Reading Water: The Brook

Bike bridge Exe23 November 2020

When I came up with the concept for the City of Literature commission, I didn’t realise how grateful I would be: I’ve been working on the story of HMS Terror, a ship from Topsham, and really wanted to tie-in the new work. As it turned out, I had written myself a perfect, legal, sanity-saving art project for lockdown.

I live a few minutes’ walk from the Exe, from the many faces and strands of the river as it is canaled and corralled around Exeter and out to the sea. I had planned to walk from Exeter to Topsham in one sweep down the east bank, but the Exe had other plans, so I ended up on a series of soggy, circuitous, muddy, icy, reedy expeditions, backtracking and criss-crossing, bridging and fording, bird-watching, mud-larking and learning. As usual, my friends got dragged into the project – our socially-distanced walks would be planned around a section I wanted to explore.

On this first day of reading the water, someone rang me when I got down to the end of the ‘island’, as far as I could get, so the river that day was a river of listening, of solace, of feeling too far away to really help, but of trying anyway. I sat staring out over the water, watching walkers and cyclists crossing the arch far above the water, and the water, ever-changing but constant, beneath them.

 

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;

And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

(‘The Brook’ – Alfred, Lord Tennyson)

 

My Dad chose this poem. He struggled with his memory towards the end of his life, but he used to be able to recite whole poems by heart: a chance reference in a conversation would let flow a stream of words.

I have spent a lot of this year worried about other people, as we all have. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, but I tend to let it overwhelm me too often. Mary Oliver’s ‘I worried’ reminds me of the important things:

‘Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.

(‘I worried’ – Mary Oliver)

>Next<

State of Emergency – Commission for The Box, Plymouth

'Freedom',-mixed-media-on-newsprint-and-card,-94cm-x-40cm-(triptych-variable),-Naomi-Hart,-2020

Lockdown found me several hundred miles from home, legally and practically unable to return, without most of my work materials and prevented from taking part in many social activities. Like many others, I was glued to the news and newspapers, obsessively reading about the virus and how others were managing it, as if by reading I could somehow solve the enormity of the problem. The news and economic pages were deeply depressing, and the lifestyle pages seemed even more irrelevant than usual, given that there was no way to travel to the tropical islands and the concerts weren’t happening, while I had no way visit the galleries or remodel my own home and garden. Like everyone else, I found myself in a seemingly familiar but utterly alien state of limbo, struggling to make sense of the new ‘reality’.

 

From those newspapers I took images of athletes, politicians and celebrities, participating in the same social, cultural and leisure activities that have been denied us, then turned them upside-down, just as all our lives have been turned upside-down.

 

The silhouettes, divorced from everyday life and their contexts at the moment the photos were taken, became suspended in strange, uncomfortable poses: rising or drifting, fighting or at peace, reaching for something unknown and unseen. The figures could be falling, floating or merely in suspension. Their very isolation could be as much freedom as imprisonment in an infinite, undetermined time and space – it all depends on perspective.

 

After experimenting with background colours, blue seems the most satisfactory – symbolising sky, air or ocean.

 

“Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not… All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.” (Yves Klein, Selected Writings)

 

The colour blue has been used by artists for centuries to represent holiness and majesty – The Virgin Mary’s robes are blue, partly because it was so expensive, being found only in the mines of Afghanistan – ‘ultramarine’ means ‘beyond the sea’.

 

For Goethe, blue presented ‘a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose’ and for Rebecca Solnit, it represents something out of reach:

 

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that colour of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The colour of that distance is the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and of desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not. And the colour of where you can never go.” (Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost)

 

Painted on newsprint, the physical backgrounds to the images are continual reports, statistics and speculation on COVID-19, as this terrifying virus forms the new background to everything we do.

Paris Street residency: 4

PF101wThose sunny postcards of Plymouth that I posted a few weeks ago? I spent a happy/disturbed couple of weeks painting scenes of catastrophic sea level rise obliterating parts of Plymouth.

Scientists, writers and psychologists have spent years trying to work out why, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, we often choose to deny the truth or simply remain inactive when we think about the future and climate change. It may be that we thought it would be ‘some time in the future’, many models used to show things happening ‘at the end of this century’, which of course is too far away for many of us to contemplate. Perhaps we thought everything would be all right until then?

