets, sandwich wrappers and empty energy drink cans on the floor. Perhaps they are the detritus of Urban Explorers, but more likely – my guide tells me – they belonged to cable-strippers, who break in to spend hours at night, in the dark, dismantling the technical infrastructure of the once-vast steelworks site so it can be sold for scrap. We emerge into a small control room still lined with numerous relays and control equipment. A desk is empty. Another nearby underground office space is half-filled with rubble, tipped in by the construction workers who helped convert a part of the building into the science adventure centre it now operates as. The main shed is lofty, and the reverberant, dispersed sound of pigeons complements the scattered feathers on the floor. A small, disused crane operator’s booth is the opposite: enclosed, dulled from the heat protection, close. Someone’s jacket is on the back of the chair, as if they’ve just nipped off for a dinner break. My stomach rumbles. The works ceased operation in 1993.

Figure 5.1 Inside an underground cable tunnel at MAGNA, Rotherham. Image courtesy of the author.

There is a tone. I’m not sure if it is the distant rumblings of the M1, resonating through the earth and down the solid-walled tunnel, one of the centre’s exhibitions scattering sound across the walkways and disturbing the pigeons, or a past conversation about football, the canteen food or the price of scrap copper, reaching up through time, warped and decayed, obscured, like an audio file played back at the wrong sample-rate – a memory filed-away and then

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pieced together again, but in the wrong order. Perhaps, more interestingly, in that small moment it is all of these things, and simultaneously my imagination, finding something in the material memory of the place, its somehow noisy silence.

Figure 5.2 The steel trumpet where the sound emerges from underground, part of the Subterranean Sound Tunnel installation at MAGNA, Rotherham. Image courtesy of the author.

Listen to Audio Extract 1, from Subterranean Sound Tunnel, available at http://www.sonicghosting.com/materialmemory/. What you are listening to now is a recording of an installation, titled Subterranean Sound Tunnel,1 that was grounded in my experiences of the post-industrial landscape of the South Yorkshire steel industry. Unfortunately, the recording can’t give a true “picture” of what it feels like to stand outside the once-vast Steel, Peech & Tozer arcfurnace steel works at Templeborough, Rotherham, UK, (fig. 5.2) listening to soundscape compositions constructed from manipulated and processed on-site field recordings, channelled through underground tunnels and out of a large galvanized steel trumpet – but it can try to offer a glimpse of it, a semblance, a distant echo. Similarly, this text – as multimodal as it might attempt to be – can only hope to offer a glimpse, an echo, of the critical foundations of what a “sonic ghosting” practice might be, and of the two example projects that it refers to. In a sense, though, the very nature of these artefacts as individually incomplete, failures in their attempt to “recreate” or “reproduce” a singular, subjective and embodied auditory experience, perhaps allows them to better exemplify the nature of a sonic ghosting practice. By acknowledging their incompleteness, and accepting them as layers of memory making, we can afford a space for imagination – a space where, as in my recounting above, we can experience the multiple temporalities of the materials, places and spaces we engage with. It is this idea – of layering multiple modalities, temporalities, memories, experiences, and sound spaces – that sonic ghosting attempts to embody in its practice, and deploy in its interrogation of the relationship between space/place/memory and sound/music/noise. By deliberately rupturing the soundscape of the present with the echoes, phantoms and potentialities of the soundscapes of the past/future, it explores the spaces in-between, “beyond the opposition between presence and non-presence, actuality and inactuality, life and non-life” (Derrida 1994, 13). It attempts to explode out the fleeting moment where the present “unexpectedly betrays us” (Jameson 1999, 39), and we catch a glimpse of the multiple “intersecting temporalities” (Edensor 2005, 126) that haunt it.

1

Subterranean Sound Tunnel was commissioned by MAGNA Science Adventure Centre and supported by Lottery Funding from Arts Council England. It was installed at MAGNA in Templeborough, Rotherham and open to the public from July 2013.

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Figure 5.3 Graffiti inside the MAGNA building. Image courtesy of the author.

Our experiences of the post-industrial landscape – particularly its ruined, disused and repurposed spaces – offer the potential to engage with a material memory, to see the visual remnants of past inhabitants, machinery, to see the layerings of pasts and rusted, graffitied presents that might be suggested to more directly embody a notion of these “intersecting temporalities” (Edensor 2005, 126). But, if we close our eyes and listen, we hear the present soundscape: distant traffic, birds, wind. It is true that we can tune our hearing, shift our threshold and potentially hear the creaks of an empty building, the acoustic effect of the ruined environment in relation to its previous states – but only if we have reference points for how it might have been. Even then it is always the present soundscape we hear, despite how we might experience it. As a consequence, interrogating these experiences sonically is problematic. Creating a representative soundscape of a “steelworks in 1970”, for example, and suggesting this is how it should be remembered, memorialized even, offers no engagement with the multiple modes of existence that sites/spaces have to communities, individuals, generations, objects, and institutions. To present a field recording may suggest a fixed, linear and singular sonic narrative, and – particularly with the context of a descriptive title, place or photo – give the impression that in the duration of that recording, the space is sonically and empirically knowable. Instead, sonic ghosting seeks to actively conjure the spectres – shadows and echoes of the multiple intersecting temporalities – to make audible what might be felt to be present, and in turn, underline that the post-industrial landscape is a place that most certainly “bears the freight of its past” (Thrift 2008, 120). To achieve this, there is a creative and compositional employment of fracture, degradation and performance interruption – both temporally and spatially. Where sonic material is gleaned from on-site field recordings it is manipulated, cut-up, processed, delayed, moved in time and space. The process creates layers within the fabric of the work, between the memory of sound on-site, the recordings, their fractured remains, electronic and acoustic instrumentation, and the multiple modes of presentation and iteration: performance, installation, documentation, image, text. The practice may also combine improvised performance and part-composed score, allowing flexibility where the relationship between experience, memory and material can be explored. Where memory itself might be “always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruin” (Solnitt 2007, 355), a sonic ghosting practice brings this to bear on the illusory completeness of the present, remembered, or recorded soundscape. Where physical ruins might be “our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time” (ibid.), sonic ghosting explores the resonances, harmonies, and discord between the fractured layers of sonic memory as they move in and out of spatio-temporal phase.

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Figure 5.4 An abandoned maintenance shed at Tinsley Marshalling Yard, South Yorkshire. Image courtesy of the author.

To illustrate how these processes, practices and modalities might manifest more specifically, I will briefly outline two sonic ghosting works: Subterranean Sound Tunnel (referred to above), and Chalk Pit.2 In Subterranean Sound Tunnel, three different soundscape compositions were constructed from field recordings made on-site in and around the ex-steel works buildings that now house MAGNA Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Recordings were made in numerous spaces, both publicly accessible and outside the “normal” experience of the site, in cable tunnels, buried offices, control rooms and empty furnaces. These recordings were warped, processed, and fractured in time and space to produce new soundscape compositions reflective of the experience of being in the spaces, of the tones – real and imaginary – and the resonances. An important element in the presentation of the installation, and contributing significantly to its multimodality and embodiment of spatial fracture, was the re-sounding of the compositions through the bowels of the building. The sounds were diffused from 100 metres down a disused cable tunnel underneath the main concourse of the centre, emerging from a giant galvanized steel trumpet, hand riveted by Matt Harling, and attached to an access shaft. This re-sounding provided for a constantly shifting calibration of the soundscape to the building as the work was tuned by the landscape, sung by the steelworks itself. The interactive nature of the installation further added to the layers of fracture and displacement between recordings, soundscape compositions and the re-sounding of these through the site. A control panel was constructed from remnants of steelworks control systems and disused science centre displays (see fig. 5.5 above) and positioned near the entrance to the centre, above where the sound diffusion system was placed underground. The control panel allowed exhibition visitors to select from one of three soundscape compositions and to control playback speed/pitch and a layer of processing in real-time via two touch-sensitive panels. As such, the installation is affected by the visitors’ experience of the site and the visitors themselves, who choose a soundscape, manipulate it, perform it, all of which is heard within the present soundscape of the site. The layerings of these temporalities – within both the work and the site – are central to the work’s exploration of the relationship between space/place/memory and sound/music/noise. Listen to Audio Extract 2, from Chalk Pit, available at http://www.sonicghosting.com/material memory/

2

Chalk Pit was commissioned for WTF Arts Festival 2014 and installed as part of the festival in August 2014 in Falmer, East Sussex.

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Figure 5.5 The control panel for Subterranean Sound Tunnel. Image courtesy of the author.

Figure 5.6 A disused chalk quarry, West Sussex. Image courtesy of the author.

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In this second example, Chalk Pit – a work exploring the post-industrial landscape of the Sussex chalk industry – many of the same basic principles were followed. Field recordings were made, this time at two related sites, and then manipulated, processed, fractured to create a 32-minute looping installation soundscape composition. Presented outside at a Sussex arts festival, this looped for seven hours, accompanied by the sound of the surrounding South Downs that housed much of the chalk industry. As a further attempt to rupture any fixed or singular sonic narrative that might manifest through the looping installation, an improvised performance interruption of electronics, guitar textures and amplified processed stone (gleaned from the sites that were recorded) happened alongside the installation, joining it, intersecting it and then disappearing without announcement. Where Subterranean Sound Tunnel had more direct and deliberate public interaction, Chalk Pit used part-improvised performance to draw attention to the nature of the work as another fleeting layer of sonic memory within the present soundscape. The deliberate “sounding” of materials gleaned from the sites – bowing, clawing, playing the amplified lumps of chalk and flint – attempted to conjure the ghosts of material memory, in part, from the very materials themselves.

Figure 5.7 Chalk Pit performance interruption, WTF Arts Festival, Falmer, East Sussex. Photo by Kassia Zermon, Image courtesy of the author.

Where the cable tunnel’s resonances “voiced” the diffused sound of the manipulated soundscape compositions at MAGNA, Chalk Pit’s materials became part of a chorus of instruments, alongside the fractured field recordings, guitar, voice and the spaces themselves. This was important in maintaining a physical link, a “grounding” of the work to the sites it explored, as well as where it was exhibited. The work was further augmented by presenting the installation soundscape alongside an arrangement of chalk on the ground, and a text/image assemblage reflecting on the sporadic history and documentation of the sites, as well as the experience of exploring them. Ultimately, both examples outlined here illustrate the deployment of creative fracture that is at the heart of sonic ghosting works. It manifests in both the composition of the works – in the way recordings are processed into soundscape compositions, the use of part-improvised performance materials – and the multimodal nature of the works’ presentation and realization. So what role might a sonic ghosting practice have in the creative interrogation of post-industrial landscapes, spaces, legacies? Michel de Certeau stated, in The Practice of Everyday Life, that “[t]here is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence” (De Certeau 1984, 108). Sonic ghosting, then, is a deliberate creative act of conjury that attempts to give these spirits voice, rupturing the present soundscape where they dwell in silence – the shifting layers of fractured sonic spaces and temporalities instead providing cracks, fissures, gaps through

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which a glimpse, and echo, might be heard. By exploding out the moment where the present “unexpectedly betrays us” (Jameson 1999, 39), there is an element of “sonic ghosting” that is about unmooring the sonic phantoms/memories/ echoes from their spatio-temporal constraints. Yet somehow they still remain grounded, possibly in their relationship to the material – whatever that might be – where they reside. In this sense there is a ventriloquizing of the material/space/landscape itself, extending it beyond the bounds of its normal existence. By moving into a space in between these constraints, the shadowy apparition reveals something about itself or, perhaps, the listener/composer/ performer’s relationship with it. After all, the sounds that a sonic ghosting practice produces are only one more intersecting temporality – a hint of what it might be like to catch a glimpse of one’s own sonic ghosts – and most importantly, an invitation to listen to them.

References De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, J. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge. Edensor, T. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg. Jameson, F. 1999. Marx’s Purloined Letter. In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, edited by J. Derrida, T. Eagleton, F. Jameson, A. Negri et al. London: Verso. Solnitt, R. 2007. Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER SIX CURATING IN THE POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE CASE STUDY: AMBIKA P3 MICHAEL MAZIÈRE

“One of the capital’s hidden and most exciting new spaces.”1

In 2007 I started curating Ambika P3, an experimental project space converted from a disused Concrete Testing facility underneath the University of Westminster in London. In the last 7 years we have put on over 90 events and exhibitions – commercial, academic, collaborations and new commissions.

Research Summary i) The Ambika P3 project examined how large-scale post-industrial spaces can be activated by curatorial practices dealing with moving image practices. The project enlarged understanding of how curatorial practice for film and video work can deploy the full spatial and architectural scope of post-industrial spaces within its commissioning processes. The cultural context of the space becomes less important than the curatorial and artistic proposition. ii) Secondly, research provided innovative methods for how the space can become both a site of production and exhibition, gallery and studio and how the relationships between artist, image, space and viewer can be examined and controlled. Curation then involves an act of design and co-production and not only of interpretation and selection. iii) The research clearly relocates the important work of film and video artists as a form of problematic intervention in the field of the visual arts. It further reinstated its resistance to delivering artefacts within a commercial gallery or institutional museum context.

Figure 6.1 Launch of Ambika P3. Image and Copyright Ambika P3 University of Westminster. 1

Kate Conolly interviewing Heiner Goebbels in the Guardian, 27 March 2008.

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History As Weeden (2008) states, the need for a college of architecture and advanced building technologies had been identified by the London County Council in 1957. In 1959 it was decided to place it on the Luxborough Lodge site as part of an ambitious scheme for the expansion of Regent Street Polytechnic. London County Council had been supporting the London polytechnics since the end of the nineteenth century. Regent Street was the oldest and largest of these and had provided the model on which the others were founded. Architecture and construction were among the earliest Polytechnic courses, having been taught since the 1870s. After the Second World War, there was a great demand for professional and technical training from those whose education had been interrupted, and the School of Architecture was frustrated in its hopes of expansion by limitations upon space. So when the London County Council first approached the Polytechnic Governors with the plan to expand onto the Luxborough Lodge site on Marylebone Road, previously a Victorian workhouse, the LCC finally approved the reorganization scheme in October 1962, and the Council’s own Architects Department was appointed for the Marylebone buildings. The design was based around a central podium, and special features included the construction hall (now AMBIKA P3) to act as a testing laboratory for large structures. The new buildings were completed in February 1970 and opened on 21 May 1971. 2 Between 1984 and 1996 Professor Paul Regan, a highly respected international expert in the subject of concrete, led teams which undertook the testing of concrete used in many Department of Transport projects such as Spaghetti Junction, bridges on the M6 motorway and the Channel Tunnel. Traces of the former use remain, and are fascinating, as if a part of archaeology. In the past this space was the workplace of more than 20 technicians, supporting an active programme of research and consultancy. Designed for a purpose and with deliberation, the construction halls were full of activity and direction. They were designed to test concrete to destruction, and were located in a building itself made of concrete. Once a fashionable material, it fell out of aesthetic favour but now, once again, is showing itself to be versatile and with a new aesthetic and usefulness.

Figure 6.2 Concrete Hall. Image and Copyright University of Westminster Archive.

2

“One person who walked in, actually said to me once, he had a vision of the future for this place. Yes.” Paul Regan, 2008. Interview with Professor Paul Regan, Ambika P3 Catalogue, London.

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Figure 6.3 Concrete in the Oceans. Image and Copyright University of Westminster Archive.

Transformation The discipline of Civil Engineering and the related research was closed in 1997 and the halls remained unused until the start of this project ten years later in 2007. This extraordinary unwanted and unused space held a fascination for architects and artists alike, so Katharine Heron, Head of the School of Architecture decided to revive it and brought me in as the Curator. The development involved minimal refurbishment to provide a raw and malleable project space and give it a fresh lease of life. There were two construction halls, each being about three storeys high and sharing the same airspace, but divided by a double row of columns and a “bridge” half-way up from which to view the performances in each of the halls. Numerous proposals for new uses for the construction halls were made, ranging from creating a health or fitness gym complete with swimming pool, to a music venue and museum, to filling it with computer suites. All of these required extensive capital investment and substantial reconfiguration of the site, and were not realistic, so the idea that this unused space could be recycled and used with the minimum of expenditure, took shape. The drama of the scale of this subterranean space and its location in central London was compelling. Ambika P3 was developed with minimal investment and a lightness of touch and is an example of the intelligent redeployment of an existing resource. It wasn’t born out of years of planning as with a new building, but opportunity, enthusiasm and the support and inspiration of the artists and the institution behind it. As an artist and curator coming to Ambika P3 it was clear that the space had strong potential for exhibition but also that it contained its own logic, which would influence and determine the kind of projects which could operate successfully there. The Ambika P3 space provides generous but specific limitations – it is underground, it has no daylight and is divided into two equal areas – one with a high 10-metre ceiling and the other with a low roof held up with pillars. While it is of substantial size, its space is on a surprisingly human scale and it can be intimate as well as cool and formal and does not suffer from the fairground effect of some giant art spaces.

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Figure 6.4 Cable Structures. Image and Copyright University of Westminster Archive.

Figure 6.5 Cable Structures. Image and Copyright University of Westminster Archive.

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Programme In the last 20 years, contemporary art has witnessed an exponential increase in its exhibition spaces, audience numbers and its market value. The new Millennium and its Lottery funds have brought a large network of white cube-based art centres across the UK. The anarchy of the studio and artist-run spaces of the 60s and 70s has been transformed into managed churches of culture, sleek art agencies and global gallery brands. The development of curating courses at the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths University, Chelsea School of Art and other institutions has also professionalized areas of art that were once held by artists. The close relationship between large government funded and private galleries further devolve power towards a homogeneous art establishment and away from artists. While both artists and the public have benefited from this polished presentation of work to ever growing audiences, there is also a growing need for spaces in which artists can experiment, nurture and develop new and risky work. The management of the “creative industries” by experts in curating, marketing, and fund-raising is not always the best way to develop the grass roots or the experimental nature of artistic practice. Increasingly, with the development of research-based practice, universities are becoming sites for the development of intellectual and creative enquiry in the arts. Historically, the “art school” model in which students move freely across creative disciplines from music to painting and film to fashion has been the backbone of Britain’s success in the global creative industries. It is the anarchy at the heart of these creative processes that needs space to breathe and develop, space to fail or succeed. It is in this context and also as a palliative to the oligarchy of private collections that the Ambika P3 commission programme is located. Ambika P3 is a space for contemporary art and architecture which presents a public programme of curated group exhibitions, solo exhibitions, education projects, talks and events in central London. Ambika P3 works with international artists to support the development of their practice critically and in the field of research, particularly those developing large-scale installations where full advantage can be taken of the large and accessible space. It consists of four connected programming strands: Academic, Collaboration, Commissioning and Commercial. The Commercial strand is not relevant to this context.

Academic The Ambika P3 academic programme offers a showcase for students, staff and alumni to strengthen the profile of the courses, the school, the campus and the university. It establishes and nourishes a research culture and fosters new curriculum development in keeping with Higher Education and industry requirements and the strategic plan of the university. Exhibitions such as the Degree Shows from the Faculty of Media, Art and Design & MA Photographic Studies are all part of this programme. The programme also exhibits practice-based PhD doctorate work such as the AVPhD Research exhibition and Viva Viva which celebrated the work of audio-visual practice-led students, supervisors and examiners from across the UK. A good example of this was the exhibition From Floor to Sky,3 which is situated within curatorial and historical research that seeks to capture experimental practices in art school and was conceived as a living case study of the influence of art schools on contemporary visual art. In the 1960s, Peter Kardia4 pioneered a new teaching method, at St Martins School of Art, which broke down traditional medium boundaries and freed education from the patriarchal apprentice model. From Floor to Sky grew out of a series of regular exhibitions curated both at Ambika P3 and at London Gallery West, which examined the work of alumni from the University of Westminster’s significant fine art and photography courses. Exhibitions such as Interruptions in Time: A celebration of 10 Years of the MA Photographic Studies course (March 23–May 6, 2007) curated by David Bate and Michael Mazière and After Art School (April 7– May 21, 2006) curated by Mark Wilsher, Keith Wilson and Michael Mazière, looked at the relationship between the work of the artist and the university courses they had taken. These projects examined the integration of alumni into the art and photographic worlds and provided examples of transitions from education institutions to practice in the real world of galleries. From the outset, From Floor to Sky took a historical and critical perspective by deciding to concentrate its research on the work of a single educationalist (Peter Kardia), rather than an institution and to examine the work of artists he had taught across two generations. As a radical and pioneering teacher, Peter Kardia set up the experimental “Locked Room Course” in 1969 at Saint Martins School of Art, and subsequently established the Environmental Media Department, in 1973, at the Royal College of Art. Kardia’s courses provide the intellectual bedrock for much of contemporary teaching in art through the blurring of boundaries between technique-based painting, sculpture, photography and film. From Floor to Sky asks whether the role and influence of a significant art schoolteacher working during this period of radical reassessment can be made visible through exhibition, and what curatorial methods are appropriate to the task. From Floor to Sky also asks how much of the development of an artist’s work reflects his or her training and influences. It contributes new strategies and methods to curatorial practices concerned 3

From Floor To Sky, 5 March 4 April 2010, group interdisciplinary exhibition of 28 artists; 56 exhibits of variable sizes sculpture, installation, film and video. 4 “Kardia’s impact on students and staff at Saint Martins and later, from 1973 86, in Environmental Media at the RCA was considerable. In 2010, this was documented for the first time in the survey exhibition From Floor to Sky at Ambika P3, in London, which showcased works by past students of Kardia, including Roger Ackling, Nina Danino, Richard Deacon, John Hilliard, Richard Long, Jean Matthee, Katharine Meynell and Bill Woodrow.” “History Lessons,” Malcolm Le Grice, Frieze, Issue 142, October 2011.

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with the illumination of pedagogic practices in arts school contexts. A central tenet of the exhibition was to recreate the open environment of the studio, alongside commissioning and producing work on site. The curatorial strategy asked each artist to exhibit an early work and make a new one. It was developed to create an exhibition centred on restaging specific elements of Kardia’s method.

Figure 6.6 From Floor to Sky 2010. Copyright Ambika P3 and artists, Image Michael Mazière.

Collaboration “It’s an unbelievable space, deep underground beneath a University, which I find a very nice metaphor,” says Goebbels, who likens the venue to the Artic “doomsday vault” that will preserve 3m seed varieties in case of global catastrophe a nuclear winter, say, or an asteroid impact.5

The Ambika P3 collaboration programme creates new partnerships to deliver a range of unique events and exhibitions and develop strong working relationships with the creative industries. Collaborations are developed on a case by case basis in close collaboration with the partnering organization. There’s always a sense of adventure and discovery at Ambika P3. And that’s what inspires designers and artists and it’s why the leading art commissioning agency Artangel6 chose it to present Heiner Goebbels’ elaborate installation Stifter’s Dinge, in which the space was transformed into a shimmering lake, the moving stripped pianos drifting across rippling water to music and poetry. Aside from Artangel we have collaborated with many institutions, galleries and artists’ groups such as the London Festival of Architecture, Frieze Art Fair, The Photographers Gallery & Kinetica Art Fair among others.

Commissioning David Ward (2009), Anthony McCall (2010) and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (2013) In these separate but connected exhibitions of the moving image the artists each focused on a specific piece of the cinematic apparatus – David Ward’s work examined the screen, Anthony McCall, projection, and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, the auditorium.

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Kate Conolly’s interview with Heiner Goebbels in the Guardian, 27 March 2008. Artangel: “We produce art that challenges perceptions, surprises, inspires and wouldn’t be possible within the confines of a gallery.” Available from https://www.artangel.org.uk/about us/

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1. The artist David Ward7 was commissioned by Ambika P3 for this new work which transformed the floor of P3 into a huge light drawing. Linear drawings from sources including ice-skating are digitally projected from the high ceiling of P3 on to the expansive floor. Viewers could see the constantly changing work unfolding from the mezzanines in the space and can also take to the floor, walking among the lines, arcs and spirals which move and layer over the surface like the paths of skaters or stars. 2. Anthony McCall8 explored solid-light works that are oriented vertically projecting downwards from the ceiling onto the floor, forming 10-metre tall, conical “tents” of light, with a base of about 4 metres. Here, the projected line drawing on the floor is, quite literally, the footprint of the work, with the three-dimensional “body” rising up from the floor and finally narrowing to a point at the lens of the projector, well above one’s head. In McCall’s Vertical Works, the only space defined is that of the projection beam, luring the viewer to engage with the work as pure material light – only visible because of the haze generated by a steam machine. 3. An installation by international Russian artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, pioneers of installation art. The Happiest Man9 featured a room within a specially created cinema showing clips from Russian propaganda films of the 40s and 50s. The visitor could escape to the room and become “The Happiest Man” or enjoy the films in the classic cinema setting. Two questions emerged: can the curation of installation art tell us something about the cinematic experience of spectatorship? And does curatorial research and practice in the elements of screen art propose new processes, strategies and uses of the cinematic in the curation of extended moving image works? The works present the elements of illusion (screen, projection, site) as material objects within a poetic framework. In exploring these elements the research significantly develops the curation of moving image practice by enlarging our understanding of how curatorial practice can deploy the full spatial and architectural scope of post-industrial spaces within its commissioning processes. The research provided innovative methods to enable the space to become both a gallery and a studio. It conflated the two. Curation then involved an act of design and co-production, and not only of interpretation and selection. In this form of curation and production of moving image there is a new integration and synthesis across disciplines and practices producing innovation in methods for curators working in this way. These three exhibitions involved collaboration between the curator, the artists, the commercial gallery, software operators and specialist engineers to make the pieces work. All three involved similar processes – first, the design and 3D mapping of the work, then testing of individual elements such as projection and sound. The method of curation here was not limited to the selection of artists, but a more fluid one as commissioner, interpreter and producer.

Figure 6.7 David Hall, End Piece… 2012. Copyright Ambika P3 and David Hall, Image Michael Mazière. 7

David Ward, Rink, 2009. Digital projection of video and animations of photograms, drawings and photographs. Anthony McCall’s works in the exhibition: Vertical Works (Breath, 2004; Breath III, 2005; Meeting You Halfway, 2009; and You, 2010): Four video projectors, computer, QuickTime Movie file, four haze machines, two audio speakers. 9 Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Happiest Man, 2000: One video projector, audio speakers, 150 cinema chairs, wooden room and screen. 8

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David Hall, End Piece… 16 March–22 April 2012, Ambika P3 “However we achieve it, the work has to be problematic.”10

Curating David Hall’s End Piece… (2012)11 aimed to raise questions about history, context, audience and technology. Specifically this exhibition examined a number of distinct elements: the analogue monitor cube as a sculptural building block in video art, the social context of the gallery space and the manipulation of the broadcast signal as a strategy of social intervention. As Steven Ball defines Hall’s work: While video art may well be the commonly used, generic name for this practice historically, its scope is both too narrow and too general to describe Hall’s oeuvre: his work is concerned mostly with video situated in social, participatory contexts, not only as an art proposition, but also as a means of exploring art’s role and status in society. (Ball 2013)

The centrepiece of David Hall’s exhibition consisted of a new commission. A contemporary reworking of Hall’s early work 101 TV Sets, 1001 TV Sets featured 1,001 cathode ray tube televisions of all ages and conditions tuned to the five analogue stations, and gradually fading out between 4 and 18 April 2012, as the final analogue signals were broadcast from London’s Crystal Palace. The context for this project is the field of video art curatorial practices. While the use of video is now widespread within the field of visual arts, the restaging and reinterpreting of three seminal video art works from the 1970s, David Hall’s End Piece... aimed to raise questions about history, context and technology. The curator worked with the artist, acting as a catalyst, producer and enabler in the reinterpretation and exhibition of a seminal work, in order to test it in the contemporary context, 40 years after its first airing. The curator’s decision to commission David Hall to remake his work 101 TV Sets at the moment of the cut-off of the analogue signal was of primary importance since the site of Hall’s work is not simply the art world, but the wider participatory context of broadcast television as a social phenomenon. The research asks, can such restaging reveal relationships between early video art, broadcast and contemporary visual art practices? What were the multiple sites in video art’s original contribution, both as a social intervention and in the field of contemporary visual art practice? The project produced new curatorial methods, approaches and thematic foci, for the restaging of historic video art and showed how the role of the curator can function as a catalyst to relate historic themes in video art to contemporary issues. Similarly, the exhibition presented the cut-off of the analogue signal as a technological and semiological break with the idea of media as curated and linear and signalled the move to the new pay-as-you-go culture. The research clearly relocated the important work of video artists in the social and political field and its value as a form of problematic intervention – it also reinstated its resistance to delivering artefacts. Victor Burgin, A Sense of Place, 1 November–1 December 2013, Ambika P312 Victor Burgin’s A Sense of Place presented five recent digital projection pieces complemented by earlier photo-text works exploring relations between place, memory and image. Victor Burgin first came to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of Conceptual Art, when his work appeared in such key exhibitions as When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and Information (1970). He has since remained one of the most consistently influential artists and art theorists of his generation. His still and moving image works, and his extensive and widely translated writings, have had a profound effect on the landscape, language and teaching of the visual arts in general, and photography in particular, both in Britain and abroad. The exhibition of Victor Burgin brought together this wide body of his work in order to: x Connect his early photographic conceptual work, his political work and his more recent concerns with space and architecture made on video and digital animation; x Explore the development of an artist’s body of work by presenting it as a journey through space and media; x Bring together photographic and videoworks in a dialogue within a structured spatial itinerary. The basic curatorial principle which Ambika P3 lives by is to adapt the space to the work of an artist and not vice versa – that is why no permanent structures have ever been fitted, the space and the footprint remains as it was when we took it over in 2007. This was particularly prescient in the case of Burgin where the chronology of the work and the manner of its encounter was crucial. Although Victor Burgin’s work presents a clear intellectual development he has used a variety of materials and techniques, which required a very careful and attentive strategy in order to curate it 10

David Hall in conversation with Michael Mazière quoted in Cate Elwes, 2012, “Phases, Ruptures and Continuities.” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 1(2). 11 Works in the exhibition: David Hall: 1001 TV Sets (End Piece), 1972 2012; Progressive Recession, 1974, and TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces): the Installation, 1971/2006. 1,001 CRT analogue televisions, steel scaffold, cabling, netting, 16 CRT monitors, 9 cameras. 12 Videoworks in the exhibition: Voyage to Italy (Basilica I & II) 2006; Olympia, 1982; Solito Posto (2008); The Little House (2005); Mirror Lake (2013); A Place to Read (2010). Photoworks in the exhibition: UK76, 1976; Zoo78, 1978; Portia, 1984; In Grenoble, 1982; Hotel Latone, 1983, Gradiva, 1982.

