all or nothing

City Centre 12 May 2018 – A walk from town to countryside (Crouch Hill, Oxfordshire, UK)

Walked by Ruth Broadbent and Rhiannon Evans

Blake Morris is walking each of the walks from Ways to Wander by Clare Qualmann and Claire Hind (Triarchy Press, 2015) and inviting others from around the world to either walk with him in person, or remotely. This particular walk was City Centre by Tom Hall. Following the instructions for the walk, I set off to walk out of town, turning back when we crossed the boundary from town to countryside at Crouch Hill and the ancient track, Salt Way, that borders this edge of the town. En route I met up with another artist, Rhiannon Evans to accompany me on the walk. Rhiannon has done a lot of artwork on Crouch Hill so I was delighted that she could join me. We were also joined by over 50 others who were interpreting the walk in different locations around the world. The occasional ping of my phone with updates from these other walking artists added an extra dimension to our walk.

For the start and end of the walk, I walked alone in silence, writing down any observations on paper. Walking together, I made some brief notes but mostly we observed, listened, explored and discussed our encounters along the way. An unexpected feature of this walk was boundaries and barriers. With a new housing estate being built, we found that the old and well-worn permissive tracks regularly used by locals and dog walkers have been closed off, and where they would have come out on Crouch Hill is now being reclaimed by brambles and foliage, as well as the occasional piece of litter. Barriers marked the boundary of the new estate. After coffee and chocolate by the trig point on Crouch Hill, commenting on how the view is beginning to change, we noticed a dog walker crossing the field below that we had tried and failed to enter. We decided to find their route in, so descending onto Salt Way, a track bordered by trees and fields (and also currently undergoing a transformation in parts as new estates are built outside of this boundary line to the town), we walked along it to the main road back into town. With the traffic noise returning, we searched the field hedgerow and ditch for a place to enter. Just as we approached the start of town once again, a small gap in the hedge revealed itself, a new path created as old ones close. I look forward to seeing how the paths continue to shift and change as people and animals make new tracks up to the hill.

Along the way I took square photographs of the ground, documenting the shift in surface. This connects with my current artwork, in particular A Line Across England, where I take rubbings of the ground surface as I follow lines on foot or by bicycle. Although this walk started in town in an urban area full of tarmac surfaces, I searched out any patches of grass to walk on, from verges to strips between carriageways. Plenty of grass areas and trees cover a particular area of the walk, originally designed as part of a social housing project, and fortunately still continue to exist. Gradually the smooth urban manicured grass, punctuated by the ruts created by urban domestic cars, changed to undulations in the track more familiar to the countryside. Sounds changed along the way with birdsong present throughout and traffic and human activity fading in and out. Although a familiar route that I have walked many times, the nature of this event meant that it became a slow and contemplative walk, adding new resonances that will continue to echo on my future wanders in this area.

The following text and photographs record the surface of the ground and accompanying observations as I walked. The photographs are organised in three lines, the first and last are the solo start sections of the walk, and the second central column is walking together up and down the hill. The text is as I wrote it at the time, with some minor edits added a few days later. (Click images to enlarge).

Rhiannon’s writing on our walk is as follows:

A wander up Crouch Hill – with Ruth Broadbent – Sat 12th May 2018

It was strange. Just when I was feeling disconnected, came the request. Ruth asked if I’d like to join her and others, globe-wide, on a walk. Hers was going to be up Crouch Hill.

I ‘d almost finishing reading Patti Smith’s M train and already feeling the sense of loss associated with ‘missing a book’ before I had even finished it, so, of course, I said ‘yes’.

When Ruth arrived, I suggested we follow the route I had, at one time, taken so very frequently, almost daily.

It felt recent, until I started walking that day, but actually was months ago. Perhaps not since the building work began, I guess.

As we approached the site and I felt like a traitor. I thought it looked smarter, somehow; tidy.

But when we reached the gateway into the big field I was shocked and hurt. Our way up, alongside the hedge, along the headland, so familiar; was blocked.

