The Great Hedge of India

This map of the Great Hedge of India has been on display in Somerset House as part of Salt Cosmologies, an art project by Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser). 

'The project invokes the spectral presence of the so-called Great Salt Hedge, a vast, long-forgotten barrier of plants which the British colonial regime created in the 19th century to control and tax the movement of salt across the Indian subcontinent. This 4000-kilometre-long 'hedge' was made of thorny shrubs, locally found brush, sweet plums and prickly pears, and inhabited by birds and snakes. Although highly profitable, it was also a nuisance to maintain, often battered by winds, burnt during the rebellion of 1857 and eaten by termites. Now, it is largely erased from memory and the landscape.'    

This all sounds extraordinary, like some kind of vastly ambitious land art project, halfway between Christo-Jeanne Claude and David Nash. You would think that even at the time it might have been painted or photographed, but apparently not: 'it was neither beautiful nor picturesque, and by the time photography began to document such relics, the hedge had been abolished in 1878 - paraphrased from H.F. Pelham (historian and scholar), in his brief account on the Great Salt Hedge or Inland Customs Line'. Finding only textual records, the artists used an AI model to create 'several images to return the Inland Customs Line to collective memory.' My instinctive dislike of AI meant I preferred to use my imagination, drawing on the collection of archival materials (see above) displayed in Somerset House's old Salt Office. This included botanical illustrations and bird specimens - Allan Octavian Hume, the colonial administrator who oversaw construction of the Inland Customs Line, was also a prominent biologist and collector. The Hedge was a wildlife habitat as well as being an implement of imperialism (in 1930 Gandhi would famously protest the salt tax). 

In a separate Tate Britain installation the artists have installed a video projection (see below) which includes some contemporary quotes. This one is by Flora Annie Steel who wrote many books about India. The full text can be found on Project Gutenberg in a chapter called 'The Salt of the Earth'. In case you can't read it in this photograph, here's what she wrote:

It was a strange, weird barrier, a vast hedge of cactus and thorny acacia, of prickly palms and agaves, that thrust out their spiked swords boldly from a buckler of spine-set thicket... What a barrier it was! Forty feet high by as much broad! A grey-green mighty wall of leaves all starred with pink and yellow and white cactus blossoms, over which birds, butterflies and dragonflies fluttered, while on the round fleshy leaves the cochineal insects gathered, like tiny spots of blood, scarlet...

Postscript 

After I posted this, Gareth Evans kindly pointed out that the Great Hedge of India and imperial salt trade were explored a decade earlier in another (continuing) collaborative art project, 'Common Salt', by Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer. Their work is discussed in a fascinating 2021 article on the BBC website, 'The Mysterious Disappearance of the World's Largest Shrubbery'. It begins with Robert Moxham, author of The Great Hedge of India, who began researching the subject after finding a reference to it in a second-hand book he bought in 1994. 'Moxham made three trips to India in the mid-1990s, seeking it out. He pored over old maps and satellite imagery, travelled to small towns and spoke to villagers and locals in areas where the hedge was mentioned in historical records. In many places, Moxham found that the Hedge had just melted away.' Another researcher, Aisling O'Connor, made trips to Uttar Pradesh and found that the path of the hedge was now a road corridor. She got invited to a conference on Nuclear Energy to speak about the Great Hedge because "they were intrigued by how such a big project could have disappeared from memory in such a short time." The BBC article concludes by suggesting that trying to keep public memory of the hedge alive 'is a constant challenge', so it is probably good that more artists have recently been engaging with this fascinating structure.

The new open farmland

The latest David Matless has quite a lot to say about English landscape. Some of the things covered in England's Green have been discussed on this blog in the past, including Richard Long, Ghost Box, Roy Fisher, Susan Hiller, The Peregrine, ley lines, The Detectorists, the Green Knight, Andy Goldsworthy, the Fitties, Ground Work, J. G. Ballard, John Fowles, Stonehenge, Electric Eden and rewilding. The book's main chapters veer around from topic to topic, a bit like Some Landscapes but with an organising principle and more specific points to make. They include interesting material on government environmental policy and changing attitudes to farming, set alongside nostalgic references to childhood TV and pop culture, from The Wombles to The Wurzels. Matless is a similar age to me but got exposed to things in Norfolk we had no experience of growing up in Brighton, like agricultural fairs and country dancing!