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coherently and effectively. David Campany and Michael Mazière curated the exhibition with equal overall responsibility and with complementary sets of knowledge of both the space and the work of Burgin. Burgin’s work is complex, exacting and precise and has to be read in very specific ways. The Ambika P3 space had to be completely built as nine galleries with connected corridors in order to curate a cogent and rational journey for the public. The curatorial process was delicate, as it involved the retrospective of an artist with a large body of work, rarely able to travel to London. The two curators working on the project had to share knowledge and communicate regularly in order to produce a coherent selection of work and a design of the space that would facilitate the engagement of the audience in what is quite dense artwork. Secondly, the decision to present a whole exhibition around one artist’s work meant that we had to build a very large made to measure construction to Museum standard. We built nine separate galleries in the industrial space of Ambika P3 and a long exhibition wall which acted as a causeway between the two sides of Ambika P3 and provided the ability to exhibit the totality of UK76, 1976 – a rarely seen work consisting of eleven 40 x 60 ins panels. Four of these spaces were video projection spaces with customised black ceilings and layout. Thirdly, as described, we worked closely with the artist and lighting designer to create a new LCD lighting system to provide even lighting in the exhibition walls as opposed to spot lighting, providing a much smoother and reflection-free experience for the viewer. The exhibition was curated by David Company and Michael Mazière with much input from Victor Burgin, build was managed by Christian Newton and lighting by Sam Projects. Victor Burgin’s commissioned new work for the Ambika P3 exhibition, Mirror Lake, was a response to the Seth Peterson Cottage, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1958 in what is now Mirror Lake State Park, Wisconsin.

Conclusion Ambika P3 has a complex constituency made up of students, artists, academics, researchers and general and specialist audiences. We have developed a curatorial practice which echoes its history as an urban-scale laboratory and responds to the needs of its constituents by driving forward new projects and commissions beyond the white walls of the gallery and the black box of cinema. All this work was done by simply adapting an existing abandoned post-industrial space – an act of recycling and an antidote to the proliferation of palaces of art from London to Dubai that are colluding with the inequalities of late capitalism.

References Ball, S. 2013. “The End of Television: David Hall’s 1001 TV Sets (End Piece).” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 2(1). Elwes, C. 2012. “Phases, Ruptures and Continuities.” Moving Image Review & Art Journal 1(2). Le Grice, M. 2011. “History Lessons.” Frieze 142. Regan, P. 2008. Interview with Professor Paul Regan. Ambika P3 Catalogue. London. Weeden, B. 2008. The Education of the Eye: History of The Royal Polytechnic Institution 1838–1881. Granta Editions.

CHAPTER SEVEN U(NU)SED AND ABUSED: SOCIAL AND POLITICAL POTENTIALITY MATERIAL, MANUFACTURE AND ABANDONED SITES ANDREW LIVINGSTONE

Bricks and Politics! The value of site (abandoned) as a means for artistic production forms the basis for this chapter, in which, “material” and “manufacture” create the potential for socially and politically engendered practice. This will be explored through the artwork Surfeit 621, where material, in this case “brick/clay” has become politicized in its relation to abandoned sites and the global financial crisis of 2007–8. In the economic boom, prior to the 2007–8 global financial crisis, unprecedented construction of new homes took place all over Ireland, in a period which saw rapid economic growth between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, an era framed by the moniker “Celtic Tiger”. The abundance of house construction resulted in 621 “ghost estates”, according to Conor Pope writing for the Irish Times on 27 January 2010, however, some three years later, Rob Kitchin, also writing for the Irish Times, on 26 January 2013 stated that there were 2,876 such unfinished estates in Ireland. This overwhelming construction of new homes incurred the creation of a proliferation of ghost estates, a term which is explained more fully in the following quote: A “ghost estate” the term used extensively in the media and everyday discourse is an extreme example of such an estate and was first coined by David McWilliams (2006). Following initial work by Kitchin et al. (2010), a ghost estate is generally accepted to be an estate of 10 or more housing units where 50% or more of units are either vacant or under construction. (Kitchin et al. 2014)

The ghost estate as referenced in the quote below creates an “opening for politics”, an observation that is grounded in the development of the artwork Surfeit 621, as it is precisely the politicization of clay (brick) that holds a central conceptual tenet within the work. O’Callaghan observes that: We focus our analysis on Ireland’s “ghost estates” residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the “ghost estate” functioned as an “empty signifier” through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by “ghost estates”: firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of “excess.” We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post politicization occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis. (O’Callaghan 2014)

Due to its abundance and ubiquitous position in society and culture, clay is often at the centre of historical and anthropological analysis, most notably evidenced through the clay “sherd”, however, with reference to this text the analysis of clay is located within a contemporary reading, and if we are able to extend our interpretation, you could argue that the ghost estate could be read as contemporized “sherd”, albeit on a large scale, a man-made, clay constructed form, from which a new history can be told. This new history is fabricated upon what can be described as a “ruin”, where, through definition, ghost estates exist as buildings that have never been lived in, and thus the concept of “ruin” in this context is somewhat oblique to its vernacular understanding. Kitchin et al. discuss the difference in terms of a non-traditional ruin, where an elaboration upon the financial and political perspective is put forward: By contrast, the unfinished estates of Ireland are ruins that have never been occupied and contain no traces of previous inhabitants. Thus, they constitute a form of ruination different from traditional ruins; whereas in the latter capital has extracted value and moved on to a new spatial fix, in unfinished estates investment capital has melted into air before value can be extracted. Here “ruin” is used to describe buildings that are being left to fall to pieces not because they themselves have lapsed into disuse, but because the speculative future that they as financial investments promised has lapsed into disuse. (Kitchin et al. 2014)

The authors make clear that the buildings have purposefully been left to rot and this action is directly linked to a financial, and in turn political, agenda. This observation is embedded within the construct of the artwork discussed in

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this text, as a connection is drawn deliberately between the choice of clay (brick) as a building material and the financial toxicity that is applied through visual and narrative display. In observation, it seems appropriate to employ Martin’s neoteric position on the “ruin” where he states that, “new ruins require a fuller reading of the landscape; to return to the archaeological metaphor, they require that we dig deeper” (Martin 2014). With this regard the phenomena of “new ruins” form the critical basis for the development of creative practice discussed within this chapter. The “ruin” has become a critical site for investigation for numerous fields of study, including cultural geography, social anthropology and in the context of this chapter, visual art, although of course the list is much more extensive. So why has the “ruin” become more prominent as an area of exploration and particularly so with reference to this text in respect of visual art? You need only to search the term “ruin porn” on the Internet to experience the vast arena of “work” globally that is observing and utilizing the “ruin” as a site for theoretical and creative exploration and application. Numerous blog sites including those entitled Ruin porn, or Architecture of doom are dedicated to ruins or abandoned places, and whilst this arena is dominated by photography from a visual arts perspective, the “ruin” has and does provide stimulus for creative practitioners and this was evidenced within the varied lectures presented at the Material Memory: The Post Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice Conference at Newcastle University in 2014.

Figure 7.1 Andrew Livingstone, Surfeit 621, 2011, clay/brick, video projection and drawing. Image: Andrew Livingstone

The artwork Surfeit 621 makes direct reference to the excessive housing construction in Ireland during the economic boom and the consequential abandoned housing estates created by the economic crash; in this context the work is by no means to be read as exploitative, and its intention is political. At the core of the critical exploration is clay “brick” which in this context has become politicized as a material through its connection to the economic crash in Ireland. The work consists of 621 cast clay components, the forms of which are simplified house shapes, created in three different sizes to represent typical new build “starter,” “family” and “executive” homes that are constructed as part of new housing estates built across Ireland and the UK. A total of 620 of the clay houses are laid out in grids, which map out housing estate street plans; the 621st house is ground to dust, an action that has since been implemented in reality as many of the housing estates have been razed to the ground. The destruction of the clay house in the artwork is performed through video where the film depicts the artist destroying the object until only clay/brick dust remains. Within this work, safety clothing has been adopted, something that you would wear to negotiate “contaminated” or “toxic” materials, the analogy here lying with the media reference to the economic crisis and the term “Toxic Debt”.

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Material, Manufacture and Abandoned Sites

Figure 7.2 Andrew Livingstone, Surfeit 621 Figure, 2011. Image: Andrew Livingstone.

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This ubiquitous politically charged term is referenced through the material, as “the artist” is devoid of direct contact with the clay – in this respect clay is visually rendered toxic, which in reality is absurd, as clay is a naturally occurring material that has no inherent harmful properties. Whilst much creative work related to ruin is site specific the artwork Surfeit 621 engages site as a point of departure. In this regard the work was created as a politicized commentary on ghost estates where a connectedness is referenced through material and performative action. As previously stated, the adoption of safety clothing and the 40minute film of the artist destroying a clay house maintain a familiar reference (Livingstone 2008) to the actuality of the “new ruin”. The translation of “site as reference” to “site as gallery” introduces additional meaning and contextualization of the work. The exhibition site for Surfeit 621 was “The Shed” (an apt name in the context of this chapter, as it may also be considered a dwelling), which is located in Galway harbour. The building is a steel corrugated industrial warehouse, which now serves as a multi-purpose space in the city of Galway, where it is often used to exhibit contemporary visual art. This repurposing of a building (which quite simply could have transformed into a ruin) appears ironic with regard to the consequential demolition of the ghost estates across Ireland. Within the exhibition space the artwork consisted of nine platforms that contained the 620 clay/brick houses, laid out as housing estate maps. On an adjacent wall a video projection depicts the artist destroying one of the clay/brick houses, and on the opposite wall a series of drawings based upon the houses complete the installation. The juxtaposition of miniature clay/brick houses and large-scale projection aims to imitate the scale of mass construction whilst simultaneously providing a narrative that also plays with scale and makes direct political reference. The value of site (abandoned) as a means of artistic production is an important element within this work, and whilst a more detailed exploration of site-specificity is not necessary, there are crucial observations that are poignant to the adoption and interpretation of site as a point of departure. Martin, in his text “Introduction: Towards a Political Understanding of New Ruins”, includes Weizman as saying, “He also argues that ruins are ‘a form of media,’ in that they ‘store and, with some help from their interpreters,’ also transmit information about the effects of historical process” (Martin 2014). These observations with regard to ruin certainly hold validity with the development, creation and evaluation of the artwork Surfeit 621. In examining Weizman’s sentence, it is easy to map the ghost estates to his observations, particularly with regard to the “effects of historical process”. Although this is a recent history, the ghost estate as ruin has become embedded in the social and political histories within Ireland, and will include the numerous sub-headings that fall into both the terms “social” and “political”. The wider effects of the ghost estate are too numerous to mention and are outside the remit of this short chapter, however, it should be noted how this particular contemporary ruin has implicated a wider remit, an observation expounded by Martin where he states that: Weizman offers us ways of conceptualizing ruins that have a wider applicability and resonate with the extant ruinology literature (DeSilvey and Edensor, 2013), such as his suggestion that ‘the ruin has an “architecture” in which controversial events and political processes are reflected and from which they might be reconstructed and analysed’ (Weizman, 2011). (Martin 2014)

In observing Weizman it is interesting to note how the ghost estates of Ireland reflect both a political process and also a controversial event, although as indicated earlier in the text, the focus of the artwork Surfeit 621 is towards a political commentary rather than an explication upon controversy. The actualities of the ghost estates and the consequential wide-reaching implications that surround them acted as a trigger to implement the artwork Surfeit 621. Multiple readings of the work are possible and they will hold resonance on different levels with regard to an individual’s placement within the narrative of the ghost estate and financial crisis. The events have marked the physical and political landscape in Ireland and it seems appropriate to conclude with the observations of Bender and Winer: Landscapes are not just backdrops to human action; people make them and are made by them. How people understand and engage with their material world depends upon particularities of time and place. These understandings are dynamic, variable, contradictory and open ended. Landscapes are thus always evolving and are often volatile and contested. (Bender and Winer 2001)

References Bender, B. and M. Winer. (eds) 2001. Contested Landscapes; Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg. Kitchin, R., C. O’Callaghan and J. Gleeson (eds). 2014. “The New Ruins of Ireland? Unfinished Estates in the PostCeltic Tiger Era.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(3): 1069–80. Livingstone, A. 2008. “The Authenticity of Clay and its Redefinition Within Contemporary Practice: Ceramic Familiarity and the Contribution to Expansion.” Un-published PhD Thesis. Martin, D. 2014. “Introduction: Towards a Political Understanding of New Ruins.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38(3): 1037–46. O’Callaghan, C. 2014. “Post-politics, Crisis, and Ireland’s ‘ghost estates’.” Political Geography 42: 121–33.

CHAPTER EIGHT RISK, EDGES AND MAKING WITH CLAY MEGAN RANDALL

This chapter reflects on my own practice-based research into ceramics sited in post-industrial spaces and the documentation of these site-specific interventions. The artworks described map ceramics to place such as edgelands (Farley and Symmons Roberts 2011) or contingent places (Rugg 2010) and examines how place can inform risk when making art. Using abandoned and disused spaces provides a creative freedom to make, learn and explore ideas. Ruins provide space to experiment and create artworks, which change the space itself and challenge the people who inhabit it. This paper is formed around the discussion of two pieces of artwork. Entropy, 2009 and Fuck the Police, 2012. Both artworks make use of post-industrial ruins as sites and ceramics as material. Entropy was installed in multiple sites in Hartlepool and Sheffield; the installations consisted of several thousand small ceramic bowls. Fuck the Police used pre-existing graffiti artwork, remaking it in found ceramic objects. The theme running through these artworks creates a dialogue with the post-industrial sites chosen for the location of these installations, and with the people who use these spaces. This creative practice is driven with a voyeuristic intention of observing interactions of people with ceramic objects in these spaces and focusing on interactions both with the space (graffiti) and the artworks placed in these spaces (destruction). Ceramic artworks placed in these unused sites develop a dialogue between ceramics, space and intervention, bringing in surrounding ideas of ruin, material and transformation. Ceramics is a functional, domestic material and the series Entropy (see Fig. 8.1) makes use of the idea of ceramics as nourishment against a backdrop of destruction. Tiny (7cm diameter) thrown porcelain bowls were used to create large installations, forming a dialogue with the site in which it is placed. These spaces include many pre-used sites – sites which in themselves have undergone transformation, from industrial and craft-related buildings to drug dens and skate parks, hideouts and scrap metal stores. The installations placed in them were then photographed and recorded daily as the installations were destroyed, shot at, broken and rearranged. The buildings mirror the entropic destruction of the artwork through neglect, vandalism and misuse. Neglect and abandonment of space forces the purpose of the site to change. The site and space change and evolve with the people who use it, from workplace, industrial site, office, and workshop to canvas for graffiti artists, and playground for explorers. In Sheffield, Factory (one of the artworks from the series Entropy) makes use of old cutlers’ workshops and steel mills. It delves into the post-industrial past of a city and recreates that landscape into new industry, individual makers, artisans and craftsmen. The artwork makes use of the derelict spaces and the people who now inhabit it. It creates an intervention that can be intervened with. The people who frequent the spaces, scrap metal thieves, graffiti artists and drug addicts can change, steal, destroy and alter the fragile ceramic components. The space provides a “playground” (Parry 2011, 19) and the artwork is “activated” (Bishop 2005, 6) by visitors to the space who, like the artist, should not be there. This activation is made possible through opportunities which would be unattainable in more structured parts of an urban landscape. Parry (2011, 31) writes “the informal city represents a space for opportunity, experimentation and co-production of a user-generated urbanism”. This experimentation creates new opportunities both for artists and individuals who use the spaces. Fuck the Police makes use of Parry’s idea of co-production. An anonymous graffiti artist scrawled obscenities across the side of a factory building; this was documented and then waterjet-cut blue and white plates were hung on the inside of the same building. This work was also then photographed. The anonymous author started a dialogue, which created an artwork. The work subverts what we understand graffiti to be. By using dinner plates the work discusses mass production, families, mealtimes and homeliness, in juxtaposition to the text it depicts. Trigg (2006) uses “subverts” and “transgresses” as descriptors of behaviour but these terms could be extended to that of ceramic objects placed in these ruins subverting the meaning of the object itself. In Fuck the Police plates stopped being containers to eat food from, or even commemorative objects and become functionless objects and a canvas for graffiti. This work was made to explore the documentation of ruin and artwork, and the ability to make a work which is both site specific and works on its own as a separate entity in a gallery site. The text and language used within this work has a definite and aggressive nature to it. The location of the work both questions and defines the site in which it is placed. Through falling from its previous function, and thus outliving the use originally conferred upon it, the ruin transgresses and subverts our everyday encounter with space and place … A derelict factory testifies to a failed past but also reminds us that the future may end in ruin. (Trigg 2006, xxv xxvi)

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Figure 8.1 Entropy, 2009. Image: Megan Randall.

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Figure 8.2 Megan Randall, Fuck the Police, 2012. Image: Megan Randall.

Empty buildings provide a glimpse of entropic ruin; they show that there is no such thing as permanence and that this inevitability of ruin is in itself progress. The myth of “progress” that is shattered by making artworks in ruins allows us to experience something other than the normal. Placing mundane objects in these spaces testifies to our existence. We remain and continue to create despite the fact that the space in which we create is now an empty shell. “What was once built to testify to a singular and eternal present becomes the symbol and proof of its mutability” (Trigg 2006, xxviii). The idea of change and impermanence is echoed in both the artworks. Trigg states there is no certain future, but only a constantly changing one. Once installed on sites there is no certainty of what an artwork will become; only the site and people who come across it can alter the outcome. Entropy as an artwork was deconstructed over a period of months. Fuck the Police was removed within a week. The interaction itself is not documented except for its absence, and similar to the post-industrial spaces used, the buildings function and parts of walls and roofs are absent, but the space remains. The site changes the audience dynamic but also the artist’s dynamic. It reframes artworks and reinvigorates ideas. Site delivers potential to both artwork and practice. Climbing through open windows into a ruin promises a view of another world. It is transformative in that it allows for changes and challenges to social norms. Recycling space, recycling industry and reusing objects. Fuck the Police is remodelled in this outsider culture, the people who create graffiti and the messages that they want to express. The buzz and thrill of doing something, which may not be completely legal is an important driver in the development of concept, and from this comes the idea of subverting such a domestic material as clay. Fuck the Police produces conversations and dialogue between site and artwork, reacting to scars and damage and intervention other people have afflicted on a place. Both works Fuck the Police and Entropy make comments about the fringes of society as expressed in the sociological study “Edgework” (Lyng 1990). This study explores the fringes of society. Drug-taking and adrenalin sports are grouped together to acknowledge a section of society living outside social norms. Garratt (2013, 98) links edgework with urban exploration and the relationships formed between explorers and place through these risks. This term “edgework” fits almost perfectly with the poetic notion of “Edgelands” (Farley and Symmons Roberts 2012), a text which describes places on the edge, places in the landscape that go un-noticed and ignored as the spaces inbetween. Haywood (Ferrell et al. 2008, 74) describes urban edgework as occupying “paradoxical spaces” which by nature are on the fringes or edges of a neighbourhood. This is implemented as an understanding of both the edges of society and geographical locations, “urban edgework attempts to construct an enhanced sense of self by engaging in risk-laden practices on the metaphorical edge” (Hayward 2004, 166). It expands the previous theory put forward by Bishop (2005)

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Figure 8.3 Megan Randall, Fuck the Police graffiti, 2012. Image: Megan Randall.

of activated artworks, that instead of an audience or viewers activating artworks the site activates the artistic intervention. The site affords people the opportunity to do whatever they want to the artwork. Hayward, like Trigg (2006) is exploring these non-places as transgressive environments. The need to break boundaries is a popular theme within the arts. The idea of danger and boundaries being crossed is apparent whilst trespassing, but other social boundaries are also being crossed. With the non place, the construction of taboos is visible in the neatly arranged rationalizing of public space. Yellow warning signs and padlocked doors encode space with a language of suppression and in light of the public climate of “terror”, paranoia (Trigg 2006, 190)

Art is almost the antithesis of suppression; it reflects boundaries that have been rejected. Trigg and Hayward provide an example of what ruins as spaces can mean for people, providing a view of what these unusual spaces mean for artists as places for creative endeavours. These Edgelands provide a diverse group of people with the space and opportunity to experiment and explore. The post-industrial spaces are a vacuum waiting to be filled; they are completely stationary and still, waiting for people to activate and reinvent them. Making artworks in abandoned spaces is laden with risk; spaces where artworks are made and sited are full of dangers and making the artwork is equally risk fuelled. Taking risks as artists pushes and empowers ideas; risk in making creates the chance to fail but equally leads towards new discoveries. Making in a ruined environment reduces the risk; I am making for myself and leaving the artwork for the endless uncertainties of interactions. The risk of the site, of broken glass and rotting floors seems to somehow counteract the risk of making, of failure and critique. The work produced during the exploration of derelict sites is simultaneously on the edge and constricted by site. The industrial heritage that the post-industrial site offers is rich in opportunity providing freedom to explore space and material. Exploring the use of ceramics in these post-industrial spaces provides a critique of sites; the familiarity we have towards ceramics is almost the opposite to that of the damaged ruins in which it is placed. Ceramics as a material are ubiquitous. They are among mankind’s oldest synthesized materials and are present in almost all aspects of our daily lives: “from sanitation to tableware, art to hip replacements, bricks to windows” (Smith 2010, 54). Ceramics is already in these ruins as crumbling bricks and broken coffee cups. The ruin becomes an archaeological site; it narrates stories of industry, of workers and gradual decline of space. A ruin functions as a barometer of change as much as the ceramics that is both found and reinstalled there. The sites in this chapter deal with abandonment and decay, postindustrial ruins also acting as a “barometer” of social and economic change. “Ceramics creates bridges to the past, linking object with history, people and places” (Veiteberg 2011).

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Figure 8.4 Megan Randall, Entropy window, 2009. Image: Megan Randall.

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Ceramics is synonymous with domestic environments – kitchens, dining rooms, coffee tables, and bathrooms – however, placing obviously domestic objects such as plates and bowls into a non-ceramic environment provides a new context for the objects. They cease being domestic and become decorative. Ceramics out of the context of a domestic or gallery setting becomes altered in function, interacting with the fabric of the building and the (mass) production of the object. It is difficult to describe the interest in a place which is devoid of human life, that has elements in it that are recognizable as doors, desks, shoes, mugs. These spaces are caked in dirt and grime. The building provides a snapshot of what is possible, what can grow and flourish as the space disintegrates around it. These ruins alternatively signify the inevitable death of place and objects which ironically outlive the inhabitants. Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned: they are necessary consequences of life. The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life; one is in no position to abolish it. Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it. (Nietzsche 1967, 25)

Buildings made of bricks break and crumble, just like cups and saucers, but fragments of them remain, shards of pottery and washed up bricks on beaches. They show this past decadence and waste; by entering these spaces urban explorers elevate ruins from decayed decadence to a higher status. Ruins are an anomaly of Nietzsche’s idea of decadence – they are precariously balanced between decay and destruction and past and present. They are held in limbo. Contemporary ruins, unlike historic ruins, maintain this peculiar position of voyeuristic pleasure and aesthetic beauty. I think the common element that draws me to each of these places from abandoned buildings to utility corridors to storm drains is the feeling that I’ve earned myself a glimpse of something authentic, not designed for public consumption. It’s the thrill of getting to peek behind the scenes and see the real situation (Ninjalicious, interview, in Trigg 2005)

Ideas of authenticity of space, that of realness and acceptance, align with ceramics as an authentic material, which is familiar, as put forward by Livingstone (2007, 4 and 384). An urban reality filled with ruin is personalized and made more comfortable (homely) with ceramics. “Thrill” exemplifies artworks within ruins and sites, which are not designed to be public spaces. Working in these spaces is more than a “peek behind the scenes” – it is understanding the historical value of site, understanding space and how intervening in space changes the future actions and reactions of others to and in that space. Placing work in old abandoned factories or disused railway sidings attempts the formation of an understanding of a world that is completely alien. This in turn forms an understanding of the people who inhabit the spaces. This is an aspect of voyeurism, watching both the reactions people in the spaces have with the artwork but also looking at the space; it is peeking into another world. Making artwork in this other world “hacks” the environment. For a short time the place is transformed into what I want it to be, and then this function changes for the next person. Ceramics and the fabric of the ruins seem to merge together; both are materials that could be considered authentic. In this sense, authentic is not the opposite of artificial, but an extension of it. Urban explorers describe this as a “real” experience, something that does not have a gloss to it but is authentic and faithful to space. Entropy and Fuck the Police find a balance between decay and destruction. The ceramics, which is broken, stolen or rearranged by people, and the way in which spaces decay calibrate each other. This all stems from a need to understand chaos and how entropically “decay forces the layers of order to buckle, we gain a glimpse of what constitutes that order” (Trigg 2006, 184) In ruined sites there is a transfer of power between space and explorer, as both adrenalin and risk occurs. Making artworks in these spaces, although still risk fuelled, provides space to experiment, play and push boundaries whilst testing ideas. Making in these spaces provides space to learn and investigate; it also forces the artist to make quickly without overly deliberating possible outcomes. The space acts as a catalyst for new ideas and new ways to interact with place, in turn creating works that will catalyse reactions in others. Making work in ruined buildings temporarily appropriates the space and transforms it into something else. Seeing what others can’t, finding a hidden angle or corner of a city, gives a glimpse into an alternate world, it shows an authentic experience, which enriches our existence. Once a site is found and changing, interfering and making work in the site completed, the work can be left to become something else. It is a perpetual cycle of finding, making and moving on, trying to find new spaces, forming new ideas, interacting with different people. Engaging with a space and changing it slightly, even if for a very short time, allows for connections to be made between historical context of place, present moment of inhabiting space and future uncertainties of place. Norberg Schulz uses “genius loci” (Jiven and Larkham 2003) to describe the experience of using places rather than place making, linking place with ceramics through ideas of authenticity and familiarity. This refers to place as more than topographical location but the sense and atmosphere, which go along with the much-overused “sense of place”. It is this sense of place that informs my making, of being in post-industrial spaces, and making in them, where the sense of risk of space and freedom to experiment are constantly counteracting each other. The artworks discussed merge objects that are familiar into sites and spaces that are extraordinary; it produces artworks that question the function of space and the desire to inhabit these spaces. There is an invisibility and impermanence to ruins as much as there is to the artwork that is made to fill it. A ceramic object can become a part of the site but can also remain completely alien to it.

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Figure 8.5 Megan Randall, Entropy railway siding, 2009. Image: Megan Randall.

References Bishop, C. 2005. Installation Art. London: Tate Publishing. Farley, P. and M. Symmons Roberts. 2011. Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness. London: Vintage Ferrell, J. et al. 2008. Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. New York: Sage Publications Ltd. Garratt, B. 2013. Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City. London: Verso Hayward, K. 2004. City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience. England: Routledge-Cavendish. Jiven, G. and P.J. Larkham. 2003. “Sense of Place, Authenticity and Character: A Commentary.” Journal of Urban Design 8(1): 67–81. Livingstone, A. 2007. Authenticity-familiarity-redefinition. Sunderland: University of Sunderland, Learning Development Services. Lyng, S. 1990 “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking.” American Journal of Sociology 95(4). Nietzsche, F. 1967. The Will to Power. United Kingdom: Vintage. Parry, B. (ed.), with S. Medlyn and M. Tahir. 2011. Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Intervention 1st edition., Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Rugg, J. 2010. Exploring Site-Specific Art: Issues of Space and Internationalism. London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd. Smith, M. 2010. “Philosophy.” In 18 Proposals, Class of 2008–2010. London: Department of ceramics and glass. Trigg, D. 2006. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. —. 2005. Ninjalicious 1973-2005 [online] Accessed 20 Feb 2016. http://dylantrigg.com/Ninjalicious.pdf Veiteberg, J. 2011. “Caroline Slotte: Artist Presentation.” In Thing Tang Trash – Upcycling in Contemporary Ceramics, edited by Jorunn Veiteberg. Bergen: Bergen National Academy of the Arts/Art Museums

CHAPTER NINE THE CREATIVE POTENTIAL OF THE POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE DAVID JONES

… (the Holocaust) towers high above the past genocidal episodes in the same way as the modern industrial plant towers above the craftsman’s cottage. (Baumann 2010, 89)

This chapter examines the potential of the post-industrial landscape to develop an ethically informed aesthetic through an analysis of an installation created in Germany in a factory site. The fate of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and those who opposed the Nazis in Germany and the occupied countries under German occupation in WW2 has been read by Giorgio Agamben and Zygmund Baumann as a distortion of, but only possible with, the bureaucratization and the division of labour of modern industrial capitalism. This chapter discusses the installation Grenzerfahrung, which I created at a symposium, sited in an unoccupied factory building belonging to the furnace manufacturer ELIOG in Römhild, Germany. This was close to Weimar; the Lonely Planet travel guide informed readers that just a short bus ride away is the concentration camp of Buchenwald – this is where my grandmother was killed by the Nazis and where we must assume her mortal remains were incinerated. Bauman quotes Feingold: “the concentration camp was also a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death” (Baumann 2010, xii). I worked collaboratively with the visitors and residents of Thuringia to make ceramic work that responded to the destruction of humanity; the work emphasized the determinant of morality that Emmanuel Levinas has called the “face of the other” (Levinas 1996, 7), in my search for a new direction in post-industrial expression.

Figure 9.1 David Jones, Grenzerfahrung, installation, mixed media, Römhild, 2011. Image copyright David Jones.

Grenzerfahrung utilized found and appropriated waste industrial materials from the factory site. Its physical presence was based around a “skeleton” constructed from re-purposed waste shelving units appropriated from the

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factory and installed in the space; they implied a series of interlocking meanings: fundamentally the shelves stood as a limit – dividing the gallery space – a liminal condition (a border or Grenze in German). It could be read as the dividing line that allowed the Nazis to perceive Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists as less than human; it could be read as the old border separating West and East Germany (Römhild is but 5 kilometres from the Cold War border with the west of Germany, that actually separated families for decades). The shelves also stood for the stacked bunks of the concentration camps, which held the bodies of human beings that the Nazis regarded as raw material for processing in the factories of death. The use of industrial shelving served to emphasize the objectification that had occurred in the minds of the Nazis, concerning their victims, who were treated as industrial material for processing. It referenced the form of the installation Wirtschaftswerte (Economic Values) by Josef Beuys, where he had employed a set of iron shelves to structure the work. He had stocked the shelves with basic food stuffs and tools from the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) and had employed his own personal vocabulary of materiality – plaster block with pencil and fat; he had also included paintings appropriated from the collection of the host museum in which it was shown. The paintings in Wirtschaftswerte were to suggest an aspect of bourgeois luxury; I used porcelain, glazes and salt-glaze firing to indicate a contrast between the inner and outer worlds of the prisoners in the camps. When I experienced Wirtschaftswerte I was conscious that, without the war, that life in the GDR could have been my own; for Beuys, the artefacts from the GDR “represented a simplicity and authenticity that reminded him of his childhood” (Beuys 1980) opposed to the commodification of life in the West. Grenzerfahrung was also an opportunity to experiment deeper with the concept of collaborative working, a version of Beuys’s notion of Soziale Plastik (Social Sculpture).

Figure 9.2 The kiln like crematoria in Buchenwald, and cast iron door furniture designed by Topf und Söhne. Image copyright David Jones.

The ceramic elements contained on the shelves were both self-authored and created in collaboration with audiences; Grenzerfahrung also included ready-made and waste materials from the factory site, to stand for the industrialization of the Holocaust. On the shelves, like exhibits in a Wunderkammer, were individual elements, groups and undifferentiated piles of materials, redolent of the piles discovered at the liberation of the concentration camps. The installation utilized the indexical marks of making as symbolic representation of the hand-made as a signifier of “the other”; this was significant, as it conceptually embodied the essential quality that Hannah Arendt had argued defined homo faber (man-the-maker, her definition of humanity in a state of freedom) (Arendt 1998, 14).