There was a high metal construction fence with notices about consideration and respect.

I felt excluded, and imprisoned.

We turned back and went the road-way.

Within minutes, a joyful coincidence – seeing excited faces and waving from a white van parked on the kerb. A mixture of anxiety and anticipation was palpable; exuded by parents and son through the van. Shared feelings of loss and gain were visible through the window, and as they moved on, so did we.

Discussing routes, ownership and permissions, we walked slowly upwards across the mown grass to scrappy woodland. As we searched for paths we’d both walked before, but separately, we made our way through; clambering over branches, caught in brambles, stumbling, finding mossy roots and glimpses of sky; caught in a tale of mystery from time ago.

We rambled this way for sometime (or was it just a few minutes?) emerging almost where we entered, but changed, as in all good tales of wanders and discovery.

Our discoveries were banks of earth, high and newly pushed upwards; fences old and young, wood and metal; and detritus bottles, cans; and a fragment of ‘vintage lino’, which I carried home, and kept as a treasure for my ‘collection’.

Reaching the more familiar path, the hawthorn was overgrown from few passings  over the long winter and wet spring. Slippy paths and uneven descents have claimed ankles and wrists in their time. Maybe these routes are less popular with dog-walkers now; no passable route down the hill to the road, anymore?

On the summit we sat, ate and drank, reflected and ‘supposed’- seeing the ingress of the development below into the next precious field.

I thought I saw a friend, Louise with her dogs. Trying to find a way through to the road, near the old way. I called her- but it wasn’t. She was in her garden, not visible, half- a mile or so away.

Ruth used an app. to help us name the hills. The sun shone determinedly bright on the screen making the text difficult to read and our decisions, unconvincing.

We returned by walking back down the hill to the West and took the Salt Way to Giant’s Cave. Along the main road back to my house we looked for new paths through the hedge, formed by others. This was for future reference, giving access, once more, to the big field,a way up the headland, through rough boundary gaps, to the top.

It seemed the right thing to do.

Not far from some pre-cut, carefully laid new turf and a neatly cleared ditch,

we found one.

For more info on this project, my work or Rhiannon’s:

Ruth Broadbent:  www.ruthbroadbent.com and on Twitter  Facebook Page Instagram

Rhiannon Evans  Twitter and blog at https://vectorcatalyst.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/public-viewprivate-view/ and https://vectorcatalyst.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/a-disturbing-pre-occupation/

Blake Morris: A Wander Is Not a Slog (includes an invitation to join him in a walk and links to the participants of this walk) #awanderisnotaslog

Artists in the Field: Ephemeral Landscapes and Experimental Geographies

A personal response to the symposium within the context of my own art practice

‘If in doubt return to the field’ was Dr Harriet Hawkins’ opening to the symposium, Artists in the Field: Ephemeral Landscapes and Experimental Geographies at the Parasol Unit, London, on 16 January 2016. Serendipitous timing, as I am moving back towards working in the landscape and reflecting on my practice, considering how I will re-encounter ‘the field’ as well as the nature of the fieldwork itself and potential outcomes. Both are fluid and liable to change. I have starting points without end points. When I asked the panel about the extent to which their methodologies and outcomes are defined from the start, I was pleased to hear that everyone takes a creative and experimental approach, and it was useful to hear how they find ways around the inevitable need to pin these approaches down in applications for residencies to PhDs. The phrase ‘pilot project’ used in geography is one that I will bear in mind.

My past works responding to landscape have come out of a personal encounter through walking and involve activities such as observing, photographing, sketching and making both on site and back in the studio.  My own interest in investigating the history and present identity of a particular site, my gender, and my love of being in nature and landscape are unavoidably integral to the way in which I work and any ‘outcomes’. I therefore instantly knew that I was in the right place when Dr Hawkins spoke of how geographical encounters and engagements with ‘the field’ are now seen as being far from neutral with the elitism of the past expanding to be more culturally diverse.