I'll just highlight one part of the book here to that give a flavour of his approach. A section on 'Today's Country' begins with Camberwick Green, the children't animation in which Windy Miller is a traditional rural figure and Farmer Bell a modern farmer. They are rivals but friends. Matless sees them as embodying different 1960s figures - Windy's values consistent with the emerging counterculture while Bell, 'in no sense a villain', had modern tractors and farm machinery that resembled the Corgy, Dinky and Matchbox models being sold at the time. Farmer Bell's world could also be seen in scale model dioramas on display in places like the Science Museum. This modern farming 'could also claim aesthetic value', as set out in an interesting quote from Nan Fairbrother’s New Lives, New Landscapes (1970):

‘The new open farmland, if we cease to look at it nostalgically, has its own distinctive beauties, its very openness being one ... In large-scale arable farming we are conscious too of the land, the earth itself. We can see the shape of the ground as we never can in small hedged fields, and in our rolling landscapes the modulations of the surface are in themselves beautiful.’

It is hard to imagine anyone writing that now, given the environmental problems that became increasingly apparent with modern agriculture. And yet I have to admit her description partly resonates with how I felt aesthetically about the open, bare hills of the South Downs when I lived in Sussex. Fundamentally though, Fairbrother's idea of 'a land restyled for today' sounds like a depressing prospect, in more ways than one. She suggests that 'fields as we know them will disappear' and future historians will be have to uncover them 'as we now study Celtic lynchets and the open field system at Axholme.' I now have my father's copy of New Lives, New Landscapes (essential reading for a town planner) which he bought in 1972, when I was probably still enjoying Camberwick Green.

The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice

François-Auguste Biard, Magdalena Bay, 1841 

Having written last time about Victor Hugo I will add something here about his lover Léonie d'Aunet, a novelist and playwright who inspired many of the poems in Les Contemplations (1856). She was not merely a writer though, she was an Arctic explorer. Last year I mentioned the trip painter Emma Stibbons made to Svalbard, following in the footsteps of other artists who have taken part in the Cape Farewell voyages, but Léonie d'Aunet was the first woman ever to visit the archipelago. In 1838 she accompanied her future husband, painter François-Auguste Biard, on an expedition led by the scientist Joseph Paul Gaimard. Biard's painting above was acquired by the Louvre in 1841 and is subtitled 'view taken from the Tombs Peninsula, north of Spitsbergen; aurora borealis effect.' There were no casualties on their expedition, but the figures in the foreground prefigure later famous tragedies. 

An article on a UN website talks about Léonie d'Aunet's published recollections in relation to climate change. She described setting foot on ground at Magdalena Bay: 

“I said on the ground, as one usually does, but I should have said on snow, because I couldn’t see the slightest part of earth,” she wrote in her book Voyage d’une femme au Spitzberg (1854). Even in summer, everything was covered in snow and “between each mountain there are glaciers, which are growing in height every year. This is inevitable: the immense amount of snow that piles up during the 10-month winter cannot change in the summer that lasts only for some weeks. Eventually, in time the glaciers will be as high as the surrounding granite peaks.” The French woman’s predictions have, of course not materialised.

Now the landscape of Svalbard (Spitsbergen is its largest island) is at risk from global heating. 'An avalanche in 2015 cost two lives in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement. They were described as Svalbard’s first deaths from climate change.'

I am not sure if Leonet d'Aunet's book is properly available in an English translation, but there are some quotations from it in a 1903 anthology called Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century. 

