Behind the old pines rimming like hedgesI scan a ten-mile long beachlike ironed and stretched white silk;the water is calm and clear,I can count the grains of sand.
Behind the old pines rimming like hedgesI scan a ten-mile long beachlike ironed and stretched white silk;the water is calm and clear,I can count the grains of sand.
Regrettably I never saw them perform and the old footage of them staging events on derelict land by the river is increasingly hard to relate to what you experience in the modern city. They talked about how cheap it was to live in Butler's Wharf when they first met in the seventies. It sounds like a magical time, with Anne Bean's studio the venue for art world parties that included key figures from the punk movement. From the perspective of this blog, I'm interested in the way they worked at scale and transformed whole cityscapes - Simon Reynolds called them 'the missing link between Test Dept’s metal-bashing clangour and the Land Art of figures like Robert Smithson'. One of their most striking ideas was a concert for cranes, making use of the fact that Docklands was a permanent building site, with instruments picked up and moved around in three dimensions. Their use of pyrotechnics would not be possible now, although apparently they did get away with breaking the rules recently. Back in 1993 Burwell and Bean staged a spectacular event at Bankside power station (an image can be seen in my photo above). The woman who organised it was in the audience last night and she said they were only allowed to do it if they insured the building, but nobody knew what it was worth. So she got a quote from a local insurance company and it set them back £375. A few years later Bankside had become Tate Modern.'they were filmed for over ten hours as the tide ebbed and flowed capturing the massive energy of this amount of incoming water and the ways one could harness this power to shift and shape sound. As the huge resonant chambers of the barges filled up, they deepened the sounds of the metal reinforcing bars sticking out as they were played with sticks and beaters. Passing vessels obliged by blasting their horns, adding to the Bow Gamelan’s own array of foghorns, sirens and hooters.'
'The keynote of this landscape is a soft, variant, fawn-coloured brown, than which nothing could take more gratefully the warm glow of sunlight or the cool purple mystery of shadow; the latter perhaps especially, deep and powerful near the eye (the local brown slightly overruling the violet), but fading as it receded into tints exquisitely vague, and so faint that they seem rather to belong to the sky than to the earth. At this time of year the broad coffee-coloured sweep of the river is bordered on either side by a fillet of green of the most extraordinary vivacity, but redeemed from any hint of crudity by the golden light which inundates it.' - Leighton's travel journal, October 1868
This panorama is one of the highlights of Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature, an exhibition of oil sketches which we saw at Leighton House last month. It was painted on the first of three trips he made to Egypt - Leighton was a lifelong traveller and, having grown up on the continent, was fluent in several languages. A wealthy bachelor, he was also extremely well connected and for this trip was provided with a steamer to take him up the Nile. He evidently took pleasure in making oil sketches but didn't do them on every trip, or at least so it appears - we don't have a record of them all and he mainly kept them private, only showing some of them late in his career. His modesty about them can be explained in terms of his self-image as President of the Royal Academy, engaged in the highest-regarded genre of history painting, but it still seems extraordinary.
There is an excellent catalogue which apart from anything else smells delightful (mine still has that fresh paper new book aroma!) The main author is Pola Durajska who did a PhD at York on Leighton's landscapes. She and the other authors point out some interesting features of his sketches:
"The Oak," observes Mr. Gilpin, "is confessedly the most picturesque tree in itself, and the most accommodating in composition. It refuses no subject, either in natural, or in artificial landscape. It is suited to the grandest, and may with propriety be introduced into the most pastoral. It adds new dignity to the ruined tower, and Gothic arch; it throws its arms with propriety over the mantling pool, and may be happily introduced even in the lowest scene."
From Sylvan sketches; or, A companion to the parks and the shrobbery: with illustrations from the works of the poets (1825) by Elizabeth Kent
This quote about landscape by William Gilpin, influential eighteenth century writer on the Picturesque, is an excuse to mention two books by Elizabeth Kent. This one, Sylvan Sketches, is a guide to trees and it was her follow-up to Flora domestica, or, The portable flower-garden: with directions for the treatment of plants in pots and illustrations from the works of the poets (1823). I've always loved the idea of plant dictionaries based on quotes from poetry and years ago tried to compile one myself, in a vain attempt to lodge in my brain botanical knowledge that would enliven family walks and impress my wife when we visited garden centres. Sadly it failed, as I was always more interested in the poets than the plants. You would be hard pressed to beat Kent's two books though - they are delightful. And what makes them especially interesting is that she was part of the Cockney School, fully conversant with contemporary poets like Keats, Shelley and John Clare, whose work she quotes extensively. Kent was the sister-in-law of Leigh Hunt and worked very closely with him, leading to some contemporary gossip (see Daisy Hay's Young Romantics).