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The choice of ceramic as a material was also metaphorically loaded: Clay is a product of the erosion of rock; ceramics is the transformation of that muddy substance back into a rock-like material by fire; it is thus ideally suited as a symbolic transformative material to represent the change of lives into object-hood. Local clays (earths) as well as industrial clay bodies were utilized to convey the compromised narrative of place, and bodily memories. Meaning is burnt into ceramic in firing, reiterating the fate of the bodies of the victims of the Holocaust. These pieces were juxtaposed with the appropriated waste from the factory, which is marked by the patina of use. The firing of ceramics, conducted in a variety of kilns, alluded to the fires of the crematoria of the Nazis, which had been built using kilnbuilding methodologies, by the German kiln manufacturer Topf und Söhne of Ehrfurt (whose name was proudly displayed on the iron-work of the doors using a well-designed type-face, and was interestingly still in business until the early 1970s). The objects I designed to populate the shelves were symbols of the lives that were corrupted by the Nazis; these were the piles that have come to be seen as iconographic of the Holocaust when they were discovered in piles on the liberation of the concentration camps – they were wedding rings, toys, hair, shoes, piles of human bone ash, urns. I worked collaboratively with groups of visitors ranging from school parties to interested local people to re-create these elements in local clays – work to stand for a future where industry had not been corrupted as a factory of death. One of the most significant newly conceived elements of the installation were Zusammenstücke (“together pieces”) made with a roll of clay squashed between my hand and that of the visitors to the studios, including many school parties. The multiplicity of Zusammenstücke, that occupied the space of a handshake, were an imaginative suggestion to the audiences of the possibility to move from the alienation of factory production to a re-awakening of the handmade and via that to access “the face of the other”.

Figure 9.3 Urns for ashes to be resold to the Jews. Image copyright David Jones.

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Figure 9.4 David Jones, Grenzerfahrung (detail) urn and clay wedding rings. Image copyright David Jones.

Figure 9.5 David Jones, Grenzerfahrung (detail) Zusammenstücke, black clay. Image copyright David Jones.

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When the work was finished it was installed in two alternative formats: the audience was confronted by the gallery space being bordered or divided by the installation. As they approached they encountered the materiality/thingliness of the pieces placed on the shelves. Firstly through the appearance of the elements and secondly through tactile engagement, the objects on the shelves connected the audience to that embodied narrative of hand-making – they put their hands where mine, and those of my collaborators had fashioned the pieces. By confronting the audience with these ambiguous objects they experienced the aura of the work transmitted through an intimate relationship, that stood for “the face of the other” or as the intuitive ethical interaction characterized by the philosopher Martin Buber as I – Thou (Buber, 2003, 7). In short it is that direct confrontation with another’s humanity through a phenomenologically embodied narrative.

Figure 9.6 David Jones, Grenzerfahrung (detail) Zusammenstücke, Porcelain. Image copyright David Jones.

The making and ownership of artefacts is an aspect of our being. No objects came to my family from the time before the escape of my mother on the Kindertransport from Germany, and there was no direct communication from my grandparents’ time in the camps, so I am working with intuited apprehensions concerning their experiences which manifest themselves fundamentally as “the uncanny” – the “unheimlich” (Freud 1919), which literally translates as the “un-homely” in German, while its contrary is Heimlich, “concealed, hidden, in secret, [as well as homely]”. This makes the choice of the vessel, and its associations with the domestic and the home, significant as a vehicle of expression, as the work represents the dislocation of ordinary life by historical events, alluding to a pre-industrial time of hand-made pottery. For the Grenzerfahrung installation, contemporary imperfect vessels, signifying damage, were created. These were deliberately manipulated with crude hand and finger marks, imprinted by striking with hard-edged tools or cracked and broken, fired damp so that they would explode; some were used to hold the spilling clay rings. The cutting and tearing of the clay vessels found an echo in the iconography of Judaism: keriah is the tearing of clothes in Jewish mourning rituals which is instated by the gash/cut embedded marking incised on the vessels. The clay rings subverted the appropriation by the Nazis of gold wedding rings collected in abundance from their victims, solely for their material commodity-value. The collaborative making gave an intrinsic value to the clay rings that have no material worth in themselves, since they are quickly made from cheap found clay. In order to underscore this narrative of the fate of the Jews, torn paper containing extracts of Paul Celan’s poem Todesfuge, which draws the reader’s attention to the black hair of the Jewish girl, Margarethe, murdered in the camps, were positioned on shelves. In my installation Grenzerfahrung I used swarf – the waste trimmings of industrial metalturning, placed on a shelf, to represent this aspect of her humanity that had been shorn on entry to the camps.

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The contrast of the hand-made with the anonymous quality of industrially produced goods and waste was philosophically significant: ontologically the piece of clay that is formed between my hands and those of the people whom I contact is the space of our almost touching in meeting. It was made physical through changing it into material. These clay forms, moulded by our hands alone, were then fired. The artefacts on the shelves will endure past our own death, for kiln-fired ceramic remains have almost the longest duration of any man-made products. Making and firing ceramics, like the making of all works, as Hannah Arendt observed, has “the capacity for producing durability” (Arendt 1998, 172). Time is embedded as an essential part of the embodied narrative of the ceramic object; a vessel can be read as a memento mori, making us aware of our own inevitable death and drawing attention to our own authentic existence in the way the vessel was used as an image in the Bible. In this way I made a symbolic replacement for what did not come to me from my grandparents. They are the material accompaniment to our history. Frank Wilson (1999) and Charles Woolfson (1982) have perceived the hand as central to the evolution of intelligence, sociability and human being. Hand-made objects carry the ethical and moral connotation overlaid by the Arts and Crafts Movement, as well as being imbued with the ethical significance, standing for “the other”, as envisioned by Levinas (1996). Richard Shusterman explains that with significant works: “ethical content so often deeply pervade[s] the artwork’s meaning that the work could not be properly understood without attending to its ethical dimensions” (Shusterman 2012, 133). My work is non-utilitarian and informed by Modernism; it reads craft as sited between design and art, essentially as part of a continuum reaching back millennia rather than the “radical rupture in time created by the Holocaust” (Hoffman 2005, 87); it demonstrates an ethical meaning embodied in the work. The visit to Buchenwald brought home the ironic parallel between kiln-firing and the crematoria (and gas chambers). They had been carefully designed by teams of engineers at the furnace manufacturer Topf und Söhne to dispose of vast numbers of human bodies in as efficient and cost-effective a manner as possible – a corrupt inversion of our current concern with sustainable developments in ceramics and kiln design, further underlining the need for an ethical framework to be considered in all applications of industry rather than a position of disinterestedness. In this way methodologies evolved in the pre-industrial world transport a new significance to the post-industrial landscape.

Figure 9.7 Clay rings left at Buchenwald. Image copyright David Jones.

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References Agamben, G. 1995. Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bauman, Z. 2010. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beuys, J. 1980. “Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments.” Accessed December 2015. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/joseph-beuys-actions-vitrines-environments/joseph-beuysactions-10. Buber, M. 2003. I and Thou. New Jersey, USA: Paulist Press. Celan, P. 2001. Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. London: Norton. Freud, S. 1919. The “Uncanny”. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 217–256. London: Penguin, Vintage Classics. Hoffman, E. 2005. After Such Knowledge. London: Random House. Levinas, E. 1996. Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by A. Peperzak. Bloomington, IN, USA: Indiana University Press. Schulte-Peevers, A. 2008. Lonely Planet Guide to Germany. Lonely Planet. Shusterman, R. 2012. Thinking through the Body – Essays in Somaesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, F.R. 1999. The Hand. New York: Vintage Books. Woolfson, C. 1982. The Labour Theory of Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

CHAPTER TEN BLIND LANDINGS MATERIAL MEMORY JANE AND LOUISE WILSON

Death was what the Atlantic Wall1 and Siegfried Line2 were all about. Whenever I came across these grim fortifications along France’s Channel coast and German border, I realized I was exploring a set of concrete tombs whose dark ghosts haunted the Brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 1950s. … Modernism was a vast utopian project, and perhaps the last utopian project we will ever see, now that we are well aware that all utopias have their dark side. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were two utopian projects that turned into the greatest dystopias the world has known. (Ballard 2006)

Figure 10.1 Jane and Louise Wilson, Biville, Sealander, 2006, c type print on aluminium with diasec. 180x180cms. 1

The Atlantic Wall (German: Atlantikwall) was an extensive system of coastal defence and fortifications built by Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1944 along the coast of continental Europe and Scandinavia as a defence against an anticipated Allied invasion of Nazi occupied Europe from Great Britain during World War II. 2 The original Siegfried Line (Germann: Siegfriedstellung) was a First World War line of defensive forts and tank defences built by Germany in northern France during 1916 17 as a section of the Hindenburg Line.

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In May 1940 German forces invaded France, and it remained under Nazi control for the next four years, during which time the Atlantic coastline was declared a military zone. Built in late 1942, these defensive concrete bunkers formed part of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall”, a string of fortifications stretching from the Spanish border to Norway. Construction was overseen by Organisation Todt, the Nazi civil and military engineering group, with much of the building work done by local men as compulsory labour. The works from the Sealander series were photographed during the summer of 2006. The images were very much inspired by the article written by J.G. Ballard. We felt very moved by Ballard’s writing, when he compares the Brutalist architecture of these once functioning bunkers to “being as indifferent to time as the pyramids” (Ballard 2006). We were struck by the compelling dystopia of these modernist Brutalist structures, a truly failed modernism, but at the same time an architecture that was so popular in post-war 1950s Britain, where many Brutalist-inspired developments flourished in bomb-damaged cities and new town developments. We shot these works in black and white because we wanted to heighten that sense of abstraction and abandonment; in some of the images it is difficult to work out whether the bunkers are in fact falling into the sea as a consequence of coastal erosion or actually emerging from it. We felt to document these works in colour would somehow normalize the abstraction and sense of displacement in time that we wanted to invoke. The low angle and large scale of the photographs are all shot on a square medium format camera that lend these structures a monumental, corporeal quality despite their obsolete and derelict state. However, whether such remnants of occupation should be preserved as historical buildings is currently a matter of debate in France. In 2008 we were given access to the Kubrick archive housed in the London College of Communication (LCC) in Elephant and Castle, London. During our research there we came across images from the Ealing Film Studios archives that were taken in the 30s and 40s. Each image featured a yardstick – black and white painted rulers in lengths of one yard – a now relatively obsolete measure, but then used as a measure of scale in the reconstruction of architectural details and for the use in set design, in particular for the design of film sets to establish a scale of measurement for set designers and cameraman. What we found particularly fascinating about some of these images was the almost forensic detail in the way the yardsticks were placed like clues, providing evidence of the presence of a human scale without actually featuring people. Inspired by the archive of photographs acquired by Stanley Kubrick we began directly referencing the yardsticks in our work.

Figure 10.2 Digital pigment print of a production photograph from the Ealing Film Studios, from the Collection of the Stanley Kubrick Archive LCC London.

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Figure 10.3 Installation view Tempo Suspenso, Jane and Louise Wilson CGAC, 2010; Measures Obsolescere, Bronze and enamel 198cm, 2010; Props And Dressing, 2010; four 31x24cm, 30x25cm, 31x24.5cm and 31x 25cm, black and white digital pigment prints Jane and Louise Wilson (stills from the Ealing Film Studios from the Collection of the Stanley Kubrick Archive, LCC London) Courtesy of Helga de Alvear Foundation, Caceres, Spain.

As Peter Osborne (2011, 33–9) writes in his essay, “Yardsticks: When Will the Postwar End?” about our work, “What is being measured here? What else but time – itself, according to Aristotle, the measure or ‘number’ of motion? The passage of time: time as loss, loss of what is past, both its horrors and its opportunities.” Yardsticks are obsolete measures, not just because of changes in the technology of film production, but because of their imperial standard: the yard (0.9144 of a metre), 36 inches. The inch is the basis of the British Imperial system of measurement. Man, Antiquity and Empire are all obsolete measures and therefore subject to monumentalization. In the Wilsons’ Measure Obsolescere3 the yardstick from the films and photographic series is monumentalized, cast in bronze – the imperishable stuff of classical art and hence inviting confusion with sculpture. Yet it is from their specific obsolescence, not their monumental material, that the art status of these yardsticks is staged. Obsolete and thereby abstracted from function, it is the multiple redundancies of the yardsticks that place them, alongside the Kubrick archival images, into the sphere of a post-conceptual, contemporary art. The Measures Obsolescere are physical manifestations of pure abstractions. Drawing attention to the various qualities of its internal architecture, the Measures do not evoke the sculptural tradition so much as Mel Bochner’s famous 1969 Measurement Room or the Polish artist Edward Krasinski’s Intervention series. Bochner’s and Krasinski’s lines mark the alienation of measure from the measurer. In her book Atomic Light, Akira Mizuta Lippit gives a description of the experiments Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen, the German physicist, carried out in 1895, in the discovery of Röntgen rays. By exposing his wife’s hand on a photographic plate the rays passed through it to “generate shadowy photographic tracings from a distance … Like a dream, this form of light moved through objects, erased boundaries between solid objects, crossing their internal and external borders” (Lippit 2005, 44). When his wife saw the resulting X-ray image, she is said to have had a “vague premonition of death” (Lippit 2005, 46). Lippit remarks that the X-ray image captured by the Röntgen rays, “anticipates less than a century later Vladimir Shevchenko’s film A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks. Filmed in 1986 in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, it captured for the first time, the effects of gamma radiation on film” (Lippit 2005). In June 2010 we visited Ukraine. Our trip was supported by the British Council in Ukraine and Forma Arts and Media in the UK. We were invited to specifically research the abandoned site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor plant, and the Exclusion Zone surrounding it. While we were there we visited the abandoned town of Pripyat, built in the early 1970s under the former Soviet Union to house the Chernobyl factory workers. Known as Atomgrad (Atom City) 3

Jane and Louise Wilson, Measure Obsolescere, 2010, John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton.

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this once thriving new town has lain abandoned and contaminated for the last 25 years since the series of explosions which destroyed the buildings and nuclear reactor. One of the most evocative descriptions of Pripyat has been written by Paul Dobraszczyk in “Petrified Ruin” (2010). He talks about the model status of Pripyat, and the journey from its elevation to one of the most prosperous towns in the Ukraine to its final destination as “the petrified ruin” (Dobraszczyk 2010).

Figure 10.4 Still of Pripyat, Kiev National Film Archive, Ukraine. Pripyat’s model status is now ironic; with the sarcophagus conventional architectural roles have been reversed: the ruin, the destroyed reactor, becomes monument and a literal model, while the model, the ideal city, becomes a ruin. (Dobraszczyk 2010)

We felt that the most appropriate way for us to document Pripyat would be through a series of still photographic works, because it seemed that the only way to show the extent of the aftermath, physical destruction and deterioration of the town was through the hyper-real detail offered by the large format photograph. Using the recurring motif of a yardstick placed within each of the interiors, there is a desire to make conscious the act of entering and photographing these spaces. The photograph encourages us to stare back into the past, into the empty manmade spaces, yet the yardsticks – a means of measurement now fallen into disuse, much like the buildings themselves – play with notions of association, interpretation and memory on material fact and that which is recorded, measured, articulated and analysed. The work explores the thematics of dark tourism, using the yardsticks as a forensic and literal measure that act as a register for the viewer.

Figure 10.5 Still of Reactor no. 4, Chernobyl, 1986, Kiev National Archive, Ukraine.

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We had wanted to make a film connected to Chernobyl for some time, however we were very conscious that Pripyat and the site of the Reactor had been filmed many times, with numerous videos available on YouTube. On our return from Chernobyl we undertook research in the Kiev state film archive and whilst there we viewed Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks (1987) made by Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko in the days immediately following the disaster. This film is an extraordinary, close-up record of the efforts to contain and clear up the disaster but it is also a compelling document of the physical effects of radiation on film. When Shevchenko first processed his film he noticed that portions of it were heavily pockmarked and affected by static interference. He mistakenly thought that this interference was caused by faulty film stock, however when he subsequently played the film back on a Steenbeck, he heard sound alongside the image and realized that each time the image deteriorated, it coincided with the sound of the Geiger counter. So there was no fault with the processing… Shevchenko had captured 4 the effect of radiation on film for the first time. To quote Susan Schuppli, in her essay The Most Dangerous Film in the World (2010), “Arguably what is fascinating about Shevchenko’s film is its transformation from a conventional documentary or benign media artifact into a radioactive fossil through the mysterious intercession of an invisible agent.” Our fascination with Shevchenko’s film is that by capturing the effects of radiation directly onto his film stock, the film not only documents the event, it becomes an event in itself.

Figure 10.6 Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad, Nature Abhors A Vacuum IV, 2010, 180x180cms, c type print on aluminium behind diasec.

Shevchenko died less than a year after making the film, caused by an excessive dose of radiation. The 35mm Russian Bolex camera, a Konvas Automat, used to make the film had become completely radioactive, recording over 60 times the tolerable levels of radiation for one adult. The camera (as was standard with contaminated equipment and

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Dr Susan Schuppli, media artist and cultural theorist, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Centre for Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, Assistant Director of the Forensic Architecture course, Goldsmith's College. See also http://susanschuppli.com/wp content/uploads/Radical Contact Prints Revised.pdf.

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vehicles) was subsequently buried. Caroline Wilkinson,5 of the University of Dundee, commented while in discussion with us about Chernobyl at the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) in 2012, “The idea of a radioactive forensic film and camera is also fascinating – that the moment and the event are captured in time as a process as well as an image is the ultimate forensic experience.”

Figure 10.7 Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad, Nature Abhors A Vacuum VI, 2010, 180x180cms c type print on aluminium behind diasec.

In March 2011 we returned to Kiev to interview the three cameramen, Vladimyr, Victor and Anatoly who had assisted Shevchenko in the making of his film. During our interviews with them they told us where the camera had been buried. We were unable to visit the site on that occasion as access is generally not permitted, however we began working with a fixer in Ukraine, himself a Chernobyl “veteran”, the term used to refer to the individuals who undertook the clean-up operation. He subsequently arranged access to the site which we filmed last year. The Toxic Camera (J. and L. Wilson 2012) our most recent film installation was made in Ukraine. We also filmed on location in the National Cinematheque of Ukraine “KievNaukFilm”, the Radioactive Waste Storage Facility in Pirogovo, just outside of Kiev and Orford Ness in Suffolk. In July 2012 we were commissioned to create our first publicly sited installation Blind Landing, H-Bomb Test Facility, Lab 1 and Lab 4, on Orford Ness, an island off the Suffolk Coast, UK, which was a former secret military HBomb test facility owned by the Ministry of Defence. It was subsequently de-commissioned in the 1990s and the once functioning laboratory testing buildings have now been left to gradually decay as the island has become a nature reserve. Lab 1, in the photograph Blind Landing, H-Bomb Test Facility Lab is the largest Lab and the pit is the only visible feature left to see. The “Pagoda” Lab 4 was unique in design, in that it was built for the vibration testing of the casing of the H-Bomb during the Cold War. The architectural remains of Orford Ness stand surprisingly resolute. However, inside its abandoned facilities nature has invaded, re-testing the limits of particles suspended in concrete. The discourse of industrial violence is momentarily the return of a repressed “nature” – mould and vegetation — that seems intent upon covering over the traces of the past. When you visit the island, there is something acute about the 5

Caroline Wilkinson, Professor of Craniofacial Identification at the Centre of Anatomy and Human Identification, College of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, UK.

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perception of scale, it distorts, contracts and expands, depending from which perspective you look. At the shore the island architecture appears almost embedded as though camouflaged; this is the first encounter of viewing the shingle spit by boat.

Figure 10.8 Jane and Louise Wilson, Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 1 (H Bomb Testing Facility, Orford Ness), 2012.

When you land on the island the scale of the buildings appears quite epic, however when you finally draw up to them they appear much smaller, and in proportion to the landscape; they lose their menace and appear no more than the large bunkers they are. It is curious how scale can magnify them as an image of menace then reduce them to the concrete structures that they really are. It was with this in mind that we sited literal measures, the yardsticks, to act as a register for scale and intimacy. We cast the measures in aluminium, painting them with their individual black and white markers. The allusions were rich for us as the vertical uprights challenge the sense of scale and ruin, pointing to the architecture of forensics and camouflage.6 With all of this knowledge in mind it gives the Lab buildings on Orford Ness an historic relevance that is not just about a ruin but the future ruin as the repercussions of their function are still very much being felt today. Time as history, measured in fragments: small pieces of time carrying with them history 6

Caitlin DeSilvey talks about the site and exhibition in Ruin Memories Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, edited by Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Pétursdóttir, Routledge. See Chapter 5, Palliative Curation: Art and entropy on Orford Ness 79 (pp. 82 5). Available at: https://www.academia.edu/7441847/Palliative curation art and entropy on Orford Ness?auto download (accessed 31 July 2016)

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and experience, through their relationship to each other. And through our imagining of a past ruin we may find the potential to remember a future ruin.

Figure 10.9 Jane and Louise Wilson, Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 4 (H Bomb Testing Facility, Orford Ness), 2012.

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Figure 10.10 Jane and Louise Wilson, The Toxic Camera, 2012, Installation view, HD Film Installation dur. 21 minutes. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Commissioned by FLAMIN Productions. Co produced by Forma Arts and Media Ltd with funding from Arts Council England.

References Ballard, J.G. 2006. A Handful of Dust. Copyright Guardian News and Media Ltd. Dobraszczyk, P. 2010. “Petrified Ruin: Chernobyl, Pripyat and the death of the city.” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture Theory, Policy, Action 14(4): 370–89. Gould, P. 1990. Fire in the Rain: The Democratic Consequences of Chernobyl. The Johns Hopkins University Press; First Edition. Lippit, A.M. (2005) Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota press. Osborne, P. 2011. “Yardsticks: When Will the Postwar End?” In Jane & Louise Wilson: Tempo Suspenso. Santiago de Compostela, Spain: Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Xunta de Galicia. Schuppli, S. The Most Dangerous Film in the World, https://www.academia.edu/751404/The Most Dangerous Film in the World 14 Shevchenko, V. 1987. Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/23bjxv/chernobyl a chronicle of difficult weeks directed/

CHAPTER ELEVEN WASTELANDS AND WEEDS: SPONTANEOUS VEGETATION AND THE EXPERIENCE OF PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY BERLIN ROWLAND BYASS

Architecturally Berlin was hideous, but as a compensation its streets were spotless and bordered by miles of carefully tended geranium beds. (Bowles 1987, on Berlin in 1931) Approximately 400 million m3 of debris was left in the wake of World War II in Germany alone. … From barren heaps of broken bricks emerge wild jungles of box elder, black locust and tree of heaven. Celandine and nettles sprout from sidewalk paths and traveller’s joy covers entire backyards obscuring the very substance of rubble as well as the memory of its origin. (Toland and Wessolek 2011)

August – late summer in Berlin. Arriving on the train from Schönefeld airport, the first things I notice are the tall weeds growing along the railway sidings. I recognize some – American ruderals like Goldenrod, familiar from similar wasteground settings in Britain. The white umbels of wild carrot. Tall, fine grasses with parchment-coloured seedheads – Calamagrostis, I think. Via the German nurseryman Karl Foerster, selections of Calamagrostis species have found their way into “prairie” and “wild” planting schemes all over the temperate world.1 These weeds are finer, with less dominance of rank grasses than I’d expect to find on the heavy clay soils of London. They speak of poor, sandy soils. Of the northern European plain stretching thousands of miles east to the Ural mountains. There’s a wide rail corridor running east–west roughly along the course of the river Spree, from Rummelsberg into Berlin’s eastern centre at Alexanderplatz. Wider than the river, this corridor is somehow more significant than that natural feature in defining the form of the modern city. It bisects East Berlin and forms the boundary between the districts of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. From Karl-Marx-Allee, you can cycle along Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, over the Spree onto Museumsinsel and again over the river onto Unter den Linden without really noticing it. But Warschauer Brücke carries you up a ramp over the railway and from the brow of the bridge, offers up a panorama of the city – rare in the largely flat riverine landscape of Berlin. Below, multiple railway lines carve their way through a broad hinterland of weeds, scrub and trees. Weeds grow up to the rails, grading from tall grassland communities to the scrubby beginnings of woodland further from the tracks. Even on the broad avenue of Warschauerstrasse, grasses and weeds grow between the rails of the central tramline, trimmed by the undersides of trams passing above. Then there are the pavements. Weeds grow in the cracks between the granite cobbles flanking every pavement, on every street. Imagine a giant sponge floating in a clear cool pool of water filled with sand and stone. This is home. Between the soggy ceiling of the ground water aquifer and the uppermost interfaces of earth and air is a spongy space of soil particles and pores invisible to most surface dwellers the vadose zone. (Toland and Wessolek 2011)

Berlin’s pavements are designed to be porous, encouraging rainwater to percolate through hard surfaces to recharge the groundwater. Along the Spree river corridor, the city is built on glacier-deposited sand and gravel with a high groundwater level, which has been gradually lowered by pumping over the last hundred or so years. Pavements are constructed in retention-weak materials with unsealed joints filled with fine sand. The intention is to prevent flooding and frost damage to surfaces from standing water. Specifications for public pavements favour unsealed surfaces.2 Throughout the city there is a standard public pavement design.

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For more on the development of garden varieties of perennial plants by German horticulturalist Karl Foerster and others see Hansen and Stahl (1993) 2 “Closed surfaces used only where consistent maintenance of water bound surfaces cannot be guaranteed or where the surface is used intensively.” “Paths should not be functionally compromised by surrounding plant growth.” Berlin Design for all: Public Outdoor Space http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/bauen/barrierefreies bauen/download/designforall/pos green broschure en.pdf

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Figure 11.1 Dry grassland perennials growing alongside railway lines in Berlin, August 2014. Image: Rowland Byass.

On older pavements this consists of a central path of large granite flagstones around 1m wide and 1.5m long or more. On more recently constructed pavements, the central path is of smaller square “terrazzo granite” concrete pavers with a visible textured granite aggregate surface. Either side of the central path are smaller, irregularly riven cubic granite setts (cobbles), about 10 x 10 x 10cm. The joints between both flagstones and setts are filled with sand. Every spring a new generation of annual weeds, washed into these joints, germinates. On every pavement in the city, these urban soil seams filter and buffer rainwater, allowing it to percolate into the lower soil and subsoil layers to recharge the groundwater that feeds the aquifers from which Berlin takes its water. More obviously the open soil seams support life. From spring onwards, less heavily trodden parts of the city’s pavements are a green haze of dandelion, shepherd’s purse and annual grasses that become yellow and brown as the summer advances. Every time I walk down the street, this miniature wilderness landscape is there when I look down, always at the margins of my journey through the city. Walking the city streets, patches of weedy wasteland are still evident 15 years3 after the fall of the Wall, 69 years after the end of the War. Sometimes you see people playing music on these pieces of ground in the summer. Elsewhere are improvised tent encampments. There is a distinct sense, for all the new buildings, that there has been a great disjuncture here in the past. A catastrophe, a series of catastrophes. Humans are re-occupying places built in another time, for other purposes. Squatting in the ruins. There’s something casual about this re-use, a lack of automatic deference for the past. The way graffiti covers old and new buildings without discrimination. The past is everywhere; 3

Revisiting this account originally written in August 2014, more construction sites and fewer patches of weedy wasteland are in evidence in February 2016.

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it’s also up for grabs. This city’s unashamed refusal to be merely pretty. And everywhere weeds, those “global signatures of disturbance”, (Mabey 2010) and the marginal land on which they thrive. This is a clue as to why I can feel free in Berlin, in a way in which I don’t in London, or Paris, cities whose monuments are still stiff with the unreconstructed national myth. No such simple imagined relationship with the past is possible here. Berlin is a broken city: broken and remade into something else. Kintsugi on an urban scale. The gaps between the broken pieces of the urban fabric are the spaces in which things both rich and strange emerge. Here’s another clue. In Berlin you can find ruined buildings aplenty – fewer than there used to be, certainly. But still the city is littered with them: old hospitals, an abandoned theme park, bombed out nineteenth-century villas, even the former Iraqi embassy. There are two kinds of ruin in Berlin. There are the incidentally abandoned or officially forgotten ruins, left to the mercy of the elements and contemporary urban explorers. Then there are the official ruins, those relating to the war. These ruins have been scrupulously repaired, but not reconstructed. The tell-tale sign is the zinc flashing. It follows the broken-off edges of the portico of the former Anhalter Bahnhof railway station like a cauterized wound. The flashing arrests the decay, fixes the ruin neatly. What is left of this building is not allowed to crumble in a picturesque way, weeds sprouting between the masonry like the basilicas of Rome or the city walls of Istanbul. This sort of ruin would risk romanticizing sudden annihilation. Anhalter Bahnhof was one of Berlin’s major rail termini. From here Jews were deported to concentration camps. Damaged in a huge bombing raid in 1943, it was demolished in 1960. Here, ruins are not just ruins, wasteground is not just wasteground. Both what remains, and what has been destroyed, has an inescapable history. Tabula rasa is just not possible in Berlin. And yet I feel freer here in Berlin than in other European cities, also freighted with history. The spaces that have arisen out of the violent discontinuities of Berlin’s history have created gaps that allow new uses and meanings to arise. The urban landscape of Berlin is inspiring for the sense that it is unfinished, open-ended. These patches of anthropogenic wilderness within the city offer – as well as their ecological richness – aesthetic and therapeutic value. This value accounts for much of the liveability of Berlin, a city alive with natural life and poetic possibilities. The 4 city’s urban morphology, a “green archipelago” of built form interspersed with both designed and spontaneous green landscapes, offers a range of experiences, including the experience of urban wilderness. Such places confound the conventional binary of rural and urban, and offer inspiration for approaches to post-industrial landscapes elsewhere. Wasteland sites offer niches for natural and human ecologies. Moreover, they frame the experience of the city itself. They give Berlin its sense of place – a city interspersed with pockets of wildness at different scales: several hectares of scrub and grassland, rabbits living in the central reservation of a highway, weeds growing in cracks in the pavement just 10mm wide. Unnoticed by many, these pockets of wildness supply a counterpoint to Berlin’s barrack-like urban blocks that relieves the monotony of built form. And yet rather than being the antithesis of the human-made city, they grow out of the very rubble of its history. They give Berlin the necessary ambiguity that makes it such an imaginatively fertile place. The dandelion growing through the pavement can, if perception allows, give us a taste of the restorative power of wildness of which designed landscapes always somehow seem like a pale reflection.