The ice-fields and the icebergs[Pg 130] inspired Madame d'Aunet with profound emotion, and, in describing them, she breaks out into what may be called a lyrical cry. "These Polar ices," she exclaims, "which no dust has ever stained, as spotless now as on the first day of the creation, are tinted with the vividest colours, so that they look like rocks composed of precious stones: the glitter of the diamond, the dazzling hues of the sapphire and the emerald, blend in an unknown and marvellous substance. Yonder floating islands, incessantly undermined by the sea, change their outline every moment; by an abrupt movement the base becomes the summit; a spire transforms itself into a mushroom; a column broadens out into a vast flat table, a tower is changed into a flight of steps; and all so rapidly and unexpectedly that, in spite of oneself, one dreams that some supernatural will presides over those sudden transformations. At the first glance I could not help thinking that I saw before me a city of the fays, destroyed at one fell blow by a superior power, and condemned to disappear without leaving a trace of its existence. Around me hustled fragments of the architecture of all periods and every style: campaniles, columns, minarets, ogives, pyramids, turrets, cupolas, crenelations, volutes, arcades, façades, colossal foundations, sculptures as delicate as those which festoon the shapely pillars of our cathedrals—all were massed together and confused in a common disaster. An ensemble so strange, so marvellous, the artist's brush is unable to reproduce, and the writer's words fail adequately to describe![Pg 131]

...

"The sea, bristling with jagged sheets of ice, clangs and clatters noisily; the lofty littoral peaks glide down to the shore, fall away, and plunge into the gulf of waters with an awful crash. The mountains are rent and splintered; the waves dash furiously against the granite capes; the icebergs, as they shiver into pieces, give vent to sharp reports like the rattle of musketry; the wind with a hoarse roar, scatters tornadoes of snow abroad.... It is terrible, it is magnificent; one seems to hear the chorus of the abysses of the old world preluding a new chaos."

According to the UN article, 'Since the 1980s, the amount of summer sea ice has halved, and some scientists fear it will be gone altogether by 2035.'

The Abandoned Park

Victor Hugo, Mushroom, 1850

Earlier this week, writing about Tirzah Garwood, I referred to landscapes in art that appear uncanny because they contain outsize plants or objects (I might also have mentioned Paul Nash's Event on the Downs - see my earlier post 'Ideas for Sculpture in a Setting'). Here is another example, a giant mushroom that can be seen in the fascinating Royal Academy exhibition Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo. In the catalogue Rose Thompson says that 'very little is known about his depiction of a poisonous mushroom. In a seemingly post-apocalyptic landscape, the drawing reveals a hidden secret: a ghostly human face trapped within the mushroom's stem.' Most of Hugo's paintings involve pen, brown ink and wash - see for example the The Octopus I included here back in 2012 - but many, like Mushroom - incorporate additional media. Here he has added charcoal, crayon and green, red and white gouache.^* 

Hugo made topographical sketches in France, northern Spain, Luxembourg and Germany, but he didn't travel much compared to contemporaries who explored the Mediterranean and near East. Many of the landscapes in this exhibition are imaginary, with mysterious buildings half submerged in mist or doubled as reflections in water. He incorporated random and accidental effects in a manner that can be likened to the blot landscapes advocated in the eighteenth century by Alexander Cozens. He can also be seen as a proto-surrealist, interested in the unconscious and experimenting with ways to abandon control in his drawing processes. A couple of miniature landscape paintings in the exhibition particularly struck me for their Romantic atmosphere. Undergrowth c. 1847 is 7.3 x 4.5cm seems to show some trees or grass - it is hard to tell at this scale. The Abandoned Park is even smaller, just 4.4 by 3.5cm - about the size of a stamp. It looks like a tiny experiment but Hugo had it engraved and it was published in a magazine, L'Artiste in 1855. Hugo also tried out new approaches in his paintings of castles, e.g. making stencils to create either positive or negative silhouettes that he could then paint over. The Guardian website has a splendid gallery of these 'burg' pictures which gives a good indication of his range of approaches. 