Painting these scenes, I found it all too easy to imagine this happening. In some of them, for good measure, I imagined the sea having disappeared, and a drought-ridden landscape replacing our seaside, but the models predict the opposite. We are supposed to try to limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, but the chances are we are already set on a course for at least twice if not three times that. Sea levels will possibly rise by metres, not centimetres. If melting ice from Greenland disrupts the Gulf Stream, as it seems to be doing, Great Britain faces a possible future climate not of sun-drenched Mediterranean summers like the one we’ve just had, but of a climate similar to Newfoundland, since we are at the same latitude. We might see giant icebergs on our shores. Other models suggest that the currents will simple chuck more heat into the atmosphere instead of it being buried in the ocean. We can’t know for sure, but things will change.

I’m an artist, not a scientist. I don’t pretend to know what will happen in the future, but the footage of flooding in North Carolina last month looked eerily similar to some of my postcards.

101 of them hit the streets, shops, venues and phone boxes of Plymouth as part of #PlymouthFutures for Plymouth Art Weekender and The Atlantic Project.

You can see all of them here

Let me know if you find one.

Paris Street Residency: 3

Meditation-(in-G-minor),-mixed-media-on-canvas,-Naomi-Hart-2018-(for-Michael-Graham)Commissions are strange animals. I love them and fear them in equal measure. How do you know the recipient is being honest when they see the finished item for the first time? How do you know they’ll be able to live with it for years? Especially when you know them, and will have to see them (and possibly your commission) on a regular basis for years – will they still love it when they’re 64?

So with the usual excitement and trepidation I agreed to a painting commission for the brilliant young Director of the University of Exeter Chapel Choir. His office is the Mary Harris Memorial Chapel of the Holy Trinity (to give it its full name) on Streatham Campus – a beautiful, modern building, consecrated in 1958 and given Grade II listed status in 1988. One of its most striking attributes is the stunning ceiling, painted by Thomas Monnington using patterns in geometry and light. There are no stained glass windows, but the light is filtered through high columns of glass bricks which distort the outside world and add to the calm quality inside.

I’ve sung, read lessons and listened to concerts and services in the Chapel, so I thought I knew it quite well, but I took the opportunity to visit in the summer when it was empty, to get a feel for the mood of the place when it’s not filled with sound. Sitting in different places, peering through the glass, finding visual references and resonances in the fittings and decor, I began to get a different sense of it, so my original ideas had to be let go. There’s a quietness and order to it which I hadn’t noticed before. I often paint while listening to music – sometimes one piece obsessively for weeks on end, so I asked Michael for his favourite pieces and chose one from them which seemed to fit the mathematics of the ceiling and the quiet grandeur of the place.

Layering the score and text under paint, I superimposed different parts of the chapel which I found interesting and played with the composition until it seemed to tell some kind of story. The hard bit about creating things is often knowing when to stop, but finally the visual harmonies seemed to come together.

He says he likes it.

A curator’s view of the exhibition

Terah Walkup, fine art curator for Plymouth Museums Galleries Archives, writes:

Naomi Hart is the Leverhulme Trust artist-in-residence at The University of Sheffield Department of Geography for 2017-2018. Hart spent August of 2017 in Svalbard, Norway in the field with students and faculty from the Polar and Alpine Change Masters programme. This body of work comes from her observations of scientific method and enquiry there and investigates the, often opposing, man-made interventions present in the ice fields of the High Arctic.

In the early 20th century, coal mining became the dominant industry of Svalbard. Recent years, however, have seen both the closing of the mines and their structural demise, due in part to heavy snow melt, one of the increasingly visible effects of global warming. Svalbard, because of its polar location, has become a site of scientific interest wherein researchers measure atmospheric and environmental changes. A landmass once mined for energy is now mined for data and information. Furthermore the drastic change in landscape from melting permafrost has prompted new explorations for making unprecedented use of natural resources, such as investigating whether edible plants can be grown in a land never before cultivated. Taking mass balance—the notion that energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed—as her premise, Hart explores the cyclical (and conflicting?) nature of the Arctic landscape.

Hart belongs to a long tradition of artists accompanying scientific missions. James Cook and Charles Darwin enlisted artists to record human encounters, biological specimens and newly charted landscapes on their journeys of exploration. However, Hart turns her eye toward the process of enquiry, the experience of researchers and students in the field and records the indexes of human action in the landscape. Hauntingly opaque human figures, whose indistinct forms recall the first photographs of Arctic explorers, give the viewer a foothold into potential narratives but resist the clarity desired by final conclusions. Likewise her use of found text, ranging from academic publications and poetry to journalistic observations by researchers, provides a glimpse of the written experience of the Arctic. Yet her fragmentation of those texts, in their burial, concealment, and decontextualisation, mirrors the abstracted data researchers must inventively extract and interpret in the field.