Berghain The usual approach to Berghain is from the south, from Ostbanhof through a recently built zone of large retail warehouses, built within the last ten years. A broad, dusty path enclosed by wire mesh fences leads to the building’s entrance, a small double door at the foot of a monumental, pharaonic-looking façade. A former coal-fired power station built in the era of the DDR (former German Democratic Republic), it looks like a gigantic tomb, a portal to the underworld. The building consists of two 40m cubes joined together, massive in scale, monumental in proportions and surface modelling. Large piers with narrow vertical windows between them rise out of a horizontal plinth up to a heavy overhanging cornice. In front of the south façade is a piece of remnant wasteground, a spontaneous meadow of annual and perennial weeds that grades into scrub and a copse of trees at the edges. The trees frame the building; at night the light from dozens of windows in Berghain’s façade backlights the trees and makes the building itself even more otherworldly, looming over this piece of urban wilderness. By forming the foreground to the visitor’s first sight of Berghain, this wasteground makes it visually separate from the rest of the city. It’s an illusion – there’s an Aldi supermarket within spitting distance on one side and to the north, Berghain is bordered by an ordinary city street with the large service access for vehicles that a building of this size requires. But it creates a first impression of a place apart, and this impression is integral to the place that Berghain occupies in the imagination of those who enter it. The name Berghain elides the suffixes of the two districts which it adjoins – Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain – formerly divided by the Wall. It is both a symbol, and tangible embodiment, of reunification and the new cultures that sprang up in the depopulated districts of East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.5 Inside this former power station, freedom is more than an idea: it is an ongoing experimental practice, lived out every weekend. During the month I spent in Berlin in August 2014, I kept returning to the land around Berghain, exploring all the accessible areas. I walked through the spontaneous meadow and scrub south of the building. I noticed familiar weeds of agricultural and waste land: scentless mayweed and wild rocket (this one seen everywhere in Berlin), Canadian 4

Ungers and Koolhas (2013) For more on former military and industrial buildings in Berlin and their role in the emergence of urban subcultures in Berlin following German reunification, see van der Gaag (2014).

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Figure 11.2 Tansy (Tannacetum vulgare), an aromatic weed of dry wasteground native to temperate Europe and Asia, growing alongside the path leading to Berghain, August 2015. Image: Rowland Byass.

fleabane (a North American annual found on disturbed ground worldwide) and Goldenrod, another naturalized North American. From a distance, these appear as a sparse green haze. Up close the varied heights and open spacing of the plants in the sandy ground allow close appreciation of their form and structure. In the low light of early evening the assemblage resembles a miniature open forest of trees of different heights when viewed from above. The colour palette of flowers and foliage seems now to me to perfectly evoke a time and place: yellow, dirty-white-to-cream shades, the parchment brown of grass seedheads, the furry dark brown of the bullrush seedheads growing in a drainage swale. Immediately west of Berghain is a former railway yard and buildings from which coal was unloaded from freight wagons. A tall railway building with huge sliding doors, presumably connected with the unloading of coal from freight wagons, is now artists’ studios. Around it a garden has been made – raised beds, ponds, seating and firepits built out of former granite cobbles that used to pave the city’s streets. Tall concrete walls are covered with graffiti art. Unenclosed and unpoliced, this place is an open invitation to use and occupation. We held a barbeque one Friday night in summer, under the tall building, where someone had helpfully built a firepit and grill. As the sun set over the car park next door we scavenged firewood from the undergrowth for a barbeque with food from the Lidl supermarket on the adjoining street. We were surrounded by woodland, cooking food over an open fire, in the centre of a capital city. Commercial space – non-place – pressed in at the edge of this patch of woodland, visible in the arc lights of the car park, the acres of tarmac beyond the fence. What kind of experience were we having? Was this a wilderness experience or an urban one? Picnicking on wasteground, or picking flowers from wasteland

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landscapes does not seem like a revolutionary act. But both repurpose the city’s spaces with new uses and meanings. Like the emergence of techno culture and squat parties in disused buildings in Berlin in the 1990s, they are examples of DIY culture: improvisation with a legacy where commerce and consumption is not the primary imperative. As soon as we finished our urban barbeque, passers-by immediately adopted the fire to sit around.

Figure 11.3 Berghain, the nightclub housed in a former power station, viewed from the remnant of waste land to the south of the building. Weeds here include wild rocket (Diplotaxis tenuifolia). Now occupied by retail and distribution warehouses, the land between Berghain and the railway corridor to the south was formerly all waste land. August 2015. Image: Rowland Byass.

The form of Berlin’s urban landscape and urban ecology is a product of its distinctive history – destruction, then division and isolation within East Germany. But the deliberate integration of urban habitats into the city’s fabric is not accidental.6 Nature conservation movements have had a significant presence in Germany since the early twentieth century. Historically, nature conservation was concerned with the preservation of extraordinary rural landscapes where these came under threat of change from urbanization. Nature conservation was in this respect anti-urban. Nature was conceived of as an antidote to modern urban life. Contact with Heimat-natur (homeland nature) provided a more authentic experience than that of the designed landscapes of parks and gardens, and enabled people to connect with the sense of a native landscape from which they were cut off by the artificiality of the modern city. Berlin’s commissioner for the care of natural monuments, Max Hilzheimer, contrasted designed urban vegetation with: … the image of the free nature, where one can indulge at will, and in which trees and bushes grow without having been directed and put in place by human hand. (1929, quoted in Lachmund 2013, 29)

The Second World War radically changed the city’s urban fabric. A survey estimated that nearly 30 square kilometres of the built up parts of the city were destroyed or badly damaged by 1945. In the aftermath of the war, the creation of so much space was seen by many as fortuitous in enabling the creation of a more open city, in line with contemporary planning ideals of a planned, organic integration of urban form and greenspace. The Kollectivplan (1946), the first masterplan for the reconstruction of Berlin, envisioned a restructured city of dispersed modernist buildings organized into neighbourhoods, separated between large highways and green spaces. But the division of the city between Soviet and Allied sectors made the realization of this comprehensive plan impossible. Nonetheless, some 6

See Lachmund (2013) for a complete history of urban ecology, politics and planning policy in Berlin.

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of this ideal vision of a city landscape filtered through in Marshall Aid-funded restoration of existing parks and playing fields. Re-greening the city both made it more habitable and served as a metaphor for the regeneration of a new German society after the Nazi regime. Greenspace planning was particularly important for West Berliners – now islanders within the new DDR – who were deprived of access to the surrounding countryside. The isolation of post-war West Berlin from its surrounding region of Brandenberg is perhaps related to the increasing importance of ecological research into urban nature during the post-war years. It drew on a local tradition of nature study in the Brandenberg region, but this study and research came to concentrate on the territory of West Berlin. In 1973, an article by botanist and ecologist Herbert Sukopp called for the recognition of the city as an object of ecological research, against the then prevailing notions in ecology that cities were inimical to natural life, and that “pristine” natural habitats were more deserving of study than “degraded” urban landscapes. The recognition of the city as a valid object of ecological study as well as “pristine” natural habitats was one of the crucial pathways that led to the protection of urban biotopes and habitats for which Berlin is so well known today. The research generated by urban ecology fieldwork fed back into policy. In particular, the production of a biotope-type map of Berlin in 1984, mapping the city according to the ecological habitat categories found there, and the 1988 Berlin Species Protection Programme (extended to East Berlin in 2004), gave species and habitat protection a definite value in planning policy framework. The Species Protection Programme, one of the most far-reaching programmes of ecological planning ever enacted for a city, mapped protected species, biotopes and ecosystems onto the land-use map of the city. Significantly, it also recognized and protected wastelands in the city for their habitat value. Walking the streets of Berlin today, the latitude given to spontaneous urban vegetation on every scale is evidence of the place given to urban nature in the planning and management of Berlin’s landscapes.

Art and Urban Rewilding This chapter was first written for the Material Memory conference at Newcastle University in November 2014. On subsequent visits to Berlin I have noticed more and more of the wasteland sites that I saw in August 2014 now cleared and transformed into construction sites. This process has been ongoing since the reunification of Germany in 1990, but within the space of two years, it seems to have gathered pace. Berlin remains a green city, perceptibly less dense and more green than any other European capital. Large areas of wasteland and urban woodland remain within the city and its periphery. But even the recognition of the ecological value of urban nature enshrined in urban planning policies has not prevented the disappearance of many patches of urban wilderness within the city. Wildness has restorative power. It offers an opportunity for contemplation of the living world that exists all around us and beneath us, independent of our perception. If we are able to perceive it, urban wildness can be as restorative as a trip to a national park or “unspoilt” area of rural landscape. Landscape design generally provides usable landscapes: parks, gardens and playgrounds as well as all the functional landscapes like highway edges, industrial parks and parking lots that are also shaped by landscape designers and gardeners. Could it be that the products of chance, neglect and ecological succession working out onto former industrialized landscapes (with occasional minimal intelligent intervention), can offer greater aesthetic richness than the products of purposeful design? That these places can give us the kind of contemplative, open-ended landscape experiences that have historically been associated with wilderness landscapes thought to have been untouched by human influence? In recent years “guerilla gardeners” have tidied up highway verges, planted tree pits with flowers and reclaimed pieces of neglected land for horticultural aesthetic imperatives. They do so because broken bottles, litter and weeds speak to them of dereliction, disorder and danger. But the activity of guerilla gardeners, amateur or professional, will always have a limited capacity in significantly increasing the quantity of urban vegetation and its concomitant benefits of intercepting pollution, moderating microclimates, providing habitats, and its recreational and restorative importance for people. Instead of improving wasteground sites according to a cultural imperative that demands evidence of human intervention and order, perhaps what is needed are strategies that shift popular perception of urban wildness from its familiar associations of decay and danger, to the beauty of the unprogrammed, dramatic richness of urban vegetation, and the ways in which it speaks about the dynamic processes of ecological succession, climate and geology and, in the age of the Anthropocene, the intertwining of human influence in all of these. Perhaps what is needed is not so much Guerilla Gardening, as Urban Rewilding. The concept of Urban Rewilding takes its cue from spontaneous vegetation that already appears unbidden on land, roofs and gutters throughout cities. The idea of Rewilding has gained popularity in recent years as an approach to the management of rural landscapes whose biodiversity has been degraded by human use. It aims to restore these landscapes so that they can support the plants and animals that have disappeared there, through management and sometimes the reintroduction of animal species which formerly played a key part in ecosystems. Urban Rewilding, by contrast, does not aim at the restoration of any notional “original nature” in urban landscapes, because it recognizes the uniqueness of urban nature shaped by enmeshed human and natural forces. Instead it attempts the integration of wild (or semi-wild, with minimal, intelligent management) habitats throughout the city. It aims for greening on every scale, from the interstitial forests of weeds that spring up in pavement cracks, to the preservation of large areas of urban scrub and woodland on brownfield land. Urban rewilding would also deploy art in the service of urban ecology. This would be an art based on perceptual strategies rather than grand designs. Its philosophy is that of non-design, minimal or non-intervention, an aesthetics of thrift and an economy of means. It

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would challenge perceptions of wild vegetation in cities: to make visible the culturally invisible beauty of wildness in the city. This is art – in the broadest sense that includes all kinds of creative practices – that discloses and articulates the hidden powers of urban wild places and urban wild plant communities in the city, to transform the perception of these places beyond their existing niche audience of ecologists, urban explorers and psycho-geographers who find beauty and mystery there.

Notes Towards a Manifesto for Urban Rewilding Art 1. Art in the service of urban ecology. Art that promotes urban rewilding. This means land subject to no or minimal, intelligent human intervention (for example seasonal cutting or the sowing of selected plant species), as well as structures designed and managed to enable spontaneous vegetation and associated ecology – for instance, green roofs, brown roofs and other ways in which architecture can allow for colonization by plants, both planted and spontaneous. 2. Art that discloses and articulates ecological process - seasonality, succession – as well as the ecosystem services performed unnoticed by wastelands and spontaneous urban vegetation: rainwater infiltration and groundwater recharge, interception of pollution, microclimate moderation, habitat for other life forms. 3. Art that prioritizes low cost, minimal intervention and emphasizes perceptual shifts that recontextualize urban nature over capital-intensive design-based interventions. Art that promotes the preservation and creation of all forms of urban greening and habitats, large and small. 4. Art that aims to rehabilitate wastelands and the vegetation they support for their positive aesthetic value and spontaneous beauty; that makes friends with disorder as a necessary ingredient of cities, as much for humans as for other forms of life. Relevant concepts for Urban Rewilding art might include: Scale: Urban wilderness can exist on several scales, from a forest to a crop of seedlings growing in a pavement. Contemplation: Urban wilderness can shift our attention, even momentarily, away from goal-directed human concerns to a living world that is both independent of humans and entwined with the places we shape. Urban wilderness offers an opportunity for contemplation that does not require us to travel to “unspoilt” wilderness (which in any case, always bears the marks of human influence) Process and soft and hard time: Urban wilderness is not static. The colonization of open sites by plants and the process of ecological succession, whereby grassland is succeeded by scrub and then woodland, articulates the passage of time in a visually dramatic way. I have borrowed the concept of “Soft” and “Hard” time from Catherine Dee’s craftbased philosophy of landscape design, emphasizing the tangible ways in which landscape works on the human senses (Dee 2012). Soft time refers to landscape elements that register the ephemeral scale of time in days and hours: the growth and movement of vegetation, moving water, and the ever changing sky. Hard time refers to things that register a sense of constancy that change over a longer timescale: rock, concrete, terrain. Much of the aesthetic excitement and drama of a wasteland landscape derives from the interplay of processes taking place on different timescales. The hard time of concrete and the soft time of weeds that exploit small cracks, are succeeded in turn by tree seedlings that in time, will buckle and break up rock-hard concrete. Opening up the soil and urban greening: Urban Rewilding should, wherever possible, promote the opening up of hard sealed surfaces to the soil below, to enable water infiltration and to increase the area of ground surface available for vegetation. The scale of contemporary cities means that designed and managed plantings, whether by municipal authorities or citizen activist guerilla gardeners, will always necessarily be very limited. Promoting the spontaneous vegetating of ground surfaces offers a far greater potential surface area of porous, living ground with all the benefits it can provide. But a perceptual shift is needed, in how land like this is evaluated by the public at large. Art can play a role in effecting this shift. Serendipity: What makes an urban wilderness site different from a park or garden is the serendipity resulting from the interaction of its human legacy (structures and surfaces) and other forms of life (plants and animals). There is something qualitatively different about the experience of contemplating plants that have arisen spontaneously on a site, to seeing a row of trees or flowers in a park. These plants exist amongst us, but are independent of human intentions. Their unbidden existence has the power to provoke a form of contemplation that awakes us to our existence in the world: What we see through eyes sealed by habit and convention is an infinitesimal fragment of what actually exists. Struggling to change things around us, we forget that another kind of change is possible: an inner change, through which we can enter a richer and more spacious world, that was there all along. (Gray 2013)

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There is great potential for thoughtful art-based interventions to disclose the contemplative, restorative potential of urban wilderness for humans to a wider audience. In this way, wasteland sites might become preserved, cherished and repurposed in a way other than the standard tabula rasa approach. Preserving, adapting and increasing urban wilderness would sustain its habitat value for other forms of life, its role in performing ecosystem services, but also its less tangible aesthetic and contemplative importance for human animals.

References Bowles, P. 1987. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. London: Peter Owen. Dee, C. 2012. To Design Landscape: Art, Nature & Utility. London: Routledge. Gray, J. 2013. “A Point of View: The Doors of Perception.” http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22648328. Hansen, R. and F. Stahl. 1993. Perennials and their Garden Habitats. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lachmund, J. 2013. Greening Berlin: The Co-Production of Science, Politics and Urban Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mabey, R. 2010. Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilization and Changed the Way We Think About Nature. London: Profile Books. Sukopp, H. 1973. “Die Großstadt als Gegenstand ökologischer Forschung.” Schr. R. Ver. Verb. naturwiss. Kenntn. Wien 113: 90–140. Toland, A. and G. Wessolek. 2011. “Beneath the Pavement – The Vadose Zone.” In Beneath the Pavement – A Garden, edited by Franceschini and Milicevic, 80–105. Loughborough University (UK). Ungers, O.M. and R. Koolhaas. 2013. “Berlin: A Green Archipelago.” In The City in the City, edited by Florian Herwech and Sebastien Marot, 11–23, 47–50. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers. van der Gaag. 2014. “Function Follows Form: How Berlin Turns Horror into Beauty.” http://www.failedarchitecture.com/berlin-horror-beauty/ For an interdisciplinary recent overview of thinking and research on urban wastelands, that looks in particular at how these places challenge conventional conceptualizations of rural, urban and the idea of “nature” itself, see: M. Gandy, 2013. “Marginalia: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Urban Wastelands.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103(6): 1301–16.

CHAPTER TWELVE BUDDLEIAS AND BITHOORAS ANDREW BURTON

Figure 12.1 Andrew Burton, Brownfield or Buddleia Vale?, 2014, Airspace Gallery, Stoke on Trent. Image: Glen Stoker

I. Buddleias In summer 2014 I spent two weeks working as resident artist at the Airspace Gallery1 in Hanley UK, one of the five towns of Stoke-on-Trent. Airspace had advertised for an artist to engage in a site-specific residency that would investigate a small “brownfield” site. This rubble-strewn trapezoid-shaped area lay just south of the city centre, close to the gallery. My proposal was to split my time between the site itself, gathering materials, and working in the studio. As an artist-run collective, Airspace’s activities are woven into the fabric of Stoke and many projects tackle the predicaments the city faces from the artist’s perspective. To the outsider, the city is best known for its industrial potteries, but few of these continue production in the city. A few of the famous bottle kilns2 are still standing, scattered across the five towns and the big factories are still there, if now derelict and fenced off.3 The brownfield site identified by Airspace is situated on a ring of sometimes derelict ground that divides the commercial centre and the rows of Victorian terraces. Some of this fringe area is occupied by industrial estates, or taken up with an ever widening web of roads that connect Stoke to the motorways and superstores. But the brownfield site identified by Airspace has not been sold and there is no agreement as to what should take the place of the mini1

AirSpace Gallery is a collaborative, artist led project in Stoke on Trent, providing professional development opportunities, studio and exhibiting space and support for artists. 2 It has been estimated that there were up to 4,000 bottle kilns with as many as 2,000 still standing in the 1950s. The Clean Air Act caused the demise of the smoky, coal fired oven. (www.thepotteries.org) 3 The historic Spode Works closed in 2008 and has since been the venue both for “Topographies of the Obsolete” and the British Ceramics Biennale. Current plans are to redevelop the old factory into student accommodation and artists’ studios.

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Figures 12.2 and 12.3 Andrew Burton, Brownfield or Buddleia Vale? (details), 2014, Airspace Gallery, Stoke on Trent. Image: Andrew Burton.

complex of a cinema and bowling alley that stood here until the 1980s. Instead, the rubble from these buildings, demolished and churned up along with the unneeded roads and pavements that served them have become submerged under a rapacious invasion of sorrel, wild pea and buddleia. “Nature” has taken back its grip, weed growing over weed

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to claim ground in this bricky haven, thriving amongst the rubble, masking potholes and looping over strands of wire.4 Delve into the thick foliage and you could fancy losing yourself for a few minutes in this landscape-in-miniature. At some points, in its midst, the foliage is so dense that only the noise of traffic signals the urban fabric less than a hundred metres away. The whole site slopes southwards, forming a sunny bank that ends abruptly at the new red brick perimeter wall of a large new Tesco, one of the last of the Tesco “Extra” stores to be built, reputedly the biggest in England. A ditch in front of the wall forms a natural collection point for rubbish. The site is cut across with a number of deep ravines that plunge down from a sunny, tarry terrace occupied by a gym and a nightclub that forms its northern boundary. But along with the usual urban detritus that collects here, there is plenty of evidence of a deeper history. Before the cinema and bowling alley were built the space was occupied by the ceramics industry. Scratch beneath the surface and it is littered with fired clay fragments, scraps of tiles, broken kiln furniture and firing cones. And thousands of red, broken bricks. For me, the residency was a chance to think again about whether the “waste” spaces of towns are really wasted at all. Working with some of the gallery’s volunteers, we spend a few days collecting material from the site in buckets and wheelbarrows. This is part amateur archaeological dig, part nature hunt. We transport scraps of old road, shards of pottery, sticks, blooms and leaves back to the studio. The studio is at the back of the gallery, a temporary making space that is soon strewn with decapitated buddleias, floral totems of dereliction. At first a rash of vivid purple and pink, the fading buddleias slowly wilt into an array of browns, but still oppress the gallery and studios with their heavy heady soapy scent. On the gallery walls we stretch out with pins some floppy butterbur leaves and let them dry out, so they turn a leathery khaki colour. There is a tub full of a collection of excavated bits and pieces of broken fired clay, mostly unfathomable fragments that must have been left behind when ceramics moved on, or maybe dumped later. Heaps of seeds and flower heads are still being munched away by hordes of green beetles who came in with them. For a few days the place buzzes and crawls with insects before they make their escape, or die. Gradually this conglomeration of outside material takes the form of an art installation. More trips with the wheelbarrow bring in fresh supplies. Outside, the weather holds and the brownfield becomes ever more verdant and bucolic as June becomes July. Beneath the buddleia some kind of yellow pea is flowering like crazy and there are ripening grasses and branches of tawny sorrel. Alongside this soft foliage we search for hard matter. Scraping away at the hard, brick-strewn earth, our trowels throw up worthless scraps – bits of broken plates and saucers, handles (lots of handles), tiny clay cones embedded in lumps of baked clay.

Figure 12.4 Andrew Burton, Brownfield or Buddleia Vale?,(detail), 2014 Airspace Gallery, Stoke on Trent. Image: Andrew Burton 4

As Richard Mabey points out in “Weeds: In defence of Nature’s most unloved plants” (Harper Collins, 2011) buddleia relishes surfaces with apparently no soil at all.

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forms a cool and comfortable surface underfoot. But the use of dung is falling out of favour, due in part to its organic nature, releasing tonnes of carbon dioxide released as it burns, adding to Delhi’s chronic air pollution problem. This project, “Making Bithooras”, therefore represents a snapshot of pre-industrial Delhi as it meets industrial Delhi. It marks a way of life that is unlikely to persist for much longer in a city of some 20 million inhabitants.

Figure 12.6 “Gobar mound”, Rajasthan, India, 2008. Image: Andrew Burton

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Figure 12.7 Bithooras, Mandi Village, New Delhi, India, 2011. Image: Andrew Burton.

Making Bithooras was an exhibition at the National Craft Museum in Delhi in Spring 2011, but the project had its roots a few years earlier in 2008 when I encountered the astonishing object pictured above (left) at the centre of a small village in rural Rajasthan. This proto-sculpture is an egg-shaped fuel store. It is made from layers of gobar – untreated cow or buffalo dung – applied in layers over the rock which lies at its core. The dung is collected daily from village cattle and stored in sheds or outhouses until a sufficient quantity has accumulated to start the process. The ovoidness of the form is established through the slow accretion of hand-sized roundels of dung, each one squashed into the layer of crisp dung below which, by this time has dried in the sun, and slapped flat with a simple squishing hand action. Each irregular disc of dung, though compressed together with hundreds of others to form a unified whole, still bears its singular and distinct hand imprint. Four spread fingers and a thumb. Overall, there must be many thousands of hand prints that cumulatively evidence the laborious process of making. This is hand making at its most direct. What could speak more eloquently about the action of making by hand than a squashy lump of shit that bears its direct imprint? Found at the centre of the village, where in an English village we might expect to encounter a war memorial, this gobar-formed-world-egg can be thought of as a monument to dung. A monument to the value of waste. Once dried, the gobar is used for cooking fuel: ophlas – dung cakes – are cherished across India for the traditional, smoky, earthy flavour they impart to chapattis. The gobar egg in Rajasthan is just one way of storing dung. Every region in northern India traditionally stores their dung in different ways. The bithooras of Delhi are another. At first sight bithooras look as though they might be rudimentary dwellings or outhouses. In fact, a single solid bithoora might contain as many as five thousand individual ophlas or cow-dung pancakes.

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Figure 12.8 Bithooras, near Gurgaon, 2011. Image: Andrew Burton.

Bithooras are made only by women. Dung is a low-esteem material and a substance that men avoid touching. Despite the laborious process involved in their creation, culminating in a spontaneous burst of pattern making, these are temporary and functional structures which last at most a few years before they are picked apart. With the possible exception of a few decorative features, they are made from a single material and without the intervention of any tool other than the human hand. Despite their highly decorative and aestheticized aspect, bithooras defy categorization as craft, architecture or art.8 Bithooras are constructed in stages. Whilst the finished structures can be 2.5 metres high, this is achieved through building a succession of “storeys” or layers, each story being up to one metre in height. There are two factors that determine the height of each storey, firstly, the quantity of ophlas that are available – dried and ready for use – and secondly, the mass of ophlas that can be supported before the whole structure collapses due to outward pressure. To compensate for this, the external wall of the partially built structure is clad with a thick layer of gobar. Once dried, this gives the structure much greater strength. Bithoora–making often takes place on Sundays and is a highly communal, almost festive event with attendant rituals. Generations of women participate, including children, and building is accompanied by singing, laughter and conversation. The external walls of the bithoora are built carefully, using only the flattest and most perfectly formed ophlas. The walls are built slightly sloping inwards. In the large inner space misshaped or broken ophlas are tossed, forming a kind of core. Once the individual ophlas have been stacked to a certain height and infilled, the thick layer of gobar is spread over the outward facing surface to give stability and protection from rain. On each of the four ophlas at each corner of the structure a bunch of fresh grass is pushed into 9 some soft dung, signifying life and the oxen themselves. Occasionally, soles of boots, scraps of mirror or pottery are embedded into the gobar. Whilst the gobar cladding is still wet, a few astonishing and dramatic moments of creative activity take place when the surface of the bithoora is inscribed with abstract or figurative patterns. This seemingly spontaneous and almost violent process involves pummelling, prodding, punching and pinching the surface, using only the bare hand. The designs, which are either abstract patterns or figures suggestive of trees, plants or occasionally birds are passed down through generations of women. It is this pattern making that gives the bithoora its exceptional decorative appearance. 8 There are conventions for determining the dimensions of a bithoora. All are based on human measurements, for example the distance from the elbow to the outstretched forefinger is counted as one unit when deciding the size of the floor plan. 9 Intended to ward off spirits.

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Only once this outer layer of decorated gobar has dried – which can take several days or longer – can work commence on the next “storey”. Once the structure has reached a height at which it can still be dismantled easily, the roof is constructed. This is made by carefully overlapping ophlas, laid in the manner of roofing tiles.

Figure 12.9 Bithooras, near Gurgaon, 2011. Image: Andrew Burton.

Our project, “Making Bithooras” – Bithooras par haath pa Chaap – took place at the National Craft Museum, Pragati Maidan, New Delhi and was as much a performance as an installation. The project involved the creation of two bithooras, but made with the addition of other materials: mirrors from Rajasthan and charcoal. The precise timing for bringing the dung to the museum had to be carefully agreed with the museum’s curators as the bithooras could not occupy the museum at the same time as other holy objects: these would be defiled by the dung. The collaborators on the project were a group of eight village women from Ghitorni village on the southern fringes of Delhi: Panna Devi, Keso, Shiv Devi, Lakshmi, Bhagmali, Sharman, Vidya, Pushpa. Translation was by Gunjan Sharma and facilitation by Sharni Chambers. “Making Bithooras” proposed a different perspective on collaborative working. Through the creation of the bithooras the project aimed to draw together contemporary visual art and the traditional process of creating bithooras, thus fusing Indian and European sensibilities for the relationship between structure, material and pattern. By situating the bithooras in the National Craft Museum in New Delhi, the first time these structures have been seen in a museum context and by foregrounding the women’s elaborations on their usual practice, the exhibition asserted the importance of these objects, both as spectacular artefacts and as an expression of innate sculptural creativity. To suggest that there are resonances between these women-made objects and the buddleias and ceramic detritus of Stoke may seem fanciful. Grouped together, the bithooras resemble a necropolis. The buddleias too, in their transformation from vivid purple to brown marked the passing of life. For each, their ephemeral and ever-changing nature (for the bithooras, once a structure is completed, its dismantling starts immediately as the ophlas are retrieved for fuel) suggests a particular reading of both post-industrial and pre-industrial. My work often draws its inspiration from the appreciation that all matter, whether natural flora, dung, or humanmade objects are involved in a continual process of accretion, disintegration, rebuilding, destruction, reconstruction, collapse. The amount of time that any object survives, finished and recognizably itself, may vary, but the amount of matter that is available for us to use for its replacement is limited and to make anew we will use what most readily comes to hand, recycling the redundant, the familiar and the sacrosanct in the process. We reuse what we can, increasingly more insistently, self-consciously and purposefully. In material terms, we sense there is less to waste.

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Figures 12.10 and 12.11 Making Bithooras Bithooras par haath pa Chaap. National Craft Museum, New Delhi, 2011. Andrew Burton, Panna Devi, Keso, Shiv Devi, Lakshmi, Bhagmali, Sharman, Vidya, Pushpa (in progress). Image: Andrew Burton.

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Figure 12.12 Bithoora, near Gurgaon, 2011. Image: Andrew Burton.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN MARL HOLE NEIL BROWNSWORD

But the greatest Pottery they have in this County, is carryed on at Burslem near Newcastle under Lyme, where for making their severall sorts of Pots, they have as many different sorts of Clay, which they dig round about the Towne, all within half a miles distance, the best being found nearest the coale, and are distinguish’t by their colours and uses as followeth: 1. Bottle clay, of a bright whitish streaked yellow colour. 2. Hard fire clay of a duller whitish colour, and fuller intersperst with a dark yellow, which they use for their blackwares, being mixt with the 3. Red blending Clay, which is of a dirty red colour. 4. White clay, so called it seems though of a blewish colour, and used for making yellow colour'd ware, because yellow is the lightest colour they make any Ware of. all which they call throwing clays, because they are of a closer texture, and will work on the wheel. (Elliot 1998, 29 30)

Situated mid-way between Manchester and Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent is a linear conurbation stretching 12 miles through North Staffordshire. The city was formed in 1925 by a federation of six separate towns that have shaped the area’s physical and economic landscape through the industrial-scale manufacture of ceramics for nearly three centuries.1 The origins of this success evolved out of a pre-industrial exploitation of the area’s abundant mineral wealth; long flame coal, ideal for firing, and excellent red burning clays for potting that could be gleaned from the immediate landscape. The plundering of this rich natural resource pre-dates first-century Roman occupation, and later flourished in Burslem during the 1600s with the expanse of yeoman-potters who began to supplement their earnings from the poverty of the land through the production of pottery. In The Natural History of Staffordshire, Dr Robert Plot, first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, provides an early account of the county’s pre-industrial pottery manufacturing during the late seventeenth century (Plot 1686). Apart from documenting potters’ practices and processes, Plot details the region’s natural clays (above) that remained fundamental to the area’s early growth as a renowned centre for ceramic production. Difficulties in securing regular supplies of Chinese porcelain during the 1670s led the Dutch East India Company to import a range of tea wares from southern China, including Yixing redwares. Prized for their heat-retaining properties, these wares were imitated in Holland and later in England. After a short period in London, Dutch silversmiths John and David Elers migrated to North Staffordshire after locating suitable seams of fine red clay in the 1690s (fig. 13.1). As silversmiths, the Elers were familiar with the use of moulds for casting precious metal, and are believed to have been the first to have transferred this knowledge to cast liquid clay into plaster moulds, a pioneering process that by 1740 was to revolutionize methods of mass production (Elliot 1998, 17). As taste dictated a greater demand for wares that imitated Chinese porcelains, white burning clays imported from Devon and Dorset were favoured by many early manufactories following the mid-1750s. The fine haematitic clays located within deposits of Etruria Marl2 associated with the Elers’ early production continued to be used predominantly for brick and tile production.3 Prominent features in the nearby vicinity of these former brick-making districts are the exhausted sites of opencast excavation, known as “marl holes”. An interest in the re-activation of this landscape, morphed by the histories of ceramic production formed the premise of Marl Hole,4 a site-specific artistic intervention developed for the 2009 British Ceramics Biennial.5 At that time, with the outsourcing of its ceramic production, factory closures and job losses, and the demolition of renowned sites of manufacture, North Staffordshire was in danger of becoming increasingly alienated from the very

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These are the districts of Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton. Etruria Marl is a calcium carbonate rich mudstone which contains variable amounts of clays and silt. Deposits of Etruria Marl stretch 30 miles from north to south Staffordshire. 3 See http://www.thepotteries.org/focus/006.htm 4 Marl Hole was a site specific residency endorsed by the British Ceramics Biennial that took place 24 28 August 2009, at Gorsty Quarry, Knutton, Newcastle under Lyme. 5 The British Ceramics Biennial aims to celebrate the city of Stoke on Trent as an international centre for excellence in contemporary ceramics, and has since played an important role in the cultural renewal of Stoke on Trent. 2

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Figure 13.1 urface outcropss of haematitic clays, Bradwelll Wood, North Staffordshire. Image: Neil Broownsword.