Victor Hugo, The Abandoned Park, before 1855

^*Coincidentally, another great writer-artist, August Strindberg, also painted a strange landscape with a single mushroom in the foreground: Solitary Fly Cap (recently sold at Sotheby's). 

Cornstalks and wildflowers

 Tirzah Garwood, The Photographer, c. 1947

The Dulwich Picture Gallery's current exhibition is a Tirzah Garwood, covering her early woodcuts, marbled papers, box-frame collages and slightly surreal oil paintings like this one, The Photographer. The trees here are represented by leaf prints: 'using a method favoured by Victorian botanists, Garwood covered one side of a leaf with ink and then pressed it onto paper, creating a strange miniature tree.' The subject was inspired by some Edwardian family photographs found by Henry Swanzy, who had become her second husband in 1946 (as a key figure in encouraging post-war Caribbean and African literature he is almost as interesting as her first husband, Eric Ravilious). Sadly they only had a brief time together - her cancer returned in 1948 and she died in 1951. 

Tirzah Garwood, Etna, 1944

Garwood clearly enjoyed playing with scale and creating artificial landscapes - an earlier painting shows toys (that for a moment look real) in a garden, so that the foliage surrounding them seems unnaturally large. It reminded me of oddities I've written about here before, like Carl Wilhelm Kolbe's Kräuterblätter scenes featuring over-sized plant life, or the botanical illustrations of Gherardo Cino that blow up herbs to the size of trees. In Etna she depicts Mount Caburn in Sussex with a toy train and 'cornstalks and wildflowers that seem to dwarf the chickens pecking alongside the railway line.' In the exhibition catalogue James Russell writes that the hill in this painting 'is dependably solid, modelled in a different medium but with a similar feeling for mass to The Westbury Horse, one of her late husband's career-defining pre-war watercolours that she had with her still. Perhaps she referred to it as she worked; perhaps she was even responding to it, but also in her own way transforming the Sussex countryside into a landscape from a dream.'

Dormitorium

Yesterday I went to see Dormitorium | The Film Décors Of The Quay Brothers at the Swedenborg House - wonderful stuff. John Coulthart has written about it and included photographs on his site (he also has previous articles on the Quay Brothers). I took these shots of a mysterious landscape used in their film The Comb (1990). On the BFI site Michael Brooke called this 'one of the most inexplicably compelling of all the Quays' creations.'  

The most deliberately dreamlike of the Quay Brothers' films, The Comb is bookended by (and intercut with) a black-and-white live-action sequence of a woman asleep in bed, the implication being that these disconcerting, dislocating impressions of fairytale landscapes populated by decrepit puppets and an endless series of ladders (shot in colour) are taking place in the darker recesses of her mind. However, this is the only aspect of the film that's in any way easy to grasp, the rest setting out to wrong-foot the viewer at every turn, and the result wilfully defies verbal analysis. ...  Distortions visible in the background décor imply the existence of hidden images. At times it appears to be a discarded theatrical set, an impression given further credence by a camera pull-back to reveal what appear to be stage flats and a proscenium arch - though it could just as easily be a forest. 

In the film you never see the 'landscape' as it is presented in this case, so that undulating shape is rather surprising. The grain of wood is transformed into pools, shadows and bands of cloud. The painted trees here look like details in old German topographical prints or copper plate paintings, or Hercules Segers' 'mysterious landscapes'. I have mentioned on this blog before the Quay Brothers' cover design for Cosmicomics which appears to be a grisaille version of The Comb's wooden sculpture (see below). The literary source for The Comb is a fragment by Robert Walser, but I'm not aware of a precise text that might provide a literary equivalent for this landscape. Writing in Sight & Sound (1992), Jonathan Romney said 'the film is set to his work, rather than derived from it—so much so that the extracts from his texts, balefully whispered and muttered in several languages simply become part of the soundtrack, along with various drips, owl hoots, and strident orchestrations of string and wood by the Brothers' regular collaborator Leszek Jankowski.'