For 11 Tracks (2002), I repeatedly walked around the tracks encircling the base of a hill, responding to their identity and history, discovering that the hill was once the site of an ancient fort. My own walking made me think about all the people who had walked these tracks and why. An unexpected outcome was seeing the work exhibited in a gallery and realising that I had inadvertently created a new ‘track’ for the viewer to walk around and encounter. I contemplated the relationship between continual attacks on, and changes to, our environment and how nature can be encountered within a gallery or museums context. Some years later I revisited this work, this time measuring the walk in my own paces, using the length of my stride, creating a more personal mapping for SP386 389 (2007-8).

In contemplating a return to the field, this time through journeys of varying length on foot or by bicycle, I looked forward to the presentations by five artists from the Temporal School of Experimental Geography (TSOEG) and found both resonances with my own practice as well as new inspiration.

I found Corinne Silva’s description of how one artwork leads to another to be particularly apt as I have meandered my way over the years from identity and place, people and objects, to the shape, form and function of objects when encased in (string) lines. This then led me into creating a series of works that consider the nature of line and drawing, scribbling and doodling, and I have totally immersed myself in this for some time now creating a series of drawings and ‘drawing sculpture’. Whilst some of these have been exhibited, I have a whole body of work that has not yet been shown and does not have an online presence (on my list of things to do this year!). Initially my scribbled lines were the result of a doodle on a train and had nothing to do with landscape. Gradually I have moved from trying to challenge and resist the way in which drawing any sense of a horizon line across a page inevitably suggests landscape, to finding that my Imagined Lines (as I am currently calling this body of work), are leading me back into landscape, in both a macro and micro way, and wanting to create new work that responds to where I am at now.

Hearing how TSOEG artists respond to landscape showed just how diverse artwork can be and yet still connect, both within and outside the group. How to communicate ideas visually, verbally and in other ways was something that came up in most of the artists’ talks. Corinne Silva’s photographic works visually connected the landscapes of Spain and Morocco, which whilst politically and geographically separated, also have similarities. She also described how the personal event of inheriting, and now being responsible for, the ‘mother geranium’ of her grandmother led to her thinking about wider issues and creating a new work (this had a personal resonance as I have also inherited my nan’s geranium which she grew from a cutting grown by my great grandparents).

For Copper Geographies, Ignaccio Acosta’s processes of working, and his personal movement across the globe, reveal the hidden power relations and exploitation in the landscape, highlighting the toxic trail between isolated landscapes and everyday lives of people in Europe. Luce Choules (the founder of TSOEG) described how she walks, cycles, swims, maps and surveys, creating a personal experience of place and a physical and emotional geography of places. Poetry and performance are important in her practice and she left the audience entranced with a reading, illustrating the power of this medium to visually generate images and encounters with a place in the minds of others. Emma Smith engages with the landscape in a very different way, through a School for Tourists that uses walks, talks, discussions, debates and other methods to engage with people to address issues around the roles of host and guest, rights and responsibilities. The process is the artwork and it is often not appropriate to document or remove the work from its original context through exhibitions.

Andrew Ranville  (founder of Rabbit Island residency) reflected on the nature of ‘the field’ and his experiences of being on expeditions, working alongside scientists and researchers. He considered the wider question of what it means to be an artist in the field and how we visually represent this experience or try to create a resulting ‘experience’ for a viewer in a gallery once ‘the field’ is no longer there, whether through photography or sculpture or any other medium. He increasingly feels that the experience of being in the field is, for him, the artwork. ‘Mapping’ is a word that came up several times during the symposium and Ranville described the inherent satisfaction of immersing oneself in a place, drawing on traditional cartographic skills and artistic practice to create a map rather than simply reading a satellite image or map. As the audience and other artists joined the discussion, some of these questions were discussed at greater length highlighting not only the diversity of practice but also the common concerns of artists working in the field.