Figure 13.2 Former site of the Royal Dou ulton factory, Nile Street, Burslem, which closed in 2005 aand was demolished in 2008. Image: Neil Brownsword.

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histories that had created it.6 These dramatic shifts in the industry’s global fortune only strengthened a need to reconnect people with an awareness of its histories and origins. The former Chatterly quarry in Bradwell Wood (figure 13.3), near to where the Elers brothers had established their early manufactory, held a particular resonance, as its location is an area I grew up in, and a place where I first encountered clay in its geographic abundance.

Figure 13.3 Chatterly Quarry, Bradwell Wood, North Staffordshire. Image: Neil Brownsword.

Following logistical difficulties as regards health and safety in working at this site, I located Ibstock Brick’s Gorsty Quarry in Newcastle-Under-Lyme (fig. 13.4), one of the largest in the UK that still remains active.7 Here an abundance of clay could be easily accessed, removing any immediate implications as regards cost and offering a near unimaginable sense of scale to work. Marl Hole addressed a recurring interest surrounding the deliberate dislocation of the familiar within one’s practice, where the strictures and sophistications of learned experience were set aside to stimulate the unversed. The project sought to interrogate the articulation of clay through a range of ephemeral interventions, fusing interactions of making and performance with the site-specific. To accompany me on this pursuit of disrupting the confines of practice, three international artists – Alexandra Engelfriet, Torbjørn Kvasbø and Pekka Paikkari, whose relationship with clay has continued to diversify – were invited to create a series of site-responsive works. Filmmaker Johnny Magee was also commissioned to capture the creative development of work as it arose during the five-day period. Notions of epistemological anarchism put forward by philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, remained fundamental to the underlying concept of Marl Hole: The only principle that does not inhibit progress is anything goes … Without chaos, no knowledge. Without a frequent dismissal of reason, no progress … For what appears as ‘sloppiness’, ‘chaos’ or ‘opportunism’… has a most important

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In January 2009 the Waterford Wedgwood group fell into administration as a result of ongoing financial problems. In the March of that year the company was bought by KPS Capital Partners who would invest in its infrastructure but move jobs from North Staffordshire to Asia to cut costs and restore company profitability. 7 Ibstock’s Gorsty Quarry extracts brick clay from the Etruria Formation. At the time of the project it represented a total reserve of some 5.5 million tonnes of material, with approximately 4.5m tonnes of which still remains to be worked. There were plans to work the quarry further to a depth of 36 metres to allow up to 15.5 million tonnes to be extracted over a 30 year period.

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Figure 13.4 Ibstock Brick’s Gorsty Quarry, Knutton, Newcastle u Lyme. Image: Jonny Magee.

A rubric of the project was to deny prescriptive methods or fixed ideologies through a series of impositions. Displaced from the familiar comfort zone of the studio, each artist faced a new set of unpredictable factors – the weather, the limitations of the material in its unprocessed state (fig. 13.5), alongside more inflicted measures that deprived participants’ access to their familiar tools. With the elimination of the latter, a broad range of haptic instincts emerged in response to the clay’s innate properties. In their dry and plastic states these structureless mudstones were shaped, pressed, modelled into a series of visceral forms. Methods that emerged generally followed a process of construction and erasure – either deliberate or through rainwater dissolving and breaking down responses to a pulverized mass. Silts were appropriated in their varied liquid states and poured, smeared, painted and launched onto the lateral strata of the quarry face. Liberated by the constraints of space and technicalities of firing, my own responses resulted in a trail of speculative and disjointed interventions. Through this casual accumulation of material knowledge, I began to adopt a more painterly approach. Marks, structures and patterns created naturally by erosive force or through the nonchalant traces of daily labour were emphasized by a delivery of luminescent orange Etruria Marl slip (figs. 13.6 and 13.7). As access to equipment to extract the material was limited to the use of a spade and a bucket or whatever else was at hand in the immediate vicinity, conventional notions of the “tool” started to expand. The site’s earthmovers and diggers were quickly commandeered, facilitating an unfettered engagement with space and scale. Commonplace haptic instincts were transferred to the “claws” of mechanization – moulding, moving, removing, and tipping an inexhaustible abundance of material in its varied states. Another of my responses harnessed clay’s unique plastic properties to physically capture the memories of action observed within the site. Monumental burrs of clay thrown up by earth movers through the routines of mineral extraction and transportation, were restaged through the bisection of a 20-metre linear deposit of clay on the base of the quarry (fig 13.8). Dutch artist Alexandra Englefriet’s initial explorations again surrounded the material’s ability to record impact, her knees becoming the tools to repetitiously manipulate a dense layer of plastic clay deposited on the quarry slope. These actions were later accentuated by a series of concave apertures carved out by the digger. … the marl hole inspired visions of being buried and devoured by the earth. The ‘heaviness’ of its historic/industrial context was strongly felt. A turning point came mid week. It was pouring with rain, I was exhausted and had a mass of clay underneath me which, with no amount of will power in the world I could move. The epiphany that followed involved one of Ibstock’s staff using a digger to punch out cavities in the dense clay slope creating a monumental sense of three

Marl Hole dimensionality. The tools of the marl hole became my new working tools. Mechanization and organic process came together. Descending into this large hole in the earth became a transforming and liberating experience … (Brownsword 2010, 11)

Figure 13.5 Etruria Marl, Ibstock Brick’s Gorsty Quarry, Knutton, Newcastle u Lyme. Image: Jonny Magee.

Figure 13.6 Neil Brownsword, Face, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

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Figure 13.7 Neil Brownsword, Track, , 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

Figure 13.8 Neil Brownsword, Burr, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

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Figure 13.9 Alexandra Engelfriet, Slope, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

Figure 13.10 Alexandra Englefriet, Tools, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

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Figure 13.11 Torbjørn Kvasbø, Sketch, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

Figure 13.12 Torbjørn Kvasbø, Marl Hole No. 1, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

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An attempt to try and divorce oneself completely from the sophistications of known methods and embodied knowledge was maybe a flawed hypothesis, as through these limitation traits of prior practice would be made manifest in different ways. This was apparent in an intervention by Torbjørn Kvasbø, where repetitive punctuations, which feature heavily in his studio practice, emerged on a much greater scale within a series of digger tyre tracks. On a slope adjacent to Englefriet, Kvasbø coordinated a mass deposit of clay slurry (fig. 13.12), reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s entropic RUNDOWN series (1969).8 Although a similar desire for spectacle may be evident in Kvasbø’s response, the work spoke more about a need for the physicality of action as a way of “knowing”: The marl hole is an encroachment hard to imagine. Notions of the familiar were pulverized, and references to its scale difficult to comprehend until we were all fully immersed within its jaws. Initial frustrations were physically made manifest: form and psychology merged. Only physical action, hard manual ‘sweating’ labour, bodily intelligence and practical philosophy; the elation of doing something relevant, helped me to handle the situation. This process offers resistance, and I get to know more about the forces over which I have limited control the incalculable elements in my inner being (Brownsword 2010, 13).

Finnish designer Pekka Paikkari’s response appropriated a lexicon of commonplace ceramic terminology, familiar to the histories of North Staffordshire. To comment upon how this unique material language is becoming increasingly abstract as the ceramics industry in the west wanes, Paikkari counted the letters within each word and randomly deposited these on a 25-by-25-metre square of the pit (figs 13.13 and 13.14). Bagwall, Bisque Fire, Body, Bone Dry … Having appropriated all the clauses with magnitude as regards ceramic manufacture, and purified their sentence structure, composite letters amounted to 8860. To try and understand the meaning of words inextricably connected to North Staffordshire, each of these individual letters were randomly poured with slip on to a 25 metre square clay surface. These letters embody all the information that has shaped the area’s ceramic industry. Today, as this is an industry in danger of vanishing, the vast majority of these words will become increasingly meaningless to future generations... Now, these letters will have already disappeared and dissolved back into their raw material state… all evidence of labour lost within the transience of time (Brownsword 2010, 17).

Figure 13.13 Pekka Paikkari, Clay Words, Marking Place with Meaning, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

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These works involved the site specific pours of asphalt, glue, concrete and other materials.

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Figure 13.14 Pekka Paikkari, Clay Words, Marking Place with Meaning., Image: Jonny Magee .

Figure 13.15 Johnny Magee, Marl Hole, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

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As Marl Hole embraced concepts of transience rather than end product, Johnny Magee’s role in the project was crucial in recording each artist’s interactions with the site. Aping the macho persona attributed to much land art of the 1960s and 70s, the resultant film is shot (tongue in cheek) in the style of a western epic: This landscape lends itself to science fiction and the American Wild West. How could I weave notions of the epic into my film of these artists’ work, the frontier the edge of civilization? I began to make my heroic piece of cinema, but never properly understood what happens when rain meets clay and when clay meets camera. Instead of Sergio Leone in the Spanish dust bowl, I was Werner Herzog on the set of Fitzcarraldo. It was like nothing I have done before with unfolding imagery somewhere between civil engineering and sculpture, and sounds which bounce around the landscape and then silence, a beautiful silence. The artists worked on a monumental scale, 200 metres apart, and I wanted to be with each of them at the same time. I would make my epic film after all, but the scale of the work was to be in the ambition of the artists and their material rather than the genre of the film (Brownsword 2010, 15).

As the only remaining permanent work of the project, the film penetrates with great sensitivity the often ineffable language of creativity, exposing points of discovery, failure and the possibilities and limitations of each individual’s material knowledge (figs 13.15 and 13.16). Marl Hole offers a glimpse at the creative potential of reinterpreting North Staffordshire’s industrial and postindustrial fabric beyond the archetypes of mass manufacture. Its legacy was one that challenged and disrupted established mechanisms of individual artistic practice, forcing each artist to rethink their intimate and on-going relationship with clay in pursuit of new knowledge. The project’s aim to emphasize the symbiotic relationship between human endeavour and a material that had formed the basis of the region’s economy over the past five centuries, 9 has started to reconnect a new audience to the complexities of this near forgotten pre-industrial history.

Figure 13.16 Johnny Magee, Marl Hole, 2009. Image: Jonny Magee.

References Brownsword, N. 2010. Marl Hole, Gustavsberg’s Konsthall. Elliot, G. 1998. John and David Elers and their Contemporaries. Jonathan Horne Publications. Feyerabend, P. 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. Plot, R. 1686. The Natural History of Staffordshire. Oxford.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN MATERIAL MATTERS: LANDSCAPE IS EVERYTHING MATERIAL, THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE NIGEL MORGAN

This chapter explores the concept behind my artwork Essence exhibited at the Material Memory Conference 2014 and my research into what constitutes landscape. Essence took the form of a series of things attached to a wall. It was important for me to communicate that these were things and not objects. Being real things, of matter, they are part of the process of landscape making, a part of our material existence. Such things can be recognized as cultural constructions; objects and artefacts viewed in the context of an exhibition, both presentation and document. This cultural ordering embodies the separation of object from material and of material from matter. The materials used in Essence were varied – some are enigmatic and unidentifiable. They are at once natural, processed or made. They are both analogous and metaphoric. The basic material descriptions of soil, steel, and stone in the exhibition text can be sub-divided or categorized, by the process by which they are formed, by their particular qualities relating to their history and origins. Materials included: building sand, poppy seeds, stone cutting dust, unfired brick clay, residues from stages of iron processing – including scale and slag from hot forge and foundry work from sites in Sunderland. All of these are the residue and debris of industrial processing. Essence also included steel box section supports, screws and plywood. Essence reflects the processes of landscape – extraction, manipulation and deposition. The “heaps” which characterize the work are defined by nature: their form can be of any size, of any place. They are natural and entropic, made of residue and spoil.

Figure 14.1 Nigel Morgan, Essence, Esse is being and our being is reflected in the material landscape. Material Memory Exhibition, Newcastle University, 2014. Image: Nigel Morgan.

The word essence is defined as the “real” or the “ultimate” nature of an individual being or thing, having “properties or attributes” – which “embody the fundamental nature of an idea or characteristic”.1 The term esse, the origin of the word essence, is defined as “being of actual existence”. I associate esse with real things, and being with temporality and with the now, the present. Both can refer to matter and site, where the past and the material present collide. This is “the peculiar moment of being present to perception” the “matter of experience” the materiality of what is otherwise an ephemeral and contingent snatch of lived experience. (DeLue and Elkins 2008, 23) 1

Merriam Webster online dictionary. Accessed February 2016. http://merriam webster.com/dictionary/essence.

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Figure 14.2 Nigel Morgan, Essence, details, 2014. Image: Nigel Morgan.

My work Essence can be appreciated as a trace, suggestive of processes such as repositioning and decay which are associated with site. However, in its conception the work holds within itself the opposite of these cultural notions: it is also an artwork conceived of as purely matter. This work is real landscape as much as the wall it is attached to or the building it is in. Essence is made up of moved material, but there are no clues to any previous location or history. Any direct material association to any specific qualities or properties of a previous place has been lost. We try therefore to

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understand its material nature, its previous location and the processes to which it has been subjected within the frame of reference of our own experience of the landscape. In this exposition, matter is at once material and nature. It has the same properties as the matter found at the site from which it was gathered. This matter conforms to physical and entropic reality. On show are the stages of the transfer from natural matter to material, a process whereby it is borne through states of processing to arrive at usefulness, value and object-hood. Each material is understood as having a distinct identity: as having individual qualities or properties. In their processing, materials are thought of as being converted from nature, but nature remains inherent within them. The matter which makes up this artwork is still being acted upon by the actions of landscaping. It will undergo change, decay, abandonment, maintenance, reuse or conservation. It remains connected to geological and environmental forces, human manipulation, and political and cultural concerns. Essence was developed in relation to my broader research question: what constitutes landscape and nature? My practice involves drawing, measuring and the manipulation of matter. All of these have equivalents in the processes of landscape creation and are used in my work to explore the essence of landscape. Traces of this research are made visible through my work on site and about site. Here the context determines the form of the artefact; the material of landscape and the re-manipulation of matter. The work is manifest as exterior or interior explorations where findings are exposed through site and material. This work process deals directly with our orientation to nature and the perceived dichotomy between human activity and nature. It engages with the continued anxieties about human “power over” and “separation from” nature. My work is an engagement with the physical topographic landscape and the processes forming landscape. The focus for this engagement is the sculpture to communicate the underlying principles relating to contemporary landscape. In contemporary sculpture that works directly with real matter we continue to deal with art as a material phenomenon. It engages with ideas being dealt with in landscape theory, where there is a search for the “real” experience of landscape. This has led to an interest in phenomenology. The experience of sculpture can be thought of as equivalent to the way we appreciate or apprehend landscape more generally. A sculpture evidently has a curiously ambiguous status as both object and as the projection of something and cultural or ideological that cannot literally be objectified. (Wood, Hulks and Potts 2007, 14)

mental, physic

The phenomenon of the “real” lived experience of an industrial landscape, was my theme in the Material Memory exhibition. My intention was to show the “real” material-matter of the post-industrial site – as a heap this was not to be thought of primarily as an object but rather as the ordering of material. Consisting of matter, this was both “thing” and “things”, not object but landscape. To use the term “Material Memory” in the context of landscape is indicative of our beliefs and anxieties about how we equate ourselves to landscape. It is a tension between proximity and distance, body and mind, sensuous immersion and detached observation. (Wylie 2007, 1)

This derives from the understanding that landscape is separate from ourselves, observed as something distant. But, in fact, landscape is something we create from, and out of, and are a part of. We are used to seeing landscape as something “other” external to ourselves, rather than understanding it as a performative or “immersive” space which we occupy. (Wylie 2007, 1)

Landscape has always been something we make in the course of our industry. Landscape continues to be made. It is a process we are constantly engaged in. it is not enough … to study landscape as a scenic text. A more substantive understanding of the landscape is required. (DeLue and Elkins 2008, 23)

We think of ourselves as distant from nature and landscape. Within the notion of a post-industrial landscape exists a different understanding of our relationship with time and space: ordinarily, we distance ourselves from a material engagement with land and nature, but here we are involved with, or in it, as something to which we are physically and morally connected. Through the post-industrial landscape, we are moving towards a re-engagement with landscape. In the post-industrial landscape we are able to look back and observe the effect our actions have had upon nature. This can be seen as an acknowledgement of our existence as a part of the matter of landscape; of forming and being formed from and by landscape. We can discern landscape as a thing we have created, and acknowledge our equality with nature and its matter, of which we are a part. This is about connecting ourselves through our actions to nature. It is about identifying with the reality and honesty of materials; whereby materials can be trusted to say something direct about ourselves and landscape and nature. Materials are what they are. They reflect the processes which have formed and changed them. They hold the memories which we infer upon them, shaped by processes which we define as either human or natural. These are memories associated with the mutability of things, but based within our temporal experience. We range across anthropocentric attitudes to the way things have become.

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The distinctions between natural and processed material, as with the broader landscape, are valorized. They have become significant because they reflect a preferred view of ourselves. Landscape was understood … to be a representation or symbolisation of particular subjectives, of particular cultural attitudes and values (Wylie 2007, 96)

Figure 14.3 Nigel morgan, Essence detail, 2014. Image: Nigel Morgan)

Our preference for one type of landscape over another reflects our ideological conditioning and our material anxieties. The term post-industrial is loaded – synonymous with scarring, debris, detritus, decay and neglect. Within the concept of the post-industrial landscape the memory of place as process is as important as the sense of place as a place of present being. We cannot help but search for meaning and narrative. Where has landscape come from, and why? All of planet Earth’s nature has become landscape. The post-industrial landscape is the landscape of the Anthropocene. We now have the opportunity to look at the after-effects of an industrial age and consider the implications of humanity being part of landscape and nature. Now we are able to consider the extent of our actions upon the Earth, from the beginning of industrial-scale mining activities five thousand years ago up until the present day. Now the effects of our industry upon our planet are registered and measured. Human activities have made such an imprint upon Earth’s geology that we have entered a new geological epoch. At the present time we are in the Holocene, which began with the Ice-age, ten thousand years ago. However, a new term for our age has been proposed by the biologist Paul Crutzen: the Anthropocene. Within the concept of the Anthropocene, all nature is seen as cultural landscape. This has been defined by the World Heritage Committee as the combined work of nature and man, as a consequence of the increasing and irreversible influence of humanity on the earth system, with anthropogenic climate change as the most prominent example. (Fowler 2003) In the Anthropocene … the separation of nature from culture and landscape from development does not make sense anymore. (Howard et al. 2013, 76)

Distinctions between the condition of matter as either “natural” or “processed” are no longer clear. Now when “nature is ubiquitous” and “cities are a part of nature” (Howard et al. 2013, 45) our relationship with nature is further confused. If nature is everything then it transpires that landscape is everything.

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In my work, the use of matter and size is my response to the post-industrial landscape and the way in which it reflects human intervention: post-industrial pertains to heavy industry and its ramifications of scale and size. Heavy industry here is opposed to light industry with its impact for good or bad being determined by its scale of operation. Here, size and scale relate to particular cultural attitudes about the landscape; industry is measured in terms of its size in relationship to, and impact upon, nature. My work uses matter and size to examine what nature and landscape is; nature can be both bigger than landscape and can be found in the small details of landscape. Like landscape, matter can be of any size. It is ubiquitous. The industrial landscape was associated with site and size, with specific locations and scale of activity. The notion of the post-industrial landscape in the Anthropocene changes these associations; the discernible, separate, postindustrial site no longer exists, for everything is now a post-industrial landscape. The scale of our impact upon nature is difficult to comprehend. Understanding the nature of size and scale, and the difference between them is necessary to understand matter and landscape. The choice of the size and matter of the artwork was important. Relating the concept of size to “natural” landscape and to topographical landforms shows how the same features can be both large and small: a heap has the same characteristics at different sizes. But matter is real and cannot be scaled up, it is the stuff of landscape. The impacts of industrial activity are now quantifiable and discernible, and the measurable matter of Earth holds within itself the memory of the industrial age. In Essence, the material’s size and shape has an inherent delicacy. Temporality and process, decay and maintenance are inherent. Much of our understanding of material comes through touch, and the appearance of fingerprints in the clay dust heap – a memory of an action within nature – reinforces the viewer’s relationship with the matter in the artwork and the ongoing process of human landscape formation.

Figure 14.4 Nigel Morgan, Essence details, 2014. Image: Nigel Morgan.

References DeLue, R. and J. Elkins. 2008. Landscape theory. New York: Routledge. Fowler, P.J. 2003. World Heritage Cultural Landscapes 1992–2002. Paris: UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Howard, P., I. Thompson and E. Waterton. 2013. The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. Abingdon: Routledge. Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Accessed February 2016. http://merriam-webster.com/dictionary/essence. Wood, J., D. Hulks and A. Potts. 2007. Modern Sculpture Reader. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. Wylie, J. 2007. Landscape. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN ENCOUNTERS WITH A COLLIERY LANDSCAPE MICHELE ALLEN

As part of the conference “Material Memory” I presented a small series of hand printed photographs and a short film which I created in response to a series of colliery lagoons near the villages of Newstead and Annesley in Nottinghamshire. I first became aware of the lagoons system in 2011 and was immediately drawn to the raw postindustrial quality of the landscape and began thinking about making some work there but felt that in order to really open up the subject matter I would also need to work with people who understood the site’s industrial history. After some discussion with the group who were managing the land I was asked to work on a short heritage project connected to the area and as a result was fortunate enough to meet many people from the local community who were also collecting material connected to the history of mining. Whilst working on this project I began to form ideas for my own work which led to the development of the project which I will discuss here. As someone whose contribution to the conference was artistic rather than academic I thought it would be more relevant to present a piece of text which evokes something of the work rather than describing it in detail. As such I have collected together a series of different narratives and images connected to the work, a kind of imagined script. The images and quotations are taken from the film I made which featured interviews with former miners from Newstead colliery and footage of water moving through the lagoons system. These are interspersed with short accounts of my own experiences of the landscape drawing on my memories of exploring the site with people from the local area and reflecting on my own impressions of the space. The effect is intended to be partial and fragmentary, which seems to me to be an appropriate way of describing spaces (such as colliery workings) which exist largely in memory and also the visible remnants of the coal industry in the landscape which are prey to the effects of weather and the processes of natural succession.

Figure 15.1 Michele Allen, Edge Water. Image: Michele Allen. Roadways only three feet high that men had got to walk down. … You weren’t on your own you were with a man, an old collier. He trained you in such things like; he’d tell you to tap the roof with the handle of your pick and from the sound it made you knew if the roof was sound or not. … All you wore was a pair of shorts and your boots it was that hot down there…1 1

All quotations Michele Allen in conversation with Bob Collier 2014 and Michele Allen in conversation with Ian Flint 2014.

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We drive up to the lagoons on a dirt track, bordered by fields on the edge of Annesley, the car kicking up grey dust as we pass under a small bridge and up a steep bank, then a view of the landscape opens up. I can’t believe how far we can see and also the surreal, almost lunar, quality of the lagoons. I had been expecting pond life and dense reeds, I’m shocked by the rawness of this landscape – there are hardly any plants. I take photos from the car window then jump out and photograph a big pile of tyres on the lagoon edge. There are small yellow flowers emerging from the grey earth which is baked hard and riven with deep powdery cracks. The flowers are cylindrical, the tiny yellow blooms poking out across the surface – they remind me of sputnik. One of the worst things was the water that affected a lot of situations down there on T2s. At the weekend we used to take the motors off the face conveyors and hang them up on the dosco because you would always get water there on a Monday morning. All the roadways are still there now, steel rings will be starting to rust and collapse…

I return later that summer, this time on foot with my mum, her husband and my 18-month old son. We walk through a wooden gate past a large graffiti wall and fenced in tarmac area. It’s hard to define the area’s purpose, perhaps a remnant from industrial buildings; my mum says it was built to give the kids somewhere to do graffiti. We continue along the train line; it’s warm and wild flowers dot amongst the long grass beside the tracks. Small trees grow around the pasture land and cling to the steep slopes on our right – which I now know are the former spoil heaps which the lagoons were built on. We reach an open space and turn naturally to climb the hill. Deep furrows are worn into the soil, I assume as a result of water draining down. Large daisy-like flowers grow between the cracks. Their roots and feathery leaves seem frail against the heavy soil pitted with coal chippings, I don’t know what they’re called. I wasn’t afraid, no; I was never afraid. You more or less knew what to expect because your fathers had told you all about it. You roughly, only roughly knew what to expect and when you got down, the pit bottom was enormous, for being underground. As lads we expected to get off the cage and crawl, you know start crawling but you didn’t and of course as things progressed things got bigger and better.

Figure 15.2 Michele Allen, Drain. Image: Michele Allen. When I first started you walked a couple of mile, perhaps three mile, before you reached the coalface, so you got off the cage then walked. Well; then they introduced man riding belts like when we worked down the Tupton, you would sit on the belt and they would take you down to the workings … but when I first started there was none of that, everywhere you went you walked.

Mist rolls across the lake in the warm morning light, slowly unfurling the soft shifting forms sit against the sharp silhouetted reeds which fringe the water’s edge, on the horizon a pylon is picked out against the sunrise; there’s something so familiar about this landscape I feel instantly at home. I’m with one of the “birders” who’s been going to the lagoons regularly for years. It’s autumn migration and they’re up every morning at sunrise logging bird numbers and species on the site. The process is as much about listening as looking through binoculars and as we walk a new world opens up. I learn that the bare earth which I was so drawn to on my first encounter with the lagoons is a

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valuable habitat for ground nesting birds, dragonflies and lizards, which they are keen to maintain. We walk around the middle lagoon and then down a grassy bank and along the edge of the fields passing Hazleford Cliff – a warm sandstone outcrop peeking out from the neatly ploughed fields – heading for the “concrete ponds”. This space has a different feeling from the rest of the lagoons, smaller, more enclosed. The ponds are rectangular, the sides made from cracked brick walls, shaded by trees, the water cascades from one to the next in shallow noisy waterfalls.

Figure 15.3 Michele Allen, Shining Stream. Image: Michele Allen. It was a beautiful pit; if you can have a beautiful pit! It was what they called a family pit, everybody knew everybody. Almost everyone I went to school with went into Newstead pit, their dads were there, their granddads before them… it was what they called a family pit.

The fences look familiar, it’s an unexpected feeling – I hadn’t imagined the project as being personal or autobiographical, but suddenly the sight of the fence takes me back to childhood walks in Mansfield. The posts are made from pebbly concrete tapering to a smooth curve at the top, diamond-shaped green wire mesh is stretched between them, collapsing in places, creating an informal trellis for hedgerow weeds and “sticky buds”. Bright yellow lichen patterns the concrete, a sign of its age; it once formed the boundary of the lagoons system, keeping the public out. The square flat sides of the ponds and perhaps their stillness induces a rising feeling of panic in my stomach – perhaps a side-effect of parenting a small child – I stay well back from the edge. In the woodland amidst moss-covered trees a weathered sign reads “Danger Deep Water and Slurry”, incongruous against the romantic tangle of fallen branches. We were very lucky that in the time we went down we had good lighting and it was safe, but I do feel very sorry for the miners that came before us. Even in my own time from the sixties through to the nineties you would shade your eyes against the brightness coming out from working in the dark. But I do fear the older miners had a much worse time and I think many of them did lose their eyesight.

I set off just before dawn hoping to capture the mist on the lagoons again, I had managed to film it last time but without a tripod the footage sways with my breath. I rush out eager to catch the sun rising over the water, but miss it by minutes, setting my tripod up in time to photograph the bright pink light illuminating the fields. A fleeting moment, then it’s gone. The light moves quickly in winter. I keep moving – I’ve arranged to meet one of “the birders” by the fishing lakes. There was a lot of bitterness, a lot of bitterness, I remember my father used to say “I remember him in 1926” and I used to think “Oh, Father, 1926!” but it’s the same now, isn’t it: “I remember him in the 80s...” but that’s how it is, miners have got long memories…

It is winter now and the landscape seems to have settled into a quiet beauty. I film water running down the narrow channels between the lagoons, meandering rivulets worn into the thick grey silt; leaves are caught up in the flow, forming tiny dams, and in the calmer puddles fronds of pond weed sway gently in the current. Even after being de-

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commissioned there is a constant movement of water travelling down from the bare open space of the top lagoon, to the concrete ponds before eventually being released into the river Leen. I’m drawn to the flat winter light and muted colour palette, an unusual experience. Perhaps something in this gentler light reveals more of the landscape’s structure, the detail in the soil and the mud a by-product of countless hours’ work underground. The high vantage point which revealed such fantastic views on my first visit now delivers an icy wind and after an hour or so my hands are fumbling and struggling to operate the camera. I pull my gloves back on and move into the shelter of the woodland. I was one of the only people who ever volunteered to work the Tupton seam but I did it for a reason, to be with men I felt comfortable with after the strike. Going into that water, it was hot and everything imaginable was in the water, acids, ochres, you’d come out with your body a completely different colour from when you went in, with sores, orange patches on your legs. Even I myself was not sorry when they shut the Tupton at Newstead because the working conditions were that bad, we went into the Hazels seam after that and that’s where we were working when Newstead closed.

Figure 15.4 Michele Allen, Hive. Image: Michele Allen.