Like the early Arctic explorers and contemporary scientists, the viewer encounters fleeting glimpses of clues of what has been experienced both in and by the landscape. Tools used for measuring, the remains of a collapsed coal mine, decaying animal skeletons, new and abandoned architecture echo throughout the series as slowly revealed or fading to the point of disappearing. Her use of form and colour make manifest the deeper tensions from opposing forces: cold/heat, protection/danger, conservation/consumption, decay/growth. Materials directly reference their subject: the carbon cycle is represented by using the very coal mined on the outskirts of Sheffield, cryoconite collected by researchers and paint thinned by glacier water from the Arctic. Hart’s investigation of how the invisible is made visible offers a timely response to the impact of current geopolitical interests on the ice fields of the Arctic.

Exhibition

Launch. Photo: Carl Whitham, Portland Works Studio

Well, that was a week!  Despite all the odds, and the worst the Arctic weather could throw at us, ice report launched on Thursday 1st March.  A massive ‘Thank you’ to everyone who helped, and to everyone who braved the blizzards and snowdrifts to come.  Special thanks to Carl Whitham of Portland Works Studio for the amazing photos (and to everyone who wore colour co-ordinated clothing, by accident or design).  See the images in the Gallery.

Exhibition 1- 8 March 2018

1 – 8 March 2018

11am – 4pm every day (8th till 3pm)

Portland Works, Randall St, Sheffield S2 4SJ

(turn right through the gates and follow the signs upstairs)

Exhibition: ice report

Advance notice.

More details soon.

Competition:Collaboration

Watching and listening to my colleagues over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting on the fine balance between competition and collaboration that everyone has to tread. There is a hugely generous spirit of sharing information in science in order to further knowledge, but it is tempered by the feeling of ‘wanting to be the first to find something out’. I asked some of the ice scientists to tell me why they do what they do. I’m an artist because it actually helps to keep me sane – I find myself sinking into depression if I don’t make or draw for a while. The answers the scientists gave were varied, but some of them struck a chord: ‘I like to feel useful’, ‘Passing on knowledge’, and ‘Being the first to know things … until I publish this knowledge is all mine.’

This tension has much larger ramifications, of course – getting the credit for discovering something is likely to mean you get funding to search for more stuff. However community-minded we may feel, there is always the need for self-preservation, and, like in the arts, with funding hard to come by, this can mean the difference between success or failure; getting a job, or not getting a job.

Similarly, as with arts funding, there is a requirement somehow to know what it is you are going to find out before you find it. Grant applications demand what the results are going to be and why this will be useful. I’m sure this hasn’t changed in hundreds of years – European exploration and mapping of the Arctic was almost entirely funded by nations wanting to find the elusive ‘North West Passage’ (that the Inuit had been travelling across overland for thousands of years), so ships went off in search of it, but often sidetracked to look for things their captains considered more ‘interesting’ while they were at it.

As Lieutenant George De Long, captain of the ‘USS Jeannette’ said in 1879

“It is an impossible thing – for one starting out on an expedition of this kind to say in advance what he is ‘going to do.’ … we go out into a great blank space. If you will be kind enough to keep us in memory while we are gone, we will attempt to tell you ‘what we have done’ on our return, which, I dare say, will be more interesting”

What I have realised is that I nearly always work in collaboration, though my collaborators may be unwitting, (‘No man is an island’, etc etc). I have music on a lot while working – usually classical, often wordless, though I am trying to expand my horizons. I also read voraciously when I get time, and have real and online conversations with friends, which often spark ideas or further trains of thought. Selfishly, I often forget just how much it can mean for someone to say that your work is inspiring, so here is a list (ever increasing and in no particular order) of what has influenced me over the last few months:

‘Arctic Dreams’ by Barry Lopez

‘Icebergs – Their science and links to Global Change’ by Grant R Bigg

Peter Doig

‘This Cold Heaven’ by Gretel Ehrlich

Hildur Guðnadóttir

Alexander Bayon

Al Swainger

‘Cantus Arcticus’ by Rautavaara

Blood snow

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