In the weeks following the symposium I have thought a lot about what was discussed and also remembered why I moved away from working in the field, whether urban or rural. Whilst following the paths of underground rivers from above ground, I found that I was struggling to visually represent my ideas, research, fieldwork and experiences of being in the field in a creatively interesting way. With so many places wanting works that respond to identity and place, I felt that my initial responses of walking, photographing, mapping, researching, sketching and making, were too predictable and not generating creative outcomes that I was happy with.

My current work on Imagined Lines is naturally leading me back into the field so it was great to feel so inspired and energised after the symposium and discover the work of Dr Harriet Hawkins of Royal Holloway, University of London, and meet some of the TSOEG artists and staff at the Parasol Unit. Everyone was very friendly and approachable and generous with their time and in sharing their thoughts and discussing their practice. Some of them are involved with the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and art so I will look out for future events there too.

All in all, a great day out. I also enjoyed seeing Julian Charrière’s exhibition at the Parasol Unit and particularly liked how, in We Are All Astronauts (2013), he has sanded the surface of globes and suspended them above ‘sandpaper’ created from the dust, thus erasing and blurring political, economic and cultural territories, borders and boundaries to create one ‘land(scape)’.

So where now? I want to complete Imagined Lines, find an exhibition space, finish overhauling my website, and then return to the field. I take inspiration from the way in which Eva Hesse wrote in her diaries and letters how being somewhere and responding to what is there, in her case string in a factory in Germany, inevitably leads to new work and ideas. In my case, years of experience have taught me to trust that when I embark on my forthcoming journeys, the very process of moving from my imagined ‘landscapes’ to re-immersing myself in the field will generate ideas and artworks and lead me somewhere. A couple of days after returning from the symposium, my head buzzing with ideas and inspiration, I received an email asking me if I could work with a group of degree students, focusing on drawing and techniques that I use in my own projects. Yet more serendipitous timing – I have created a project called ‘Encountering the field: a creative and experimental response to a site through drawing’. The timing could not be better!

 www.ruthbroadbent.com

@Ruth_HBroadbent

‘all or nothing’ was how I was once aptly described by my friend’s mum. It then became the title of my first solo exhibition. Contemplating a title for this blog, it was the first title to spring to mind and, as it also describes where I am now, I will stick with it. I am finally attempting to embrace the world of social media and dive in headfirst. It has taken some time for me to be convinced that it might enhance my practice rather than detracting from it (lack of time, already have people to discuss art with, it will take away from making time, overcoming private into public…). The shift from seeing social media updates and blogging as a chore, to embracing them as an opportunity for reflection and dialogue, has been a big leap. Having now followed or dipped into many blogs, I have enjoyed their insights and can see how I could potentially use them.

So, I have joined Twitter @Ruth_HBroadbent and am surprised by how much I like it. I’ve tried a few tweets to set the tone for the kind of content that I might include, ranging from info on and insights into my own work and ways of thinking, exhibitions and books, to links to things that interest me or might be of interest to others reading… It feels strange to be tweeting to the unknown and is still quite formal and lacks spontaneity (I still think about and draft tweets before posting), but no doubt that will change as time goes on. I’ve also set up an Instagram account ruth_broadbent for images, although at the moment I seem to be more drawn to Twitter and am also putting images on there. I’ve updated my LinkedIn profile which will probably be more of a link to my website than a platform that I use. A lot of people have also said to join Facebook but for the time being I feel overwhelmed enough trying to work out how Twitter and Instagram work.

The next thing to overhaul is my website www.ruthbroadbent.com to be responsive to the different ways that people view websites now. I would also like to include a blog on it. Having previously used Dreamweaver, I am now looking into using WordPress. Every stage is taking ages and a lot of googling for info. It is taking up a huge amount of my time, mostly because I’m not an expert at web design and want to include a portfolio of my work as well as a blog. I wonder if the time that I’m investing in redesigning my website is worth taking so much time away from being in the studio. Hopefully it will all be worth it once it is up and running. So, ‘all or nothing’, I’m diving in and look forward to seeing where it leads me.

Image: Identity Cube (detail, ‘all or nothing’), 2005