Newstead colliery closed in 1987 after a vote by the now dominant Union of Democratic Mine Workers; the NUM members who worked in the pit were excluded from the vote, effectively being denied a say in the future of their workplace. To the surprise of many in the area Annesley Colliery, which was much older, continued to work until January 2000 due to the profitable Blackshale seam which extended nearly five miles out from the pit shaft. It was 150 years old when it closed, the oldest working pit in Britain. Whilst working in Nottinghamshire I met people connected to both collieries, and from across the political spectrum; from staunch trades unionists who had seen out the length of the strike and are still active in the NUM to those who had worked for various reasons, and the wives of miners who often had careers of their own counter to the common representations of women in a supporting role staffing soup kitchens, though this happened here too. During my work on the heritage project I became more aware of the history of these villages, how communities had struggled to move on after the demise of industry and the passion shared by many to preserve this history for future generations. Perhaps naively I imagined that when I talked to miners about their work underground I would capture descriptions of the physicality of space and a world separate from the histories of the villages above. Of course these spaces are completely interdependent; the history of the pit is closely connected to the history of the village and vice versa. Whilst there is a distinct culture to life underground as can be seen in the huge diversity of technical language and pit talk, everyday life was also ever present when I talked to miners about their work in the pit. What I hope is that by bringing these narratives together with images of the lagoons landscape I might in a small way add to this huge history. When walking in the lagoons landscape I would often feel humbled to think that the soil beneath my feet had been so hard won and that the steep banks I climbed were testament to thousands of hours of labour underground. I hope that in some small way my film might reflect this and encourage people to visit this fascinating landscape which still bears the traces of an industry which has all too often been erased from view. *****

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I would like to thank all the residents of Newstead and Annesley who helped with this work, especially Bob Collier, Ian Flint and Dr David Amos. I would like to dedicate this work to the memory of Ian Flint, who sadly passed away in 2015.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN NOTES ON MATERIAL MEMORY IN POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPES HOLDING ON, BY LETTING GO: TOPOGRAPHIES OF THE OBSOLETE ANNE HELEN MYDLAND

Topographies of the Obsolete: Exploring the Site Specific and Associated Histories of Post-Industry1 is an artistic research project initiated by Professor Neil Brownsword and myself in collaboration with partner universities/institutions in Denmark, Germany and the UK, and the British Ceramics Biennial, who invited Bergen Academy of Art and Design to work in the now closed down ceramics factory Spode Works in Stoke-on-Trent, to develop a response for the Biennial in 2013. The focus of the project is on the landscape of post-industry, specifically that of Stoke-on-Trent in North Staffordshire, which had a flourishing ceramics industry for hundreds of years. We are exploring this landscape through the interdisciplinary research of over 40 participating artists. A number of on-going residencies since 2012 have accumulated individual artistic projects, from which the overriding project has developed. Topographies is a framework formulating topics and research strands.

Figure 16.1 Spode Works. Image: AH Mydland.

The industrialization of ceramics during the eighteenth century brought about a phenomenal concentration of specialist skills and knowledge to North Staffordshire. By 1800 the Six Towns of Stoke-on-Trent paralleled China as a 1

For more information about the project, artists’ events and development, see http://topographies.khib.no

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world centre for ceramic production. Paradoxically, recent decades have seen centuries of this cultivated expertise being relocated to the Far East. The Spode Factory, situated in the city centre of Stoke, once a keystone of the city’s industrial heritage that operated upon its original site for over 230 years, was one of many world-renowned brands that have since fallen into administration. In 2008 the factory was closed down,2 leaving most of its production infrastructure and contents intact. Spode Works is now the property of the Stoke-on-Trent City Council. Amongst Spode’s contributions to the history of ceramics is the perfection of the under-glaze blue printing process with iconic patterns and images, and the development and perfection of Fine Bone China. The latter was a result and response to the introduction of Chinese porcelain to Europe. During the Topographies of the Obsolete residencies, artists were granted access to work in the majority of Spode’s public and hidden spaces that dated from the early nineteenth century to 2008 when the factory closed. These included its vast production halls, design studios, show rooms, smaller workshops, backyards/courtyards, and alleyways, offices, shops, mould stores, cellars and attics. The artists encountered a mix of extreme dereliction, where the forces of nature had begun to reclaim the building, alongside more ordered and well-tended areas. With the exception of finished objects, artefacts connected to specific labour divisions were left more or less intact.

Figure 16.2 Spode Works, window view. Image: AH Mydland.

The post-industry as material: The site is the question More than 60 years after Hilla and Bernd Becher raised questions and awareness around the beginning of Europe and North America’s de-industrialization, the curators of the New Industries Festival (2014, in the Ruhr area of Germany) or the Liverpool Biennial (2014) still pose the question: what happened to industry? How does the process of deindustrialization affect communities and landscapes? The issues raised point to the still pressing need for engagement with de-industrialization and the landscape of post-industry. Through the Topographies project we have approached the post-industrial site through these strands: The Socio-Economic Post Industrial Landscape as Site, The Globalised Landscape of Ceramics, The Human Topography of Post-Industry, The Topography of Objects/Archives and The Artist/Archaeologist, The Topography of the Contemporary Ruin and The Artist in a Non-Art Space. To all we have set these fundamental questions: Within the context of site-specific practice, what is and how can ceramics and clay be 2

Spode is currently a (copyrighted) brand owned by the Portmeirion group, still producing some of the most famous patterns e.g. Blue Italian. It is no longer produced in Stoke on Trent.

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understood as both a material and subject in contemporary art practice? How can we perceive the material to be or to constitute a site? Moreover, how do ceramics and clay form and construct our understanding of the site? As a prolongation of that – the questioning of the meaning and value of “(raw) material” in a post-industrial landscape. What is the raw material in a post-industrial landscape? Apart from exploring the site’s “materiality”, we want to consider the human impact upon the site and how the residue of activities such as manufacture blend into and contribute to a new strata of “raw materials”.3 In this text I will explore whether memory could be regarded as such a material. In the archaeological project Ruin memories, post-industrial ruins are described as “‘places of abjection’ – ‘a noman’s land too recent, conflicting and repulsive to be shaped as collective memory’. Such places still contain the material causation for their abjection, and are haunted by a present past too grim or uncanny to be embraced” (Ruin Memories 2016). This resonates with much of our experiences of working in Stoke. The sense of shame and anger connected to the failure of industry, intertwined with hope of resurrecting what was gone, a pride for the past and anxiety for the future: the factory ruin as epicentre for these emotions. Ruin Memories discuss memory and material through two types of memory, re-collective and habit. “While recollective memory implies a conscious gaze directed towards a particular past, habit memory is an implicit act of remembering embedded in our bodily routines and ways of dealing with things. [Post industrial ruins] by being redundant and discarded they reveal the gaps in the construction of history as progress, as a continuous narrative; they bring forth the abject memories that both the re-collective and the habitual have displaced” (Ruin Memories 2016). Abject and displaced memories is a good description of what we and other artists deal with, when working in the post-industrial landscape. It gives an understanding of how many of the artists have been approaching and working with the site of Spode/Stoke: “navigating the gaps in the construction of history”. (Ruin Memories 2016)

Is memory a material?

Figure 16.3 Yeoungbin Lee, Office, 2012. Image: Bjarte Bjørkum.

The artist Yeoungbin Lee’s project at Spode encompassed cleaning and re-organizing some of the offices, found in a state of disarray when we first entered the site. Scavengers had been rummaging through. Yeoungbin’s aim was to make it look inhabited once again, make it look like any office, wash away nostalgia and loss, clean away the past, but as she stated, “how ever much I wash, I can’t wash away history”. Does the past, the history, or memory at one point 3

In 2016, The Geological Society of London will decide if we have entered the Anthropocene, which defines humans as a geological force that emerged at the dawn of the industrial revolution.

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become intrinsic to the object/site? An on-going reflection of mine is whether memory becomes a material in its own right, which is detectable, even when it is not your own memory. Do we recognize the quality and the presence of memory? The majority of our group had never been to Stoke, let alone Spode. The site did not contain our history or memories, but we were all acutely aware of the “aura” of memory. Everything seemed to be imbued with it. It made it difficult for many to work, as suddenly they were beset with questions: what can I do, what can I add to a place and to things which already seem to be filled to the brim with meaning, memory, and history? Will any addition feel just like an ornament, a decoration, something superficial? As a result, many artists worked with memory as a material or substance in its own right, as something to be activated.

Rites of empathy and destruction: Chapter 2: Holding on by letting go. KELLY/MARHAUG The artist duo KELLY/MARHAUG created a series of chapters, performance works for camera. “They mime the histories of Spode through silted memories and artefacts contained within crumbling walls and leaking roofs. Through a series of gestures in which fragile items are passed between them until inevitable slippage takes place, the artists create a further layer in the production of contemporary shards. In doing so they are seeking to re/generate new and living histories in spaces that resist expiring. They are unreliable archaeologists introducing empathy and contamination to the sites they inhabit. In each gesture from the chapters, it is the inevitable release of grasp and the negotiation inherent in acts of ‘passing on’ and ‘passing by’, which opens the possibility to define new futures.” (KELLY/MARHAUG 2013) The white-clad bodies, echoing the whiteness of the moulds and the bone china, very softly navigate the dirt, dust and grime, respectfully touching and handling the objects. The bare feet, the searching and concerned hands who hold as long as possible, point to the fragility of both the site, the objects and the body, the human presence. Hands relating, paying attention to the objects again evokes a past, a ghost, a memory of previous handling, previous hands. All the hands and bodies are involved in the production of these tools and objects, the mould makers, the ones who at one time hastily carved out the identity of the pattern, style and shape in the mould, with names reaching our ear like a ghostly whisper. It is as if we are witnessing/watching a ritual, a mystical way of laying to rest, with care and empathy, but also a rite of passage with the final inevitability of destruction and transformation, giving the objects an abstract new quality – pointing to them as symbols of the past, as estranged and alienated objects: alienated from function, use and activity. But destruction also gives way for the new, giving the objects a new function and story. The two white bodies are like priestesses moving through the factory buildings, giving the final rites, creating a closure: closing Spode.

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Figure 16.5: Jeremy Welsh, Stills from Tracings, 2013. Image: Jeremy Welsh.

Displaying Absence: The Ronald Copeland Art Gallery: The factor of Dynamic Memory Allocation, Mydland/Sandborg Memory questions; what is to be remembered (the monument/presence/remains) and what is to be forgotten (refuse/absence). “The factor of dynamic memory allocation” refers to a mathematical problem in the construction of artificial intelligence. Simply put, it is the ability to forget in order to make available room to process something new. Computers have a limited amount of memory. Machines and computers don’t forget, but they need to be programmed to delete and erase information. How does this mechanism work in humans? When is it time to forget, when should we hold on, and what do we hold on to? When entering Spode and the art gallery, we questioned the mechanisms and the necessity of dynamic forgetting. The art gallery was a grand room built in the early 1940s specifically for the owners of Spode, the Copeland family,4 to display their private collection of ceramic ware from Europe, Asia and the Spode factory itself. The interior is lavishly designed with exotic wood panelling and built-in brass framed cabinets, constructed so as to give the illusion of being paintings. This room was for management, board meetings, private and VIP occasions. Parallels with the chambers of curiosity (Wunderkammer) of the 1600s are easily drawn. Deserted, its collection removed, and in a state of decadent decay, the gallery appeared to be a prime example of the fetishization of the past, a place where only memory resides, and a symbol of the region which still proudly calls itself “The Potteries” (though most of the ceramic production is long gone and has moved elsewhere). Can we understand memory in this case to be understood as a souvenir or relic? Walter Benjamin (1985, 48–9) describes the souvenir as “the relic secularized … The relic derives from the corpse, the souvenir from the deceased experience”. Could he be indicating not only the concept of irretrievable loss within the object, but also the necessary treatment of the relic/souvenir? The necessary treatment: so it will not rot and transform into something nasty, sickly, dangerous, something that distracts and alienates us from the true experience. The room was not the memory, but more the casing of it. Was the room a reliquary? The reliquary is a lavish device for display, which dressed the relic up in jewels and gold, shielding it from touch. Did the room perform such a function? A reliquary, where the relic – the (BONE) china of Spode and the precious collection (being a relic of the total “body” of the once functioning production site, the brand’s ingenuity and commercial success) was absent, and

4

More about the Copelands and the Art Gallery available online: gallery.html (accessed February 2016).

http://spodehistory.blogspot.no/2013/05/spode and art

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Figure 16.7 Toril Redalen: Dust; Place and Skill. Image: Bjarte Bjørkum

Figure 16.8 Toril Redalen: Dust; Place and Skill. Image: Bjarte Bjørkum

The presence of the singular human body working, dusting, collecting in the empty factory and office buildings is again like an echo, a circulating memory of the massive physical effort and hard work that was needed for the factory

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to be alive. The movement, the interaction with the material, the handling of the dust, the clay, the slip, the glaze and so on and so on, and so on, the list of actions and movements are endless, the effort of keeping the dust at bay. But it is not a factory worker; it’s the Artist who is at work – what is labour in art? The labour and material becomes ambiguous, futile, revealing “the gaps in the construction of history” (Ruin Memories 2016). Dust and clay is, as memory alike, a constant construction, shifting and dependent on the circumstances. It is a composition, a collection, inclusive, mirroring and changeable. The memory imbedded in clay is of the Earth grinding itself. Clay is the residue of geological processes, magma, lava, meteors, cooling, crackling and then affected by erosion and erasure, water, ice and weather shaping and reshaping the Earth’s crust, rivers washing and sifting particles into layers and sediments. It is a depository for geological memory. The transformation into ceramic adds another layer of material memory, this time a result of human interaction. Ceramic is the first culturally synthesized material where humans transformed the chemical composition of the matter. Clay and dust are inclusive. There is room for everything, all is sucked in, there is no hierarchy, nothing is rejected, they absorb everything from and of their surroundings. They are different from so much else in life, which is about selection, separation and rejection, where “pure” is a positive word. Clay, dust and memory don’t do “pure”. The constant construction, addition and contamination is intrinsic – if not essential. [Dust] is not about rubbish, nor about the discarded; it is not about surplus, left over from something else: it is not about waste … It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. (Steedman 2002, 157 9)

Conclusion Entering Spode, which so many have described as “laden with history and memory”, so full that it seemed impossible to work with, we have tried to approach it without gawping at the decay like “ruin porn” spurred on by the depiction of the post-industrial ruins of Detroit and imagery from the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina. For our group of artists, taking time and repeated observations were strategies to evoke, tease out or add new meaning, to look for the glitches and distortions in memory. These actions become a balancing act with nostalgia on one hand and ignorance on the other. In my perception, memory is recognizable, a language, a material in its own right; being both the projection of human behaviour and experience, as well as something external to us, with its own agency. Is memory a haptic and visual language, and does it have an “alphabet” we can decode? In Spode it is not primarily my memory and history, which speaks, calling to me from every nook and cranny, and from every abandoned object. But it is vociferous and present - I can see it and touch it, piled and stacked, left in disarray – it feels like it is waiting for a voice, a gesture, an eye, a presence, for finding, sorting through, to keep some, collect some, and forget some. By entering Spode, Topographies and all the artists entered the “Memory Circuit” of the place. We interfered, affected, changed and challenged the Memory in and of the place. Perhaps by venturing in the gap between the re-collective and habitual memory, and by acknowledging or proposing memory as a material, as matter: By discovering and creating abject and displaced memories by holding on to some, and letting others go.

References Benjamin, W., Spencer, L. and Harrington, M. 1985. “Central Park”. New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985) [electronic] Accessed February 2016. http://www.artic.edu/~ccutro1/benjamin centralpark.pdf Brownsword, N. and Mydland, A.H. (eds). 2013. Topographies of the Obsolete: Vociferous Void. Bergen: Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen. KELLY/MARHAUG .(2013). “CHAPTER 1: ON PASSING, Laying to Rest / CHAPTER 2: HOLDING ON BY LETTING GO, First Form / CHAPTER 3: MANDARIN DUST, Slipping / CHAPTER 4: APPETITE FOR ATMOSPHERE.” Topographies of the Obsolete: Vociferous Void. Accessed February 2016. http://topographies.khib.no/projects/chapter-1-on-passing,-laying-to-rest-chapter-2-holding-on-by-letting-go,-firstform-chapter-3-mandarin-dust,-slipping-chapter-4-appetite-for-atmosphere/ Nagel, A. 2010. “The afterlife of the reliquary.” In Treasures of Heaven, edited by M. Bagnoli, A. Holger, C. Klein, G. Mann and J. Robinson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Redalen, T. 2013. “DUST; Place and Skill.” Topographies of the Obsolete: Vociferous Void. Accessed February 2016. http://topographies.khib.no/projects/dust-place-and-skill/ Ruin Memories. 2016. Accessed February 2016. http://ruinmemories.org/about/project-description. Steedman, C. 2002. Dust: The Archive and the Cultural History. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Topographies of the Obsolete. Accessed February 2016. http://topographies.khib.no

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN TURNIN’ MY HEARTBEAT UP CHLOË BROWN

Figure 17.1 Chloë Brown, Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up) 2013. Two Northern Soul dancers are seen dancing with passion in the empty, once splendid Boardroom. The room is transformed into a ballroom, a dance hall, where uplifting music is played and a couple dances, absorbed in their own movements and thoughts. The footage is interspersed with short clips of details of the decaying building that almost act as freeze frames: a chandelier moves gently in the breeze caused by a broken window pane; a discarded fridge sits at the bottom of the spiraling grand staircase that leads to the Boardroom. The soul music binds together these ‘still lifes’ with the moving images of the dancers. Towards the end of the film the footage is slowed down and the music becomes repetitive, machine like, reminiscent of the mechanised elements of industrial production. The two dancers dance alone and separately, rarely acknowledging each other, lost in the music. At moments they seem to be in a state of rapture like a heightened spiritual state. This is not so much a joyous dance on the grave of a doomed industry or an archaic class system; rather a momentary reanimation of a dying room in the fading light of an industry that has all but vanished here (Brown 2015, 26).

This is a description of my film Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up),1 which was included in the exhibition Material Memory: The Post Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice in the Long Gallery at Newcastle University in 2014 as part of the conference of the same name. The film explores issues of class systems, hierarchy and labour within the post-industrial landscape of Stoke-on-Trent and takes the disused Spode ceramics factory as its critical prompt. Notions of the industrial ruin in combination with the city’s prominence within the history of the Northern Soul movement were explored through the filmed staging of a Northern Soul event in the Boardroom at the factory making connections between the post-industrial cities of Stoke-on-Trent and Detroit, from where the music of Northern Soul largely originates. The film also aims to articulate an emotional response to postindustrial ruins such as those of the Spode factory and by bringing together seemingly unconnected things – people, places, music and dance – it creates a friction that leads to new readings that have optimism, not despondency at their core. Ideas of failure and loss also inform this film: the failure behind the “lost” music of Northern Soul, the failure

1

Chloë Brown, Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up), 2013, duration 5:33 HD (https://vimeo.com/75807622) was installed in the Managing Director’s office at the Spode factory as part of Topographies of the Obsolete: The Vociferous Void, an exhibition which was part of the third British Ceramics Biennial from September November 2013.

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and loss of traditional industry in the UK, and the subsequent impact on these post-industrial places, but it proposes that failure can be transformative, creative, even uplifting. The ruin is a site not of melancholy or mourning but of radical potential its fragmentary, unfinished nature is an invitation to fulfill the as yet unexplored temporality that it contains. Ruins … are freighted with possibility, even with utopian promise (Dillon 2011, 18).

I have collaborated with the international research project Topographies of the Obsolete2 since 2012 exploring interpretations of the post-industrial landscape with researchers from northern European art academies, our starting point being a series of residencies at the disused Spode ceramics factory in Stoke-on-Trent, with notions of the postindustrial city and the ensuing crisis of identity that occurs once its reason for being, its industry, has collapsed, driving the research. Throughout the visits to the disintegrating factory I was drawn repeatedly to the Boardroom (also known as the Ronald Copeland Gallery) and to the Managing Director’s office. Again and again I returned to these spaces to take in what remained and imagine what was possible. The Boardroom consisted of a large open space, wood-panelled, and parquet-floored, which exuded a sort of oldfashioned confidence. Down each side of the room were vitrines, fitted flush to the panelled walls like empty fish tanks. Silhouettes drawn in dust were the only reminders of the function of these “tanks”, which were used to display the latest and most valued collections of Spode ware. In the ceiling a glass panel, now grimy with dirt and bird shit, would have once illuminated the room and at its centre was a grand piano, placed there in order to be played to entertain international buyers of ceramics. In its disused state, the building became an overwhelming sensory experience, with smell, touch and sound becoming heightened: the wind blowing through broken windows causing the chandelier at the base of the stairs leading to the Boardroom to sway and tinkle, the creak of a door, a pigeon cooing, the smell of dust, decay and abandonment. To get to the Boardroom, an elegant staircase needed to be negotiated passing the Managing Director’s office as the stairs wound upwards. The office was starting to break down – the wallpaper peeling and blistered, revealing tendrils of fungus beneath, the smell of damp, the slightly sticky quality of the blue synthetic carpet, the vertical blinds now peppered with black mould. From the inside, the office door was padded in dark green leatherette, the big buttons giving it the appearance of a strange upended Chesterfield settee. One wall was filled with bookcases and shelves flanked by two “invisible” cupboards, papered with the same peeling covering. The cupboards contained neat piles of files holding details of the factory’s past (and declining) productivity. One cupboard acted as a wardrobe of sorts, empty coat hangers clinking in the breeze. Strangely, the desk was rather humble and not the kind usually found in a Managing Director’s office: it looked much more likely that of an administrator, rather than the boss. Like most institutions, factories are formed around hierarchical systems and structures, dependent on everyone knowing their place. This is reinforced by the location and appearance of these kinds of management-level spaces and it was no different at the Spode factory. The position of these two rooms was elevated, above the shop floor, and it was here that I felt a particularly strong resonance: the smell of the loss of authority and power. Stoke-on-Trent is not only known for the production of ceramics, but it also has a longstanding link to the Northern Soul scene of the 1960s and ’70s. This underground, secretive, largely white working-class youth culture had its own rituals (the dancing), gods (the DJs) and treasured artefacts (the records) and was centred around escapism from the hard, industrial jobs that occupied many followers of the scene during the week. At the weekends, often travelling hundreds of miles to north of England venues, they would dance all night until after the break of dawn, fuelled by amphetamines, to raw, emotional soul music produced in America’s industrial heartland. The Golden Torch club in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent was one such venue and although it was short-lived, this venue is considered one of the most revered in Northern Soul history. The desire to dance all weekend at “all-nighters” (events starting after midnight and running until 8am) was strong in industrial cities such as Stoke as a form of liberation from the mundane production-line of industry: “So they came for the weekend … in a strange kind of way to be socially and, in their 3 terms, musically and culturally liberated. That was what was absolutely gripping”. The music was the most important element for the devotees, with emotion, and its expression through dance, being at the centre of Northern Soul culture. Lyrics about longing, loss, love and heartbreak were combined with music that is uplifting, even euphoric. The music moves you more deeply than you can admit or explain sometimes … But you know all the others in the room all feel that inside and you can all get incredibly close because of that. That is the soul scene (Constantine and Sweeney 2013, 219).

What is compelling for me is that the music of Northern Soul is essentially built upon the rejected product of the music industry, which was not mainstream, but rare and difficult to obtain. In the 1960s the Motown record label based in Detroit was hugely successful producing hit after hit, operating almost as a factory production-line, the

2

“Topographies of the Obsolete” initiated by Bergen Academy of Art and Design (KHiB) in Norway, in collaboration with partner art academies in Denmark, Germany and the UK. This project explores interpretations of the post industrial landscape, initially in relation to the Spode factory in Stoke on Trent. See Chapter 16, Ann Helen Mydland, for further information. 3 Keep on Burning: The Story of Northern Soul, Dir. Joe Boy, A2B Media, 2012. (Tony Palmer, director of This England: Wigan Casino)

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recognizable Motown sound produced by a team of writers, performers, producers and arrangers. The music genre of Northern Soul was essentially the output of the Motown copyist. The sound of Northern Soul is a myriad of labels in a multitude of cities and towns across America, who tried to copy that sound. In so doing, they overemphasized certain aspects of the music … These records ultimately commercially failed for the most part. Those failures became Northern Soul.4

These commercial failures, consigned to warehouses in the US containing boxes and boxes of discontinued vinyl singles, came from a production-line approach to the creation of music, similar to the processes employed in the industries of northern England where many followers of Northern Soul lived and worked. Interesting for me too is that the city of Detroit is now synonymous with both the production of soul music and the ruins of post-industry on a grand scale. This deleted and discarded soul music was essentially lost until it was found by British soul enthusiasts and brought back to the UK to be played at what became Northern Soul events; moreover, the fewer the copies of the record that were produced or discovered, the greater the rarity and importance, elevating some of the records to iconic status. This is a fascinating reversal of meritocracy with the records with the least distribution or production, and therefore it could be said, those that failed the most, becoming the most sought after and valued. Nostalgia is also at the heart of Northern Soul, with the desire to “Keep The Faith” central to its philosophy. Its heyday was in the early 1970s when the rediscovered music was already a decade old and today there is a strong and thriving Northern Soul community with many still looking back to this time as a golden era. If Wigan (casino) shut down, if I just heard during the week that that was it, that was the last night at Wigan … and there was no ‘next week’, well I wouldn’t know what to do. It would be like Instant Nostalgia…You’d think, “God, I’m going to be looking back for the rest of my life.”5

I decided to take Northern Soul with its nostalgia, its passion for failed, discarded music, and with its links to the escapist desire of its participants to experience meaningful, emotional moments on a dance floor, and place it in the Boardroom at the Spode factory, a room that represented for me what Brian Dillon terms “the collapse of past dreams of the future” (Dillon 2011, 12). It was here that I staged and filmed an event. One cold February day, a Northern Soul DJ, Vinny Soulshaker, played music, and two Northern Soul dancers, Peter and Susan Davies, danced in the Boardroom until the light began to fade. Their dancing seemed to be second nature to them, honed to perfection through years of practice and repetition. At times their movements were almost mechanistic, their bodies going through well-rehearsed motions and gestures. This reminded me of the subtle choreography of the ceramics workers that I had witnessed during a visit to the Wedgewood Factory on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent. A particular set of movements in a particular order was required to remove porcelain casts from their moulds in order to prevent the distortion of the object (a plate, a bowl) and these movements were gestural and elegant; the ceramics workers “danced”. The resulting film of the performance, entitled Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up) was installed in the Managing Director’s office as part of the British Ceramics Biennial in autumn 2013. Both film and installation are the embodiment of what Tim Edensor describes as an activity that transgresses “disciplinary ordering, in which people are surveilled to ensure they enact ‘appropriate’ practices” (Edensor 2005, 94). The film and subsequent installation challenges this ordering and regulation of space, and a playful anarchy is encouraged, showing itself as the liberation from conventional ways of “being” in these spaces of authority and resulting in “the collapse of boundaries” (ibid., 15). It is cut through with questions of nostalgia, of looking back and loss; of the lost industry, the ghosts of the activity in the rooms, the piano that once played, the board meetings at which decisions were made that ultimately led to the collapse of the factory, the traces of the Managing Director and his staff, and beyond these rooms, the traces of the workers, everywhere. The dancers were dancing in a place that held a message of authority with connections to patriarchy, wealth, industry and economic power, reinterpreting the abandoned room through emotional expression. They are somehow dancing on the grave of past values and aspirations – not as a disrespectful act but as a transformative one in order to reimagine the space as somewhere with new potential, with a future, moving away from melancholy readings of this post-industrial ruin to become something that is, I believe, “freighted with possibility, even with utopian promise” (Dillon 2011, 18).

4

Keep on Burning: The Story of Northern Soul, Dir. Joe Boy, A2B Media, 2012. (Tim Brown, Northern Soul DJ/dealer/author). This England: Wigan Casino, Dir. Tony Palmer, Granada TV, first aired 1977. (“Dave”, Northern Soul record dealer and Wigan Casino regular. Wigan Casino, the most famous Northern Soul venue, closed in 1981). 5

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Figure 17.2 Chloë Brown, Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up) Installations in the Managing Director’s office, Spode, Stoke on Trent, 2013.

Figure 17.3 Chloë Brown, Dancing in the Boardroom (Turnin’ My Heartbeat Up) Pete and Sue Dancing, 2013.

References Brown, C. 2015. Dancing in the Boardroom, in Topographies of the Obsolete: Site Reflections. Stoke-on-Trent, Topographies of the Obsolete Publications. Constantine, E. and G. Sweeney. 2013. Northern Soul: An Illustrated History, London: Ebury Publishing. Dillon, B. 2011. Ruins. London: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press. Edensor, T. 2005. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, Oxford and New York: Berg. Keep on Burning: The Story of Northern Soul, 2012. Dir. Joe Boy, A2B Media. This England: Wigan Casino, 1977. Dir. Tony Palmer, Granada TV.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN MATERIAL MEMORY: FUMBLING IN THE DEBRIS JEREMY WELSH

And forgetting is the ruin of memory, its collapse, decay, shattering and eventual fading away into nothingness … memory is always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruin … A city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories (Solnitt 2011)

Part I

Figure 18.1 Jeremy Welsh, Tracings, 2013. Installation with video and 35 mm slide projection in the exhibition This Must Be The Place (Pick Me Up and Turn Me Round) at KINOKINO Centre for Art & Film, Sandnes, Norway. Image: Jeremy Welsh.

Sites of former productivity and the remains, remnants, debris and traces encountered therein have been a subject of my work for many years, a subject explored through photography, video and sound, often combined within installations. Material memories, material as memory, memories materialized, and especially traces – all of these notions intersect in my ongoing investigations of sites, sights, sounds and transitional zones. In 1988, while on an artist residency at Wolverhampton City Museum and Art Gallery, I discovered a closed-down, but perfectly preserved, workshop/factory above a hardware store in the city centre. This became the focus for my work at the museum, resulting in a short video, an installation and a performance exploring the theme of the post-industrial urban environment. A few years later, in Norway, I took part in a project in the former mining town of Røros, an ancient settlement in the mountains of mid-Norway, close to the Swedish border. The project involved artists and students

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from the Art Academy of Trondheim and took place in “Smelthytta” (the smelting works) that had been the centre of the town’s copper industry from the middle ages to the mid-twentieth century. Slide projections were used to evoke memories that may be submerged in the fabric of the building – slides were projected directly onto the old brick walls of the furnaces in an attempt to bring lost memories and hidden stories back to the surface and to trigger the responses of viewers whose personal connection to the place would be infinitely more complex and intimate. Since these early works I have periodically returned to similar sites and related themes, in recent years taking part in workshops for the research project “Topographies of the Obsolete” at the Spode works in Stoke-on-Trent, where material for the installation Tracings (2013) was recorded. Tracings consisted of large-scale projections based on imagery recorded in the mould stores at the Spode factory. I was interested in the way that a radical change of scale rendered these modest, neglected objects as architectural or monumental forms. I was also interested in the way these moulds are encapsulations, of skills that are in the process of being lost and forgotten, of an industrial heritage that is being preserved as an image of itself, and of the information needed to “resurrect” production processes that were halted with the closing of the factory. In particular I focussed upon markings and inscriptions, scratched into the surfaces of the plaster moulds: the names of the particular products that would be generated from these moulds, the names of the craftsmen who created them, and often the date on which the mould had been made. These were indeed material memories, traces of creation, history embodied and knowledge encoded. Fragments of texts, marks and markings, inscriptions, traces and tracings, decaying signs – all of these are combined in strands of connected imagery that point to, without disclosing, histories and memories that we may attempt to reconstruct through the process of creating artworks. The images were displayed as digital projections and as 35mm slides, the latter used consciously and strategically as signifiers of another disappearing technology, that of analogue photography. In a large, darkened space, visitors encountered slow-moving projections, the camera eye panning languidly across the stacks of dormant moulds, while a soundscape of low, abstract tones drifted through an array of loudspeakers arranged throughout the exhibition space. And the space itself – an art gallery housed in the building of a former cinema.

