The subject of place has been a recurring concern for me within my recent practice. In particular I have been attempting to select specific places that resonate with my current research interests, places that I have visited on and off through out my life, which tie in with ideas surrounding the landscape and the layering of memory personal or otherwise that occurs or may have occurred within such places.
A book that I have frequently returned to as a point of reference is W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. The book is constructed around the pilgrimage of a lonely wanderer (Sebald) along the English East coast of Suffolk. The landscape Sebald encounters is strikingly deserted containing within it long empty beaches, closed down hotels, sleepy holiday resorts, high unemployment and dilapidated manor houses. The narrative deals with memories and descriptions of human events and history, describing the extermination of Herring in the Baltic Sea, the English bombing of German cities in WWII, Ethnic genocide in the Balklands, devastation in the Congo due to colonization and opium wars in China.
'The past seems to flow into his work with a strange hallucinatory quality, one set of recollections embedded in another set of memories, one narrative voice metamorphosing into another, as though consciousness comes into its most vivide imaginative life in a state askin to dreaming.' (Cook, 2014; 10)
Each of the ten chapters begins at the East Coast, but head towards painful death, extinction and disaster. This repeated sense of repetition via the construction and deconstruction of identity creates a circular sense of movement. The sense of oscillation and movement repeating over and over again revolves around the impossibility and ruthless destruction of human history. Sebald's contention is that the past of a civilisation works on an individual in the same way as personal trauma. No landscape could be consoling or sublime but every tract of European soil is ingrained with the the traces of the natural history of destruction.
The subject of memory and the idea of returning to the past is explored in Iain Sinclair's, book Edge of the Orison, in which he re-traces the steps of the romantic poet John Clare who in 1841 undertook a three and a half day journey in order to escape from his incarceration in an asylum in Epping Forest and the subsequent walk back to his home village of Glimton on the border of Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Clare's journey is more of a personal exploration than that of Sebald.
'I had imagined that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison and that a days journey was able to find it so I went on with my heart full of hopes, pleasures and discoveries expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I could look down like looking into a large pit and see into its secrets the same as I believed I could see heaven by looking into the water.' John Clare (Sinclair, 2006; 1)
During the walk Clare orientated himself by lying down at night with his head facing towards the north, in order to know which way to go in the morning. He kept heading towards the horizon (spelt 'orison') to bring him back into the circle of his knowledge, the local landscape that grounded his identity. During the walk he ate grass in order to survive and by the end he was hallucinating due to his exertions and hunger. Via the process of escaping and walking away from the place of his incarceration it could be argued that Clare was attempting to open an alternative life and follow a different path as well as recovering an older version of himself.
Although both of the walks of Sebald and Clare operate on a personal level, Sebald's past and the memories he unearths repeatedly return to the past history of destruction inherent within a nation from which he is unable to escape. Everything he glimpses on his journey leads him back to this revelation. For Clare however his walk represents a personal journey forward away from the madness and incarceration of his present life, into his past in order to escape the present and ground himself within the familiar landscape of a life that no longer exists. In both cases it is the landscape that holds the clues and keys to their lives, manifesting itself in two very different ways.
Experimentation with the circular tondo composition:
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| Study (Untitled), 2015, Oil on MDF, 39 x 39cm |
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| Study I (Untitled), 2015, Oil on MDF, 39 x 39cm |
Making use of two older pieces of work and in a similar vein to the two studies I created using Mousehold Heath as my subject matter, within these two tondo pieces I transposed a series of semi-opaque painted rings onto the surface of a landscape scene. I hoped that this process related back to the idea of something being formed via the process of layering and accumulation.
As discussed within my previous entry by placing geometric shapes on top of elements derived from the landscape my aim was to create a disturbance of the viewing field by combining two disparate elements creating a tension within the composition. I deliberately made the rings opaque so that the underlying painted landscape showed through in order to create the visual impression of something operating beneath a surface, as well as a way of implying something that was embedded.
By using a circular rather than a conventional rectangular or square composition I hoped to create more of an immersive sense as well as turning the landscape into something that was more abstracted and removed from a conventional depiction.
It was pointed out to me during a group critique that the rings had a similar visual feel to tree rings, implying an accumulation and sense of growth, as well as the passage and movement of time. As with the two works that I created on paper I am uncertain as to whether this effect of superimposing geometric shapes on top of my painting is completely effective however I feel that as an experimental piece it creates an intriguing visual dynamic. I am keen to continue to experiment with using a circular composition but am uncertain as to whether the use of overlaid patterns is creating the effect that I am hoping to achieve.
Themes relating to the idea of a hallucination are picked up upon in relation to Sebald's writings and the account of Clare's walk away from madness. Both walks contain the idea of the past flowing into the present and vice-versa, creating a hallucinatory interpretation whereby the past and the present blend together creating a strange mix of fantasy and reality.
Cook, J. (2014) 'After Sebald Essays and Illuminations.' Ipswich: Full Circle Editions Ltd.
Debord, G. and Self, W. (2013) 'Society of the Spectacle.' London: Notting Hill Editions.
Sinclair, I (2006) 'Edge of the Orison.' London: Penugin.
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