There is of course plenty to say about the oak tree, for example
You can read the text of Sylvan Sketches (an 1831 edition) on the Internet Archive).
Clare read as much of the poem as he could before giving it back to its owner. The book was falling apart and most of Winter had gone missing. He was amazed that a work of such beauty could have been handled so carelessly. But the weaver only laughed at him and said that "t'was reckoned nothing of by himself or his friends" ...
The very next Sunday, he walked to Stamford. The bookshop was shut. He contrived a plan to return on a weekday when it would be open. His job that week was tending horses, so he paid one of the other boys a penny to mind his and another penny to keep the secret. As soon as the horses had been taken outdoors, he headed off. He arrived in Stamford so early that the town was almost deserted. At last, though, the bookseller opened his doors. A copy of The Seasons was Clare's for the bargain price of a shilling (the weaver had paid half as much again for his).
The sun was now up and it was a beautiful morning. He couldn't wait to delve into his book, but didn't want to be seen reading in public on a working day, so he climbed over the high wall that ran beside the road home. This took him into Burghley Park. He nestled on a lawn beside the wall: 'and what with reading the book, and beholding the beauties of artful nature in the park, I got into a strain of descriptive rhyming on my journey home.'
It was on this walk that Clare composed the first poem he ever wrote down, 'The Morning Walk'. He kept going, writing in secret and used a hole in a wall to store his manuscripts. He borrowed books and tried to teach himself grammar but decided it was better to try to write as he spoke. Later he would say that his chief inspirations had been The Seasons and Paradise Lost, although he drew too on the nature writing in William Cowper's The Task and Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler. He also read the self-educated labourer-poet Robert Bloomfield, whose last volume Wild Flowers, or Pastoral and Local Poetry appeared in 1805. Bate notes that each of Bloomfield's books 'was less successful than the last, and he died in poverty in 1823. By that time, Clare's own poetic career was well under way.'
John Clare in 1820, by William Hilton
I have never been to the Humberston Fitties, or indeed to Lincolnshire (I've a feeling it's the only English county I've not been to). How much of the local landscape can be conveyed by these sequences of poems to someone who has never walked along Humberston Beach and Creek? As you can see from the image above, Judith Tucker's drawings are very detailed, like stills taken with grainy black and white film. Harriet Tarlo's poems, in contrast, isolate individual words and short phrases, set within white space which the imagination can fill in. Her texts create the visual effect of following the course of a walk, or they suggest the pattern of a beach, the shape of a valley, the fall of water or the flight of a swallow. I suppose you could try to get a feel for the place by focusing on references to specific birds and plants: an egret, a skylark, an oystercatcher, geese, sandpipers, curlews, purslane and samphire, thrift, lavender and cow parsley. Maybe with this kind of data a naturalist could narrow down the location and picture an environment, but they don't seem particularly distinctive to me. What lingers instead is an impression of mud and sand, shaped and eroded by local conditions into a series of scenes lit by the changing sky, reflections in the creek and silver left by waves on the beach. Here is a brief extract from 'July PM':
dark trees above silvery marram wind-drift
grasses dune- making straggling over
fence stake|reflections downbank
shadows
The Gathering Grounds projects were supported by Sheffield Hallam and at the end of the book three academic articles are cited which describe the couple's practice-based research. In one of these, 'Poetry, Painting and Change on the Edge of England', they explain that their fieldwork in the Fitties drew on Iain Biggs' notion of deep mapping 'as a hybrid activity in which artistic, geographical and ethnographic practices interweave', with 'poetic ambiguity in dialogue with academic discourse.' They cite various writers of the edgelands and note that England's ad hoc coastal settlements* have particularly interested artists recently, e.g. 'Clio Barnard’s performance work Plotlands, 2008, Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope's documentary, Jaywick Escapes, 2012 and Julia Winckler‘s community engagement exhibition Lureland: Peacehaven Project.'
The interviews Tarlo and and Tucker carried out with residents of the Fitties included recollections of a landscape now radically changed, with the sea now much closer inland. "Years ago it was way out, the dunes were 8 or 10 foot deep. Yep, we’ve lost a lot."
The dunes referred to here have long lost their glory, being replaced by sand banks and gabions, the stones in these probably imported from Norway. The creek, saline lagoons and “pioneer saltmarsh” is spreading beyond Tetney marshes and onto Humberston Beach. The spaces humans value most highly and invented groynes to protect, sandy beaches, are being “colonised” by muddy marshland and an increasingly dangerous creek. Is the saltmarsh returning, re-establishing itself and how far will it go? Perhaps over time, regardless of the decisions human beings make about the Fitties plotland, the original saltmarsh fitties will indeed return...
*These places were the subject of a classic study Arcadia for All: The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape by Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward. The centenary of Ward's birth this year was marked by a new collection of essays.