Figure 18.2 Jeremy Welsh, From the photo project Mazine, 2010. Image: Jeremy Welsh.

My practice often involves long periods of visual research – collecting imagery and material, exploring spaces, making connections between things encountered by chance, often quite literally “fumbling in the debris”. I am especially drawn to things that are overlooked, forgotten, discarded, deprived of function, context and meaning, and re-contextualized, often becoming, in the process, images possessed of a poetic charge. I have assembled an evergrowing collection of images (I hesitate to use the term “archive”) that document a passage through diverse landscapes in which these displaced and abandoned objects reside. The objects may be everyday, trite and trivial, testifying to our society’s easy and superficial relationship with the products of consumer industries, the built-in obsolescence that

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condemns material products to an afterlife of slow decay. I am also interested in these phenomena as an alternative history, or narrative, of technological progress. The VCR, settling into a new home in a bush or an abandoned building, is a reminder of how rapidly our needs and desires are re-engineered by a techno-culture that is driven by a constant and accelerating demand for renewal, replacement, innovation or novelty. These small appliances discovered and observed on urban explorations represent, at a micro level, a similar narrative to the grander stories expressed in the works of artists such as Jane and Louise Wilson, whose installations, for example Star City or A Free and Anonymous Monument examine the aftermath and decline of space exploration and modernist architecture. I remain interested in carrying out these investigations, often in a casual manner. Walking the dog, thinking while walking, being aware and open to possibilities, being observant – all of these are methods or parts of a method for coming into contact with phenomena that will become the raw materials for emerging projects, for material memories. In If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, his debut novel from 2002, Jon McGregor writes of a character who collects things … things he finds in the street, like till receipts and study notes and pages torn from magazines … and if he couldn’t take it home, he’d take a photo of it, he had albums full of stuff … he hated the way everything was ignored and lost and thrown away … he was an archaeologist of the present. (McGregor 2002)

Reading this book several years after its initial publication, I was struck by the precision with which the author observed and described certain behaviours, strategies, habits, obsessions with which I was very familiar from my own artistic practice and that of others with whom I share affinities.

Part II: A small collection of images

Figure 18.3 Photograph from Surnadal Billag, a former bus station now being converted to an art space in Surnadal, Norway. Image: Jeremy Welsh)

2a: 1993 A.M. Sande: the inscription is scratched into the concrete floor of the former mechanical workshop of a former bus station that has also been a temporary fire station, a storage facility, the headquarters of a red cross rescue service, a venue for impromptu concerts, and that will soon take on a new life as a space for art production and display. What did A.M. Sande do here in 1993, and why did he or she feel the need to leave an inscription in the surface of the concrete floor? There are several more similar inscriptions, following the edge of a raised section of the workshop floor. Elsewhere in the building, a diverse selection of abandoned things – dead computers, broken furniture, old account books, storage facilities for machine components, and most poignant, perhaps, the machinery from a 35 mm cinema projection room, probably fully functioning, but now superseded by digital technologies.

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Figure 18.4 Covent Garden, London. Image: Jeremy Welsh)

2b: “Pictorial Postcards and General Stationery”: a slowly fading sign on the facade of a building in Covent Garden, a building repurposed as residential accommodation and leisure enterprise. The era of the picture postcard is drawing to a close, Instagrammed to oblivion, displaced to the bins and boxes of the flea market. In the early days of the World Wide Web I made an online work composed of a scanned collection of hand-coloured postcards of California in the first years of the twentieth century. Combining these images with email messages and hyperlinks, a fictional narrative journey was constructed, involving artists from many parts of the world. The actual messages on the reverse side of the postcards were not made visible in the project, but remained in the background as buried memories.

Figure 18.5 An abandoned timber export facility at Utne, Hardanger, Norway. Images : Jeremy Welsh)

2c: A small wooden building on an abandoned quayside in Hardangerfjord, Norway. Inside is an office that had been used by timber exporters. There are papers and documents abandoned from when the business closed or relocated. I photographed the various rooms and objects, the surfaces of desks and tables, a computer half hidden beneath the raised platform of the building. I removed one item: a gridded notepad, marked with the days of the week, some kind of register for transactions in and out. I placed it in an IKEA ziplock bag. I have still not decided what to do with it. I had discovered this site while following a trail through the forest, a trail marked by red circles painted on tree trunks. Photographs of these red circles are part of another collection, where they form a parallel strand in a narrative of walking that connects sites and itineraries in Norway, Romania, Italy and Catalonia.

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Figure 18.6 Forest trail in Hardanger and abandoned appliances in the street, Bergen. Images: Jeremy Welsh)

2d/1: Three conjunctions, observed by me, arranged by persons unknown. Like Lautreamont’s umbrella and sewing machine laid on an operating table, these are poetic provocations, and at the same time, they are narratives of abandonment. The first: a CRT computer monitor balances on top of a small electric stove, standing on the pavement in front of a wall festooned with peeling posters. A cigarette packet rests on the severed cord of the cooker. The monitor’s display cable snakes around the front of its darkened screen. A temporary installation that will vanish without trace in hours or, at most, days. Am I the only one who documented this?

Figure 18.7 From an ongoing series of images documenting abandoned shopping carts. Image: Jeremy Welsh)

2d/2: A supermarket shopping trolley stands in shallow water, the metal bars of its basket reflected in the water surface, strands of seaweed woven into the spaces between the wire elements. The trolley and its reflection combine to establish the image of a provisional architecture. Following the harbour’s edge from the centre of the city to its industrial hinterland, I observe multiple instances of “drowned objects”. Most of these are shopping trolleys or bicycles. The history of the readymade through modernism tells us that an object that is decontextualized and deprived

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of its function often becomes a work of art. Are these submarine relocations evidence of a sub-aquatic art practice, conducted in secrecy, awaiting appraisal by an appreciative gaze?

Figure 18.8 Derelict office building, Bergen. Image: Jeremy Welsh)

2d/3: A two-tone leather shoe stands on top of a wooden office cabinet. Behind it is a brass object of unknown provenance, in the form of a tall, narrow cylinder with a serpentine spout and a handle comprised of two wooden cones joined together with a brass ring. It is unclear why these unrelated items have been placed together, isolated from and elevated above a floor whose surface is covered by a layer of disassociated materials, remnants and objects. Value has been added, and value has been taken away. Now, nothing remains of the site or its contents save this peculiar image, and the memories of those who visited the place before its demolition.

Part III This process, this practice. It is like history, like geography, like memory, material memory. An inscribing or an erasure, an accretion of traces and remnants, a layering of fragments, a conjunction of disparities, a scattering of instances, a vortex of indices, a predisposition or a probability, grounded in uncertainty. There are lines between points in motion on the surface of a fluid sketch, an outline or a map. There are fields and layers, overlappings and intersections, blurred edges and fuzzy boundaries, transitional states and waypoints, co-ordinates and fixed points. There are places, in space and time, places where there’s time to spare, time to think, time to record, recall, remember, revise, revisit, remake and remodel. There is a tracing of spaces and actions in places that are moments in time. Moving towards, passing through, each moment in time is a point in space. Investigating the remains – of spaceimages, of time-images, of ghost images. There are tracks and traces, marks to be read, signs to be followed. Investing in the vibrations, the echoes, the buried memories of sites layered with stories and suggestions. Drawing out the spirit of a place; materializing through action and image and object and intervention. The specifics of site and sight and sound and vision and thought and action as memory materialized, again and again. Shadow collecting, the accrual of spectral data, ghost images, faint echoes. Echoes of time, spectral time, imagined time, time recorded and time erased, projected into space, the space of the image, a space in which past and future merge in the screen of the present. Gathering fragments with which to build a space-in-time, an architecture of sound and image, of echoes and traces. Theatres of memory. Gaps and absences, incomplete taxonomies, missing letters, signs, documents, references, photographs fading to ghosts of themselves, data corruption and digital rot. Trond Lundemo in his essay “Archival Shadows” states: “This dark matter of the archival shadow could be understood in several ways. It could describe the lost documents of the archive, where some archivalia point to the absence of others” (Lundemo 2010). Another understanding of a shadow as missing information would exactly be the loss

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produced by the conversion of storage supports, from handwritten documents to typed accounts of the same phenomenon, from photographic film-based images to digital files. These “shadows” seem to function in similar ways to the abyss of information of the archive … The shadows remain in these cases as very physically and spatially defined elements” (Lundemo 2010). The cinema is an archive of shadows and our audio-visual practices are part of the same. Somewhere in a city is a room that has had many functions, a room whose identity is an assemblage of pasts, converging on a present, and in this present an event unfolds. A rectangle of white light is projected on a wall. Within this rectangle, images appear (shadows of objects) and texts are written (shadows of thought). Around this rectangle, or in close proximity to it, sounds are produced, aural images of distant locations, echoes of events that took place in another time, in another place. Geoff Dyer, writing in Zona, refers to cinema as “the filmic archeology of the everyday” (Dyer 2012). We who have been spending our time sifting through material memories recognize this archaeology, it has become internalized within us. It resides not only in images, but also in sounds, in objects, in words.

Figure 18.9 From the “Topographies of The Obsolete” workshop at The Spode Works, Stoke on Trent. Images: Jeremy Welsh)

Daniela Cascella writes in F.M.R.L.: “To write sound is perhaps to build up an archive of approximations to nothing. Or maybe these word-archives are only cataloguing themselves … Looping reading into listening into writing across discontinuous and spurious materials has filled my otherwise empty time, the time emptied of meaning …” (Cascella 2015). In this time emptied of meaning we chase shadows and echoes through places that might be here, there, anywhere, somewhere, everywhere, nowhere. We’re pursuing images in transit, migrating from surface to surface, listening to sounds mutating, from sound as source to echo as memory, vibration to registration to reconstruction. Re-cording / re-coding / re-writing. There is a black cardboard box on my desk. Written on the front of its lid in gold lettering is the title “Oblique Strategies”. The box contains a stack of cards, black on one side, white on the other. Each card carries a short phrase or sentence and many of these texts are instructions or suggestions. The box was published in 1975 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. It is intended as a sort of oracle that may be used at moments in a creative process when some kind of disruption is needed, to nudge the endeavour in a new direction, or to create a pause for thought. I have used this tool for forty years. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it does not. I needed something to conclude this text, so I drew a card from the stack. It said: Destroy * nothing * the most important thing (Eno and Schmidt 1975)

Nothing can not be destroyed, and neither can memories, material or otherwise. Layers of time, layers of traces, connections and dis-connections - a constant accumulation. I’m cursed to keep doing this, to keep on committing material to memory and memories to material.

References Cascella, D. 2015. F.M.R.L. London: Zero Books. Dyer, G. 2012. Zona. New York: Pantheon Books. Eno, B. and P. Schmidt. 1975. Oblique Strategies. London. Lundemo, T. 2010. “Archival Shadows.” In The Archive In Motion, edited by E. Røssaak. Oslo: Novus Press. McGregor, J. 2002. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. London: Bloomsbury. Smelthytta Museum, Røros, Norway: http://www.rorosmuseet.no/museet en Solnitt, R. 2011. “Storming the Gates of Paradise.” In Ruins, edited by Brian Dillon. London: Whitechapel Gallery.

CHAPTER NINETEEN SHADOW, LIGHT AND REFLECTIVITY: MATERIAL AND METAPHOR IN THE POST- INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE GWEN HEENEY

All materials in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow and the shadow belongs to light. (Khan, in Lobell 2008, 5)

This chapter will explore the post-industrial landscape as a site for creative practice with a focus on the use of shadow, light and reflectivity, both inherent in those sites and through the methods of construction, to create artworks which explore the ways the artist can communicate through using material and metaphor, their interpretation of collective memory and sense of place. Emily Eliza Scott states that since the 1960s and 70s, “art in wasteland spaces represents a distinct branch of aesthetic practice” (Scott 2008) and recent exhibitions such as Topographies of the Obsolete, Vociferous Void, shown in the derelict Spode factory at the British Ceramic Biennial, in Stoke-on-Trent in 2013 have further sought to define this as a genre of artistic practice. International artists in this exhibition directly responded to the derelict factory spaces, its decaying artefacts, and “landscape of absence” (Mydland and Brownsword 2013). Artist Toril Redalen sought to communicate a poetic understanding of dust, the “detritus of people and industry” (Ibid. 2013, 44) as a transitional material with a possibility of evolving into something other than its original post-industrial state. Through my own work on a number of post-industrial sites in both the UK and internationally, I have attempted to develop a contemporary visual language within the genre of brick sculpture specifically to express meaning through the response to and manipulation of shadow, light and reflectivity. This means that my work investigates shadow, light and reflectivity in both physical and metaphorical terms, exploring how they can be used to reflect the past industries and the loss of skills and the new creativity bestowed upon specific sites in the form of contemporary artworks. In 1992 I created the Mythical Beast, produced from 30,000 extruded, carved and hand-cut bricks for the Ebbw Vale Garden Festival in the desolate South Wales valley that had once been home to a major part of the South Wales Steel Industry. The construction of the artwork was designed to work with the natural light in the valley and heralded the beginning of a focus on artworks specifically created for the post-industrial landscape. In 2006 I began working at the 1 Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Montana, USA. Here I created Shadow Stack (fig. 19.3) and Fossil Pit in the Sculpture Yard which was the site of an historic brick factory and already contained some of the narrative of my work to date: my passionate association with the historical and social issues relating to the brick industry. My starting point was a series of photographs of light forcing its way through the derelict roof beams of the disused brick factory. As I dismantled the brick sculpture I created on site I began to see new sculptural possibilities in the way the light fell on the individual parts and the visual connection with my photographs Light Reflections (fig. 19.2). The outcome was an artwork which explored the movement of light across the Montana Valley and eventually led to my PhD in which the concept of shadow, light and reflectivity has become both physical and metaphorical. Recent international sites include: Sønderborg, Denmark on the shores of the Baltic, where over the past 250 years, hundreds of brick companies have flourished and then disappeared; the derelict buildings at the Lode brick factory in Latvia, once central to Soviet brick production in the communist era (figs 19.4 and 19.5); the now abandoned Spode ceramic factory, Stoke-on-Trent, UK, although here my focus shifted from bricks to the plaster moulds; the brickyard at the former brick factory, now the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Montana, USA, and the post postindustrial landscape of South Korea. My main focus has been on creating artworks using processes and technologies once inherent to the industries which inhabited these specific post-industrial sites, i.e. the cutting box and extruder which were central to production throughout the history of the brick industry. These traditional technologies can be combined with new technologies such as CAD and 3D modelling. They can then be challenged and advanced in order to construct new sculptural forms which in turn communicate meaning through the manipulation of shadow, light and reflectivity. The purpose of placing these sculptural forms into the landscapes that inspired their creation will be to access their potential to rejuvenate and inject new energy into those post-industrial sites by developing visual narratives of memory, past histories and loss of skills. These narratives are juxtaposed through the use of inventive new brick-making processes as metaphors for new creative futures.

1

See full article: G. Heeney. 2013. “Light Shadow, and Reflectivity.” Ceramic Review March/April: 60 66 (page 1).

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Figure 19.1 (left) Gwen Heeney, Shadow Stack, Photographic series 2011. Images: Gwen Heeney. Figure 19.2 (right) Gwen Heeney, Light Reflections, Original photographs in the Archie Bray Foundation 2007. Image: Gwen Heeney.

Figure 19.3 Gwen Heeney, Shadow Stack, Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts 2007 /2011. Images: Gwen Heeney.

The cultural geographer Tim Edensor states: “The urge to seek out the ghosts of places is bound up with the politics of remembering the past and, more specifically, with the spatialisation of memory and how memory is sought, articulated, and inscribed upon space” (Edensor 2005). He refers to the ghosts of the post-industrial site as “fluid, evanescent entities” which disturb “the reifications through which performances, narratives, and experiences of memory become fixed in space” (Ibid., 829). Developing a visual symbolism within brick sculpture to communicate what Edensor describes as the often intangible essence of memories and ghosts experienced in certain post-industrial sites is an important aspect of my research. Merleau Ponty states: It is our bodily intentionality which brings the possibility of meaning into our experience by ensuring that its content, the things presented in experience, are surrounded with references to the past and future, to other places and other things, to human possibilities and situations. (Ponty 2004, 9)

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Figure 19.4 (left) Gwen Heeney, Light Stack, Latvia 2013. Image: Gwen Heeney. Figure 19.5 (right) Discarded bricks, Lode brick factory, Latvia. Image: Gwen Heeney.

This intentionality is important to the development of the artwork. The way I work requires me to be present in that post-industrial environment to experience the site emotionally as well as physically. At the Archie Bray Foundation I had to experience the interior of the derelict brick factory as the light revealed the historic interior. This then led me to research its history and enabled me to embed within the artwork references to the past and future. I returned four years after constructing Shadow Stack to document the light in the landscape as it reacted with the reflective soda fired glaze on the bricks of the sculpture over a 14-day period (fig. 19.1). Shadow Stack reflected the past in its references to the derelict brick factory interior and the future with its reaction to light in the landscape. Using my response to elements of the post-industrial landscape that are both emotional and physical I am attempting to develop, through brick sculpture, three-dimensional forms which reflect histories and memories relevant to the specific sites. I am attempting to achieve this in physical and metaphorical terms using on the one hand, the symbolic references developed from my manipulation of ethereal elements – shadow, light and reflectivity within brick sculpture – and on the other hand, my experimentation with the physical manipulation of brick through cutting boxes and extruded forms. The use of traditional technologies – the cutting box and extruder – pays homage to past skills and innovation, but my research and experimentation into further developing these processes through new technologies offers the possibility for renewal of our understanding and appreciation of the sites through the introduction of the art. Placing art within this context I hope will enable a re-examination of the sites through an intellectual and aesthetic understanding. The American architect Sam Ridgway describes in his paper “The Lume Materiale”, published in 1988, how the Venetian architect Frascari uses light in his building, “literally trapping light and making it a ‘material of construction’.” He describes how details and elements “are defined by a piercing light, which engraves their lines and sublimates them to a symbol of repose, certitude and solemnity”. Frascari uses light as a physical material, “lume materiale”, to translate his architectural language using cut stone “pillaged from abandoned sites” around Venice. He describes the stone as “transformed by technical operations proper to stonework”, which enables the light to play on the built structures. For Frascari, “lume materiale” is “a rich substance producing tangible built poetry out of elemental knowledge”. Frascari’s aim is “to emphasise the important architectural objective of embodying the intangible in the tangible” (Ridgway 2005). It is this juxtaposition of the physical use of tools – e.g. the use of the cutting box and extruder – together with the use of ethereal tools – shadow, light and reflectivity – which is central to my practice. Edensor quoting Bruno states that “In the ruin layers of cultural memory and folds of affect are tangibly inscribed in space” (Edensor 2005). Frascari and Edensor describe “memory” and “light” as tools of construction to “inscribe” and “engrave”. This sense of “light” and “memory” as intangible tools with the ability to manipulate space is an important aspect of developing artworks 2 which in the method of construction and siting communicate a “sense of place” and “collective memory”. Frascari’s manipulation of shadow and light through his cutting of stone for his buildings resonates with my own development of the cutting boxes for brick. I will discuss this further on in this chapter. Caitlin DeSilvey, writing about the ruin, states that: 2 The collective memory was defined by Maurice Halbwachs in his book La Mémoire Collective (The Collective Memory) 1980. He put forward the theory that society can have a collective memory which is dependent upon where the group sees itself within the structure of society.

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Chapter Nineteen The disarticulation of the object may lead to the articulation of other histories, and other geographies. An approach that understands the artefact as a process, rather than a stable entity with a durable physical form, is perhaps able to address some of the more ambiguous aspects of material presence (and disappearance). (DeSilvey 2006, 324)

Using the post-industrial site as an inspiration for the interpretation of histories of past industries and methodologies has been one of the focuses of the work made at the Petersens Brick factory and sited on the shores of the Baltic, Sønderborg, Denmark. Here, 150 brick factories were once in production. For inspiration I explored reflections of the sun on the water as it washed over thousands of brick fragments shaped and disintegrated by the Baltic waters over hundreds of years, remnants of the brick production; discarded, “disarticulated” industrial waste (fig. 19.6). The site holds layers of physical memory and is rich in its association with the history of the industry. In the words of Iris Brook, places tell stories “Narrative: A place that tells a story, where the layers of past history are evident, and preferably not consciously preserved, is one that expresses a spirit of place.” (Brook 2008, 216)

Figures 19.6 19.11 Gwen Heeney, Development of cutting box from reflections in water on the brick fragments taken into the computer using SketchUp. Images: Gwen Heeney.

Using the light reflections through water on the brick fragments I investigated new ways of using the physical properties of shadow, light and reflectivity within brick sculpture to develop metaphor – narratives of collective memory and spirit of place. To achieve this, I developed a series of hand-cut bricks which were created in wooden cutting boxes based on those originally used on the site. I designed the profiles for the boxes on the computer using photographs of the light reflections on the bricks in the water (figs 19.7–19.11). The boxes were then laser cut and assembled. Unfired clay bricks were then taken from the production line at the Petersens factory and placed into the boxes. They were then cut with different steel cutting wires which moved against the wooden profiles to achieve individual surfaces which echoed the reflections on the water (figs 19.7–19.11) Modelling on the computer and then developing these designs into the physical wooden cutting boxes enabled me to move between the machine and the hand to develop a series of hand-cut bricks which, when fired and assembled with specific positioning within the structure of the artwork, would, like Frascari’s stones, utilize the natural light in the landscape . These hand-cut bricks referenced traditional methodologies. However, initially developed on the computer and cut from complex laser-cut boxes, they became new contemporary units which when fired and assembled in the artwork Reflections (figs 19.12 and 19.13) could be translated as a metaphor for the post-industrial landscape, for past and future. This was achieved in two ways: the use of traditional methodologies echoed the past making and production on that site over hundreds of years and the use of new technologies and the siting of the artwork to enable the manipulation of shadow, light and reflectivity within the landscape today could be seen as a signifier for the future. Conceptually the raw physicality of these brick fragments reflecting light through the water and contributing to the beauty of the beach shrouded in the soft hazy light of the Baltic provided inspiration for the new artwork. They conjured up the ghosts and memories referred to by Edensor and the disarticulation of the object referred to by De Silvey. The disarticulation of these artefacts – the brick fragments – also obscures the narrative of hard manual labour and industrialization that lies behind the final destiny of this Baltic shore as a place of beauty shining in the sunlight. It reflects the history of manual work over two centuries, as the whole of this Baltic shore produced bricks to export all over the world. This sense of toil and beauty is reflected in the process of disintegration, of continual washing away evident in the brick fragments. My sculptures pick up on this contrast of disintegration and beauty through the cutting methods applied to the bricks and the final construction and layering of the artwork to react with shadow light and reflectivity in this landscape. Caitlin DeSilvey states that the “procreative power of decay sparks simultaneous – and contradictory – sensations of repugnance and attraction” (DeSilvey 2006). This juxtaposition of positive and negative has resonance with the articulation of shadow and light within my own sculptural forms where I am attempting to communicate on the one

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hand disintegration and decay, and on the other hand beauty and conformity. A more literal reading could focus on the loss of skills and shattered hopes contrasting with the potential for the power of creativity in shaping the future. However, the positive and negative themes are various, multi-layered and often contradictory and it is my intention to leave something for the audience to bring to the work themselves.

Figures 19.12 and 19.13 Gwen Heeney, Development of sculpture Reflections, Sønderborg, Denmark. Images: Gwen Heeney.

Emile Koefoed discussing the ruin argues, “Its material remnants therefore conjure up visions of hope, promises and progress, but the state that many industrial structures have been left in by de-industrialisation seems to reflect the shattered hopes from this past era” (Koefoed 2011). My own visual language was further extended with my site-specific installation of abandoned plaster moulds Light Entombed (fig. 19.14) in the derelict Spode Factory in the Topographies of the Obsolete, Vociferous Void exhibition at the British Ceramics Biennial in 2013. Although these were not brick, the work extended my conceptual language of shadow, light and reflectivity.3 Here I meticulously selected the square plaster two-part moulds used for the slipcasting process, originally designed to create objects for Spode’s bone china collection. These forms lay piled up on shelves in the now dilapidated Spode factory covered in pigeon faeces, as parts of the roof had fallen in. Once they had produced teapots, jugs, soup tureens and bowls and these moulds were part of the intellectual, creative property of a once thriving international company. Through a site-specific installation using shadow, light and reflectivity I aimed to articulate issues of collective memory, history of “place” and mapping of a past site of invention and creativity. The term “site-specific installation” was important here as the installation was made for a specific location in the site, being created from, and referencing, artefacts inherent to the site. The Tate’s definition of “site-specific” is artwork “designed for a specific location, if removed from that location it loses all or a substantial part of its meaning”. I feel that Light Entombed would certainly lose part of its meaning if removed from its location at the Spode factory. Like the shell of the empty Spode factory building, each mould could be seen as representing the shell of a productive creative past. The moulds were laid out in grids on the floor of one of the factory buildings which was also one of the many mould stores. Light at different times of the day played upon the moulds to expose shadows which revealed the anthropology of the forms within, suggesting both the past site of invention and the loss of the original skills referenced by the moulds. Shadow and light physically and metaphorically described the past “shadow” of the company; the loss of creative skills, invention and worldwide success. In the Topographies of the Obsolete, Vociferous Void catalogue, Mydland and Brownsword talk about the positive and negative aspects of the moulds. The original Spode Works itself has become like one of its moulds, a vociferous void. The moulds ‘negative’ form is evocatively pointing to its ‘positive’ potential and leaves us in a parallel world where we need to engage, either with our imagination, translating the ‘negative’ into our own ‘positive’ reality, or the tools we create to translate our visions into being.” (Mydland and Brownsword 2013, 2)

Tim Edensor describes the ruin as full of incomprehensible objects, unfinished things, residual objects, and weird assemblages which make no obvious sense, and which are likely to make less sense as they decay and merge with other formerly discrete material entities. (Edensor 2005, 844)

It is a desire to “make sense” of the site, its narratives and histories that informs my work and my interest in the post-industrial landscape as site for creative practice. Edensor goes on to describe the ruin: “Fortuitous combinations 3

See essays in Topographies of the Obsolete Vociferous Void and Topographies of the Obsolete Site Reflection, http://topographies.khib.no/publications/ http://topographies.khib.no/projects/light entombed/ https://issuu.com/khib/docs/vociferous void https://issuu.com/khib/docs/site reflections

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Heeney. G. 2013. “Light Shadow, and Reflectivity.” Ceramic Review March/April: 60-61. Koefoed, E. 2011. “Battersea Power Station – a disturbing post-industrial landscape.” Doctoral Thesis. http://www.spectacle.co.uk/uploads/other%20media/BPSthesis.pdf. Lobell, J. 2008. Between Silence and Light. Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I Kahn. Boston & London: Shambala. Mydland, A.H. and Brownsword, N. 2013. Topographies of the Obsolete, Vociferous Void. Topographies of the Obsolete Publications. Ponty, M. 2004. The World of Perception, T. Baldwin (intro). Routledge Classics. Ridgway, R.S. 2005. “The Imagination of Construction.” Architectural Research Quarterly 9(3–4): 188–96. Scott, E.E. 2008. “Wasteland Aesthetics: Art and the Post-industrial Landscape 1962–72.” Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/research/pdfs/scott.pdf

CONTRIBUTORS

Dr Michele Allen is an artist and researcher based in Newcastle upon Tyne, working with photography, sound and video. She recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD by photographic practice from the University of Sunderland in association with Locus+. Her work often involves collaboration with specific communities to explore issues related to landscape, environment and sense of place. See www.michele-allen.co.uk for previous projects (2004–10) and her academia.edu page and Wordpress blog for current projects and research. Danny Bright is a sound designer, composer, recordist, musician and sonic manipulator working across the fields of music, performance, installation, theatre and media. His work has appeared at the Brighton Digital Festival, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, MAGNA Science Adventure Centre, World Soundscape Conference, Victoria & Albert Museum, Prague Quadrennial, British Science Festival, Manchester, Newcastle & Brighton Science Festivals, and toured the UK, Europe, Australia and the USA. Commissions and supporting organisations include: Arts Council England, Octopus Collective, MAGNA Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council as funder of his ongoing doctoral research in Music at the University of Sussex. See www.bogstandardaudio.co.uk for further details. Chloë Brown is an artist and Course Leader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Using a range of media including film, sculpture, taxidermy, book works and drawing, Brown explores various strands of research. She is interested in the representation of animals in society and culturally. She also interrogates ideas of “The (extreme) North”, in particular in relation to the mythical place called Hyperborea and is developing work that questions the notion of the industrial ruin, architecture and extinction. She has exhibited widely in Europe and in the UK. Dr Neil Brownsword is a Reader at Buckinghamshire New University and Professor in Clay and Ceramics at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway. His PhD thesis (completed in 2006) combined historical and archaeological research on ceramic production in North Staffordshire from the eighteenth century to the present; the film archiving of craft skills in the industry today; and the creation of a body of artwork in response to this research. In 2009 he won the One Off category at the British Ceramic Biennial, and continues to exhibit both nationally and internationally. Andrew Burton is Professor of Fine Art at Newcastle University. His research explores relationships between form, material and place. He has worked extensively in Asia, including projects in China, Korea and in India where his collaborations with bamboo breakers and dung workers formed the basis for exhibitions at the British Council and National Crafts Museum. Rowland Byass is a landscape architect based in London. After studying an English degree and working briefly as a journalist and copywriter, he became a gardener and landscaper. In 2008 he completed a Masters in Landscape Architecture at the University of Sheffield, and wrote a dissertation on the regeneration of central Manchester’s key public space, Piccadilly Gardens, and the issues around urban regeneration and public space that it raised. He is particularly interested in planting design and management, landscape history and landscape aesthetics. Dr Tim Edensor teaches cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002) and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, as well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm (2010) and co-editor of Spaces of Vernacular Creativity (2009). He is editor of Tourist Studies. Tim has written extensively on national identity, tourism, industrial ruins, walking, driving, football cultures and urban materiality and is currently investigating landscapes of illumination and darkness Gwen Heeney MA, RCA, is a public artist, author and senior lecturer in Ceramics and Glass at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. She is an elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) and is a founder member of the World Association of Brick Artists (WABA). She works and exhibits worldwide with public artworks which focus mainly on brick in China, Korea, USA, Denmark, Latvia. The post-industrial site is a central concern in her present PhD research at the University of Newcastle which explores shadow, light and reflectivity as a material and metaphor. She is a member of the research group Topographies of the Obsolete. Her publications include: Brickworks (2003), Shaping Earth, edited by Gwen Heeney and Dennis Farrell (2000). She gained an MA in Ceramics from the Royal College of Art, London in 1989. She was Research Fellow in Architectural Ceramics at the Centre for Ceramic Research, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Wales (1989–91). In 2009 in collaboration with Vicky Shaw she won the Built Environment Award at the British Ceramics Biennial. For further information see www.gwenheeneybricksculptor.com.

