Gathering Grounds

I have been reading Harriet Tarlo’s Gathering Grounds (2019), described by publishers Shearsman as a ‘collection of place-based work emerging from three collaborative projects that took place between 2011-2019 in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.’ Her collaborator was artist Judith Tucker, who tragically died last year in a car accident. An obituary by Griselda Pollack explains that she was returning from Lincolnshire, where the couple had worked together for many years, painting, drawing and writing poems. They also learned 'from the people living on the climate-threatened plotlands of the North-East Lincolnshire coast where working-class communities of the North have long built fragile holidays chalets, locally named Fitties, around the originally Viking village of Humberston.' Judith Tucker co-founded the LAND2, 'a national network of artist/lecturers and research students with an interest in landscape/place-oriented art practice.' She talked about her 'Night Fitties' work in a 2023 interview and drawings used in Gathering Grounds can be seen on her website. 

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.