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Contributors

Dr David Jones is a maker, educator and writer. He is a Member of the International Academy of Ceramics and Crafts Potter Association of England. He is a senior lecturer in Applied Arts, specialising in ceramics at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. His research involves the examination of his practice as a second generation Holocaust survivor and has led to the evolution of the concept of Embodied Narrative as a critical tool. He is the author of two books: Firing – Philosophies Within Contemporary Ceramic Practice (2007), and Raku, Investigations into Fire (1999). Professor John Kippin is an artist and photographer who works within the broad context of landscape. His work pays allegiance to the traditions of pictorial landscape whilst reflecting upon issues within contemporary culture, politics and representation. His exhibition with Chris Wainwright, Futureland Now, was shown at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne 2012/13. He has exhibited at many venues including the Imperial War Museum and the Photographer’s Gallery in London. Public commissions include Cold War Pastoral from Greenham Common, Berkshire and a number of public billboards both in Germany and the North of England. Publications include Futureland Now (ed. Liz Wells); Local with Dr Henry Kippin, and He with Professor David Chandler. He was chair of the Association of Photography in Higher Education from 2008–2011 and he has been associated with Locus+ for many years. He has an MA and a PhD from the University of Northumbria. He was Professor in Photography at the University of Sunderland from 1999–2014. Dr Andrew Livingstone is Reader in Ceramics at the University of Sunderland where he leads both MA Ceramics and CARCuos the Ceramic Arts Research Centre. His exhibitions include The Smithsonian Institute and the Garth Clark Gallery, New York. His work is held in many collections internationally, including Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan and the Garth Clark Mark Del Vecchio Permanent Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Andrew has authored three books, published several articles and has delivered many conference papers internationally. He is currently co-authoring a Ceramics Reader for Bloomsbury Academic Press. He is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics and a member of the editorial team for the online journal Interpreting Ceramics. For further information see www.andrewlivingstone.com. Michael Mazière is an artist and curator, currently Reader in Film and Video at the Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster, London. His practice encompasses the production of artworks, the curation of exhibitions, lecturing and writing about artists’ film and video. Mazière shows his films and videos internationally, in venues including the Tate, London and MOMA, New York and film festivals in Sao Paulo, Oberhausen, Basle, Berlin and Rotterdam. He has curated artists’ film and video at the Lux Centre, Whitechapel, Serpentine, ICA, NFT and internationally. He is co-founder and curator of Ambika P3; recent and upcoming exhibitions include Anthony McCall (2011), David Hall (2012), Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (2013), Victor Burgin (2013), Elizabeth Ogilvie (2014), Chantal Akerman (2015) and Shezad Dawood (2016). Nigel Morgan is an artist working predominantly in sculpture. The landscape of North Wales, where he was born, was a formative influence upon his working process and research concerns. After studying sculpture at Sunderland University he has remained in the area. He has exhibited in solo shows, group shows, and has worked on commissions. He has been a VARC artist in residence and has an MFA from Newcastle University, receiving AHRC scholarship funding in 2013, and a Bartlett Travel Award in 2015. Landscape processes continue to be at the heart of his practice. Anne Helen Mydland is Professor in Clay and Ceramics, Artistic Research Leader, Department of Art, Bergen Academy of Art and Design. She holds an MA degree from Bergen Academy of Arts and Design (2000), and has since worked as both artist, curator and teacher. She is co-leader of the Topographies of the Obsolete research project and co-founder of the artist and curator group TEMP. She works with installation, sculpture, (ceramic) print and sitespecific projects, specializing in the use of ready-mades and object culture. She has also worked collaboratively with industry, e.g. Bratsberg Teglverk (brick factory) and Porsgrunn Porcelain Factory. Mydland’s artistic research is in questioning the object’s role, status and value. In methodically juxtaposing objects of private and public history, different hierarchies of value and class become evident. For more information see http://www.khib.no/norsk/omkhib/ansatte/faglig-ansatte-ved-avdeling-for-kunst/anne-helen-mydland/ Dr Venda Louise Pollock is Senior Lecturer in Art History in Fine Art at Newcastle University. Her research centres on the relationship between art (particularly public art and amateur photography), communities and place-making, with a growing interest in narrative, memory, local mythologies and ideas of “northernness”. She gained her PhD from the University of St Andrews for a thesis entitled “Negotiating the Urban Terrain: Representations of the City of Glasgow in the Visual Arts” and worked as a Research Fellow in Urban Cultural Regeneration within the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at Glasgow University before coming to Newcastle in 2006. Megan Randall is a contemporary ceramic artist, and is currently completing a practice based PhD at the University of Sunderland. Her research centres on site-specific installations which make use of disused and discarded spaces. Threads of her research include documentation, urban exploration, non-place and multiplicity of site.

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Dr Ian Thompson is Reader in Landscape Architecture in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, and recently gained an MA in Photography at the University Sunderland. As a landscape architect working for Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council he was involved in the reclamation of land that was deemed “derelict”. His photographic research project questions ideas of reclamation, erasure, loss, memory and recovery. Jeremy Welsh is Professor of Fine Art/Time Based Media at NTNU, Faculty of Architecture & Fine Art, Trondheim, Norway. He was formerly Professor and Dean of Fine Art at Bergen Academy of Art & Design. Welsh works with video, photography and installation, often within collaborative projects. He has exhibited widely internationally since the late 1970s, is represented in several national collections, and has realized a number of public commissions. Jane and Louise Wilson (twin sisters) have been working collaboratively in photography, film, video and installation since their respective degree shows in 1989. In 1999, they were shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Both have an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College. Jane is Professor of Fine Art and Louise is visiting Professor of Fine Art at Wolverhampton University and both are Doctors in Civil Law from Northumbria University. Major exhibitions have included Ruin Lust, Tate Britain (2014), Undead Sun, Imperial War Museum, London, 2014, and Conflict, Time, Photography in 2014. International group shows include the Carnegie International (1999), Korean Biennial (2000), Istanbul Biennial (2001), Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2003), Remind at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2003), and Out of Time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), and the Sharjah Biennial (2011).

INDEX

abandonment 67, 70, 84, 125, 146, 153 acoustic order 17 Adams, Ansel 31, 39 aesthetics aesthetic control 18 aesthetic strategies 38 aesthetic structures 41 ethically informed aesthetic 75 master planned aesthetics 17 positive aesthetic 99 unpredictable aesthetics 18 After Art School 57 Airspace Gallery xviii, 101, 101n1, 102, 103, 104 Amber Collective 32 Ambika P3 xvii, 53 61 Angel of the North 3, 33 Anhalter Bahnhof 95 Annan, Thomas 2, 2n1, 12 Annesley 129, 130, 132 3 Anthropocene 98, 123, 126 7, 137 anthropomorphism 4 archaeology amateur archaeological dig 103 archaeological metaphor 64 archaeological photographers 32 archaeological vestiges 20 archaeologist’s point of view xv archaeology and memory xv, 155 Artist/Archaeologist xiii, xv, 136 See also ruins Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (Montana, USA) 157 architecture Architecture of doom 64 architecture of forensics and camouflage 89 architecture made on video 60 architecture of sound signs 154 Brutalist architecture 83, 84 iconic architecture 3 internal architecture 85 landscape architecture 29 modernist architecture 151 provisional architecture 153 Arendt, Hannah 76, 80 aromatopia 17 Art Academy (Trondheim) 150 Artangel 58, 58n6 Artworks Masterplan, The 8 Artworks Programme 6, 7, 8, 13 Atlantic Wall xvi, 83n1, 83 4 Atomgrad, Nature Abhors A Vacuum VI 88 Baker, Matt 1, 2, 6 10, 14 Ballard, J.G. 83, 84 Balmond, Cecil 3 Barcelona model 3. See urbanism Barlach, Ernst 14 Bate, David 57 Becher, Bernd and Hilla 32, 136 Bell Scott, William 37 Benjamin, Walter 4, 41, 141 Benthall, Michael 13 Berghain 95, 96, 97

Berlin xviii, 5, 9, 93 100 Berlin Species Protection Programme 98 Berlin Wall 94, 95 See also urban landscape Beuys, Josef 76 Billy Elliot 27 Birmingham 3, 111 Bithooras 101, 104 9. See also necropolis Bithooras par haath pa Chaap 104, 108, 109 Biville, Sealander 83 blandscapes xvii, 17 Blind Landing 83 91 Bliss, Arthur 13 Blists Hill (Shropshire) xv Boardroom xix, 145, 146, 147 Bochner, Mel 85 bomb craters 32 bone china 136, 138, 141, 142 , 161. See also ceramics and Spode ceramic factory bottle kilns 101 Bradwell Wood 113 Breath 59 Breath III 59 brick xiii, xiv, xv, 18, 20, 31, 63, 64, 70, 72, 103, 111, 113n7, 123, 131, 150, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162 brick/clay 63, 64, 66 brick sculpture 157, 158, 159, 160 hand cut bricks 157, 160 red brick 103 British Ceramics Biennial xiii, 111, 135, 147, 161, 162 brownfield xviii, 98, 101, 102, 103 Brownfield or Buddleia Vale? 101, 102, 103, 104 Buber, Martin 79 Buchenwald xviii, 75, 76, 80 bunkers 84, 89 Burgin, Victor 60 1 Burr 116 Burtynsky, Edward 32 CAD modelling 157, 162 Cage mining memorial, Easington, Co Durham 35 Campany, David 61 capitalism global capitalism 40 late capitalism 61 modern industrial capitalism 75 ultra capitalism 42 Carrick, John 2 Celan, Paul 79 Celtic Tiger 63 ceramics xviii, xix, 17, 67, 70, 72, 75, 76, 77, 80, 103, 108, 111, 119, 135 7, 141, 144, 146, 147, 157 ceramic installation xvii Globalized Landscape of Ceramics xiii, 136 industrialization of ceramics 135 non ceramic environment 72 See also Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (Montana, USA), British Ceramics Biennial, Römhild International Ceramics Symposium and Spode ceramic factory chalk industry xvii , 49, 50 Chalk Pit 48, 49, 50

170 chambers of curiosity. See Wunderkammer Chapter 2: Holding on by letting go 138, 140 Chatterly Quarry 113 Chernobyl 85 8 Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks 87 Chinese porcelain 111, 136 Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, A 85, 87, 91 City Fathers 7 City Improvement Trust 2 class systems 145 clay xviii, xix, 63, 64, 66, 67 73, 77, 78, 79, 80, 93, 103, 111, 111n2, 113, 114, 119, 121, 127, 136 7, 144, 160 brick/clay 63, 64, 66, 113n7, 123 cast liquid clay 111 clay deposits xviii haematitic clays 112 memory imbedded in clay 144 red clay 111 Clay Words, Marking Place with Meaning 119, 120 Cold War 76, 88 Cold War Pastoral 32 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 29 Coley, Nathan 4 collage of time xix, 22 Colliery Guardian 27, 28, 32 3 concentration camps 76, 77, 95. See also death camps Concrete in the Oceans 55 Concrete Testing 53 Constable, John xvi, 39 Copeland family 141 copper industry 150 Creating the Yellow Brick Road xv creative city 3 creative class 3 Crown Street Regeneration Project (CSRP) 6 curator xiii, xvii, xix, 53, 55, 57 61, 108, 136 Currie, Ken 13 Curtis, Layla 4 CZWG Architects 6 Dancing in the Boardroom (Turning my Heartbeat up) xix, 145, 145n1, 147, 148 dark tourism 86 Davies, John 32 DDR 95, 98 Dear Green Place 12 death camps xviii, xix. See also concentration camps decay xvi, 3, 17, 18, 45, 72, 88, 95, 98, 124, 125, 126, 142, 144, 145, 149, 160, 161 abandonment and decay 70, 146 architectural decay xx arrested decay 17 decadent decay 141 material decay 22 process of decay 30, 127, 142 slow decay 151 spaces decay 72 urban decay xvii Dee, Catherine 99 Degree Shows 57 Delhi 104, 105, 106, 108, 109 derelict contrived dereliction xv dangerous dereliction 33 derelict brick factory 159, 161 derelict buildings xiii, 84, 154 derelict factories xvi, 17, 29, 67, 101, 157 derelict land 27, 29 derelict mines 29 derelict spaces xix, 17, 20, 22, 67

Index exploration of derelict sites 70 extreme dereliction 136 floral totems of dereliction 103 Derrida, Jacques xix, 46 Devastation xvi diasporic communities xvii, 3 digital animation 60 Dirty Old Town 12 documentary 38, 39, 87. See also photography Drain 130 Dubowitz, Dan 1, 2, 7, 9n4 Duman, Alberto xv dung 104, 104n6, 105, 106, 107, 108 Dunstan coal Staithes 37 Dust, Place and Skill 142 dystopia 83, 84 Ealing Film Studios archives 84 Early Detroit Techno music xvi East Berlin. See Berlin East Shore Village, Seaham, formerly Vane Tempest colliery 31 Ebbw Vale xiii, xiv, xix, 157 ecology xviii, 28, 29, 42, 95, 97 9. See also urbanism Edensor, Tim 29, 30, 33, 34, 47, 147, 158, 159, 160, 161 2 Edgelands (essay) 29 edgelands 21, 29, 30, 67, 69, 70 Edge Water 129 Edgework (sociological study) 69 edgework 69 Edina Digimap 33 Eighton Banks 33 Elers brothers 113 ELIOG xviii, 75 empathy 138 End Piece… 59 60 Engelfriet, Alexandra 113, 117 Entropy 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 89 Entropy window 71 Essence 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 Etruria Marl 111, 111n2, 114, 115 Face 115 Faces 13 Factory 67 Fenwick Pit 30 fetishism 5 Fidelma 10 Fine Bone China 136, 138, 141, 142, 161. See also ceramics First World War 83n2 Fort George 38 Fossil Pit 157 Frascari, Marco 159, 160 Free and Anonymous Monument, A 151 Friedrich der Grosse Mine 32 From Floor to Sky 57, 58 Fuck the Police 67, 69, 70, 72 Furnace to Flowers xiii Futureland 32, 37 42 Futureland Now xvii, 32, 40, 41 Garden Festival (Glasgow) 3 Garden Festival Wales xiii, xiv, xix, 157 Gatekeeper 6, 7, 14 Gateshead 3, 29, 30, 167 genius loci 72 German Democratic Republic xvi, 76, 95. See DDR Germany xiii, xvi, xviii, xix, 32, 33, 75, 76, 79, 83, 83nn1,2, 93, 97, 98, 135, 136 ghost 13, 21, 34, 83, 138, 147, 160, 162

The Post Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice: Material Memory forgotten ghosts xx ghost estates 63, 66 ghost images 154 ghosts of places 158 See also sonic ghosting Gilpin, William 29 Glasgow 1, 2, 6, 8, 12, 13 European City of Culture 3 global financial crisis 63 globalization xiii, 3, 4, 12, 40, 42, 57, 58, 63, 64, 95, 113, 136 gobar 104n6, 106, 107, 108 gobar egg 106 Gobar mound 105 Goebbels, Heiner 53, 58 Golden Torch, The 146 Gorbals xvii, xix, 1 14 Gorbals Arts Project (GAP) 6, 12 Gorbals Boys 12 Gorbals Cross 2 Gorbals Faces 13 Gorbals with Southern Necropolis Beyond 13 Gormley, Anthony 3, 33 Gough, Piers 6 graffiti 1, 17, 31, 33, 47, 67, 69, 70, 94, 96, 130 Gray, Alasdair 12 Gray, Thomas 29 Great Northern Coalfield xvii, xx, 27 35 green archipelago 95 Grenzerfahrung xviii, xix, 75, 76, 78, 79 Grierson, John 38 Grow Wild xiii Halbwachs, Maurice 5, 12, 159n2 Hall, David 59 60 Hall, Lee 27, 29 hand made objects 76, 79, 80 Happiest Man, The 59 Hardangerfjord (Norway) 152 Harling, Matt 48 Hartlepool 67 Hauntology xix Haussmann, Georges Eugène 2 Hazleford Cliff 131 H Bomb Test Facility 88 Heisenberg xvii, 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 14 Helpmann, Robert 13 Henaughen, Gerry 6 hepatoscopy 6 heritage collective cultural heritage 11 heritage districts 17 heritage landscapes 4 heritage production xvi heritage sites xv, xx, 5, 21 industrial heritage xiii, 33, 70, 136, 150 mining heritage xvii post industrial heritage xviii rhizome heritage 5 See also Photography Heworth Colliery 30 Hidden 39 hierarchy 144, 145 High Heels 12, 13 Hive 132 Holding on, by letting go: 135 44 Holocaust xix, xx, 75, 76, 77, 80 Holocene 126 Home Ornaments xvii, 10, 12 homo faber 76

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human agency 32 human made city 95 Hunter, Kenny 11, 12 Hutchesontown C area 2 Ibstock Brick’s Gorsty Quarry (Knutton, Newcastle Under Lyme) 114 15 identity accessible identities 4 civic identity 3 crisis of identity, 146 distinct identity 125 narrative identity 14 new political identities 11 If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things 151 imagery 121, 144, 150 collecting imagery xix, 150 large scale imagery 39 symbolic imagery 162 Information 60 Interruptions in Time: A celebration of 10 Years of the MA Photographic Studies course 57 Intervention 85 Ireland xix, 63, 64, 66 I Thou 79 Jencks, Charles 3 Jewels of the Sea 31 Judaism 79 Kabakov, Ilya and Emilia 58, 59 Kapoor, Anish 3 Kardia, Peter 57n4, 57 8 KELLY/MARHAUG 138, 140 KievNaukFilm 88 Kindertransport 79 KINOKINO Centre for Art & Film (Sandnes, Norway) 149 Kippin, John 32 kitsch 11 kitsch geographies 4, 13 Kodak xvi Kollectivplan 97 Krasinski, Edward 85 Kubrick archive 84, 85 Kubrick, Stanley xviii, 84 Kvasbø, Torbjørn 113, 118 Lab 1 and Lab 4 88 lagoons system 129, 130 2 Landscape landscape of absence 157 landscape aesthetic xvii landscape of colliery lagoons xviii landscape designers xiii, xvii, xviii, xix, 27, 29, 31, 34 landscape photography 31 militarized landscapes 32 monumental landscapes 4 philosophy of landscape design 99 physical landscape 4, 7 pictorial landscape xvii, xx, 32 positioning of landscape 37 processes of landscape xviii, 123, 125 rural landscapes 97, 98 wilderness landscapes 98 Landschaftpark Duisburg Nord xvi Latz, Peter xvi Leen (river) 132 lieux 4 Lieux de Mémoire 4, 5 Light Entombed 161, 162

172 Light Reflections 157, 158, 160 Liverpool Biennial 136 Locked Room Course 57 Lode brick factory (Latvia) 157, 159 London 40, 53, 54, 55, 57, 61, 84, 93, 95, 111 London College of Communication (LCC) 84 Luxborough Lodge 54 Madeley brick factory xv Magee, Johnny xviii, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 MAGNA Science Adventure Centre 45, 46, 47, 48, 50 Mainsforth Colliery (Ferryhill) 30, 31 Making Bithooras 104, 105, 106, 108, 109 Manchester 3, 4, 30, 91, 111 man made disasters xviii, xx Manual 6 Marl Hole xviii, 111 21 Marl Hole No. 1 118 Martin, John 39, 41 Marzaroli, Oscar 12, 13 material anxieties 126 material memory xiii, xv xix, 46, 47, 50, 64, 83 91, 135 44, 149 55. See also memeory Material Memory (conference) xv, xvi, xvii, xix, 64, 98, 123, 129 Material Memory Exhibition 123, 125 Material Memory: The Post Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice xiii, 145 Mazine 150 McCall, Anthony 58, 59 McCartney, Tom 6, 9 Measurement Room 85 Measures Obsolescere 85 memory aura of memory 138 buried memories 152, 154 collective memory xiii, 4, 5, 137, 157, 159, 159n2, 160, 161 individual memory 11 industrial memories xvi memories for individuals 5 memories of site xix, 154 memory in the modern era 4 memory of place 126, 154 modern memory 13 real memory 5 re collective and habit memory 137, 144 re memory 11, 13 repository of collective memory 4 social memory xv, 5 visual narratives of memory 157 Memory Circuit 144 metaphor xix, 58, 69, 77, 98, 123, 157 62 archaeological metaphor 64 milieux 4 5, 17 mines xx, 3, 27, 28, 30 33, 129, 131, 132, 142 coal mining 28 30 individual mines 32 Miners Strike 27, 29 mining industry 32 post mining history 33 toxic mine water xviii See also derelict Miracle of the Gorbals 13 Mirror Lake 61 Mirror Lake State Park (Wisconsin) 61 Misrach, Richard 32 Modernism 2, 4, 8, 9, 9n4, 13, 37, 80, 83, 84, 95, 151, 153 Modernist landscape 9

Index Modernist legacy 9 pre Modernist architectural designs 3 pre Modernist era 12 pre Modernist sociability 13 See also Brutalist structures Morgan, Edwin 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 13 Morrison, Toni 11 Motown 146 7 moving image xvii, 41, 53, 58, 59, 60, 145 M10 8 museums/galleries Airspace Gallery (Stoke on Trent) xviii, 101, 102, 103, 104 Ashmolean Museum 111 Durham Mining Museum 32, 33 International Museum of Photography (New York) 31 Ironbridge Gorge Museum xv Kelvingrove Museum (Glasgow) 3 Laing Art Gallery (Newcastle) 39, 40, 41 London Gallery West 57 Long Gallery (Newcastle University) 145 National Craft Museum (New Delhi) 104, 106, 108, 109 National Media Museum, The (London) 41 Victoria and Albert Museum (London) 41 Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester) 91 Wolverhampton City Museum and Art Gallery 149 Zaha Hadid’s Museum of Transport (Glasgow) 3 Muslim Prayer Windermere 43 Mythical Beast xiii, xiv, 157 narrative counter narratives 5, 11 embodied narrative 79, 80 fictional narrative 152 identity narratives xvii, xix, 11, 14 interrogate narrative 10 meta narrative 14 narrative of abandonment 153 narrative of the ceramic object 80 narrative of common heritage xix narrative in a diasporic process 5 narrative of the ghost estate 66 narrative of hand making 79 narrative of history 14 narrative of memory 14, 157, 158, 160 narrative of place 13 narrative of technological progress 151 narrative of walking 152 neoliberal narrative of excess 63 personal and public narratives 13 post industrial narrative 3 social narrative xix sonic narrative 47, 50 Nash, Paul 39 National Union of Miners 27, 29 strike of 1984 27, 32, 33 Nazis xvi, 75, 76, 77, 79 necropolis 108. See also Bithooras New Glasgow Boys 13 New Gorbals 6, 7, 8, 13 New Industries Festival 136 Newstead colliery 129, 132 Newton, Christian 61 New Topographics (Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape) 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich 72 No Mean City (novel) 2 North and South 32 Northern Soul xix, 145 7

The Post Industrial Landscape as Site for Creative Practice: Material Memory North Staffordshire xviii, xix, 111, 113, 119, 121, 135 Norway xiii, xix, 84, 149, 151, 152 nostalgia 11, 12, 13, 137, 144, 147 restorative nostalgia 5 See also Northern Soul Nottinghamshire xviii, 129, 132 nuclear test sites 32 NUM 132 Oatlands needs Pakora 1, 2, 3, 6 Office 137 Olley, Bob 37 101 TV Sets, 1001 TV Sets 60 One Man’s Photographs 1955 1984 12 ophlas 106, 107, 108 Orford Ness (Suffolk) 88, 89 Organisation Todt 84 other 76, 80 face of the other 75, 77, 79 otherness 9 Paikkari, Pekka 113, 119, 120 Park, Jonathan xvi Peden, Liz 12 Petersens Brick factory 160 Pfahl, John 32 Photography xvii , xviii, xix, xx, 1, 2, 12, 13, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 57, 58, 60, 64, 67, 84, 86, 88, 129, 130, 131, 149, 150, 152, 154 5, 157, 160 aerial photography 33 archaeological photographers 32 black and white photography 30, 32 documentary photography 39 landscape photography 31, 37 43 post industrial photography 32 Pitman Painters, The 27 pollution 33, 98, 99, 105 postcards 152 post post industrial reality 40 Potteries, The 141 pottery 107, 111 hand made pottery 79 pre industrial pottery 111 shards of 72, 103 Pripyat xviii, xx, 85 7 processed material 126 Props And Dressing 85 public art xvii, 1 14, 142n6 public space 1, 3, 11, 27, 70, 72 QES 6, 8, 12 Queen Elizabeth Square. See QES radioactive forensic film 88 raw materials 137, 151 Redalen, Toril, 142, 143, 157 Reflections 160, 161 relics xix, 142 reliquary 141 rhetorical topoi 4 Rink 59 Römhild International Ceramics Symposium xvii Röntgen, Wilhelm Konrad 85 Røros 149 Rubble Mound, Mainsforth Colliery, Ferryhill, County Durham 30 Ruhr valley xiii, 33 ruins abandoned housing estates 64 contemporary ruins 72

distortions in memory 144 entropic ruin 69 fabric of the ruins 72 new ruins 64, 66 Petrified Ruin xviii, 86 pleasure in ruins xx post industrial ruins 67, 137, 144 post industrial ruins of Detroit 144 ruined industrial buildings 17 ruin of memory 149 ruin porn xx, 64, 144 Ruin Lust xvi Ruin memories 89n6, 137, 144 ruinology literature 66 RUNDOWN 119 Saint Martins School of Art 57 Sam Projects 61 Sanskriti cultural Foundation 104 Sawyer, Lyddell 37 Schwebende Engel, Der 14 Scotland xvii, 2, 6, 10, 40 Sealander 83 4 sense of place xviii, 72, 95, 126, 157, 159 Sense of Place, A 60 Shades of Grey: Glasgow 1957 1987 12 Shades of Grey: Photographs of Glasgow 1956 1985 12 shadows 47, 155, 161 Archival Shadows 154 5 Shadow Stack 157, 158, 159 Shed, The 66 Sheffield 67 sherd 63. See also ruins Shevchenko, Vladimir xviii , 85, 87, 88 Shining Stream 131 Shoard, Marian 29, 30 Siegfried Line 83, 83n2 site specific artworks xix Sketch 118 Slope 117 smellscape 17 Smelthytta (the smelting works) 150 Smithson, Robert xvii, 119 Socialist Realism 38 Soft 99 Sønderborg (Denmark) 157, 160, 161 sonic sonic legacies xvii sonic material 47 sonic memory 47, 50 sonic phantoms/memories/echoes 51 sonic space xvii, 50 sonic ghosting xvii, 46, 47 8, 50 1 Sonic Ghosting xix Sosnowska, Monika 8, 9 soul music 145, 146, 147 soundscapes 150 compositions 46 delicate soundscape 18 installation soundscape 50 new soundscape 48 regulated soundscapes 17 soundscapes of the past/future 46 present soundscape 47, 48, 50 steelworks in 1970 47 working soundscape 18 South Yorkshire xvii, 28, 46, 48 South Yorkshire steel industry xvii, 46 Soviet avant garde 8 Soziale Plastik (Social Sculpture) 76

173

174 Spence, Sir Basil 2 3, 9n4 Spender, Humphrey 38 Spode ceramic factory xiii, xvi, xix, 135, 136, 136n2, 137 8, 141, 142, 144 5, 145n1, 146 8, 150, 157, 161, 162. See also ceramics Spode/Stoke 137 Spode Works 101n3, 135, 155, 161 Spode Works 135, 136, 142 Spode Works: The Art Gallery Present Terrain, no.32 142 Star City 151 Star of Caledonia, The 3 steelworks 33, 45, 47, 48, 101, Stifter’s Dinge 58 Stirling, Calum 9 Stoke on Trent xiii, xvi, xviii, xix, 101, 102, 103, 111, 111n5, 135 6, 136n2, 142n6, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 155, 157. See also ceramics Subterranean Sound Tunnel 46, 46n1, 48 50 Surfeit 621 63, 64, 65, 66 Surnadal Billag (Norway) 151 Sussex arts festival 49 Sussex chalk industry xvii, 49 Sutherland, Graham xvi, 39, 41 tactile 18, 79 Tannery 40 technologies digital technologies 151 new technologies xix, xx, 37, 157, 159, 160, 162 traditional technologies xix, xx, 157 Tees Valley Giants 3 Tempo Suspenso 85 Third Eye Centre (Glasgow) 12 This Must Be The Place (Pick Me Up and Turn Me Round) 149 3D modelling 59, 157, 162 Todesfuge 79 Tools 117 Topf und Söhne 76, 77, 88 Topographies of the Obsolete 150, 155, 165 Topographies of the Obsolete xiii, xix, 135, 136, 145, 146n2, 166 Topographies of the Obsolete and the Vociferous Void xix Topographies of the Obsolete: Exploring the Site Specific and Associated Histories of Post Industry 135 Topographies of the Obsolete: Site Reflections 148 Topographies of the Obsolete: The Vociferous Void 145n1, 162 Topographies of the Obsolete, Vociferous Void xiii, xvi, xix, 157, 161 Towne, Francis 29 Toxic Camera, The xviii, 8, 91 Toxic Camera, Blind Landing Lab 1 89, 90 Toxic Debt 64 Tracings 141, 149, 150 Track 116 trauma xx, 5, 10 Turner, J.M.W. xvi, 29 Turner, Townsend 6 Tuxedo Baltic 41 Ukraine 85, 86, 88 UK76 61 Union of Democratic Mine Workers. See NUM University Sunderland 42 Untitled (Girl with a Rucksack) 11, 12 urbanism anti urban 97

Index Barcelona model 3 new urbanism 3 spontaneous urban vegetation 98, 99 post industrial urban environment 149 post modern urbanism 4 posturbanism 4 urban cultural regeneration 3, 166 urban detritus 103 urban ecology 97, 98, 99 urban edgework 69 urban expansion 2 urban fabric 95, 97, 103 urban fringe, the 29 urban vegetation 97, 98, 99 urban wilderness xix, 95, 98, 99 100 See also landscape Urban Rewilding 98 9 utopia 2, 8, 9, 83, 146, 147 vandalism 33, 67 Vertical Works 59 Viva Viva 57 Voto xv Wall, the. See Berlin Wall Wallinger, Mark 3 Waltrop Mine 32 Wanderer, The 9 Ward, David 58, 59 Waring, Sarah 4 wasteland 21, 24, 29, 93 100, 157 Waterfalls 32 Wedgewood Factory 147 weeds 24, 93 100, 131 Weeds: In defence of Nature’s most unloved plants 103 Welsh Steel Industry xiii Weston, Edward 39 When Attitudes Become Form 60 White Horse 3. See Angel of the South wilderness anthropogenic wilderness 95 miniature wilderness landscape 94 unspoilt wilderness 99 See also urban wilderness and wilderness landscapes Wilsher, Mark 57 Wilson, Jane and Louise xvi, xx 151 Wilson, Keith 57 Winding wheel monument, Ryton, Tyne and Wear 34 Wirtschaftswerte (Economic Values) 76 Wordsworth, William 29 working class nostalgic view of working class 37 working class socialist ethos 9 working class youth culture 146 World Heritage Committee 126 World War II/Second World War/WW2 xvii, 54, 75, 84, 83n1, 93, 97 post war xvi, 2, 32, 37, 84, 98 Wright, Daphne xvii, 10 12 Wunderkammer 96, 141 yardsticks 84 6, 89n Yeoungbin, Lee 137 You 59 Zusammenstücke (together pieces) 77, 78, 79