Howe: from winternights to summerfinding

I enjoyed The Late Shift yesterday evening, and it’s given me a lot to think about. Watching performance – I like it, I realise, and what I respond to is the sheer ephemerality of it as a medium. As someone who has never been very good at picking up plotlines, I sometimes struggle to get to grips with what I’m actually seeing, but once I get it (or someone gives me a clue) I can find it the most evocative and haunting of mediums; something to mull over and hold in the shifting container of memory; maybe for just a while but maybe, if something resonates, for ever. Documentary photos can help to keep the memory going, or can stand up in their own right, but I’m not sure how far they can reconstruct the experience if you weren’t there.

For me as an artist, there’s a complexity here in that I tend to prefer private performance which would I suppose be better described as intervention. And yes, the ephemeral nature of that appeals to me greatly, too. Also the idea that people *might* notice what I’m doing or find the things that I leave for them to find, but it’s all quite subtle. At this stage I know this approach partly stems from my own shyness – I can’t imagine having the guts to ask people to sit or stand around and watch me doing something. But at the same time I’m trying not to beat myself up about it even though I’m aware of my limitations and how they affect the way I plan my work. I do actually like making subtle interventions, and they are, I think, appropriate to the subjects I explore.

It won’t, therefore, come as a surprise when I say that I didn’t actually hand my Howe flyers to anyone yesterday. However, I did leave them on tables, on sofas and at the reception desk, and I was happy enough that I was able to do that. I can tell myself that it’s consistent with my practice anyway!

Today, I’ve been revisiting the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Elfin Hill. Just two translations seem to be readily available, but some of the differences between those translations are interesting in themselves. I think of the way tales change subtlely as they are repeated backwards and forwards over time – perhaps back and forth across the North Sea. It reminds me, too, of the way hill names may have changed as word of mouth turned tricky Scandinavian words into something more homely. Potato Hill, anyone?

Just time for a quick post today as we’re off out to The Late Shift at SCVA in Norwich. This is a fantastic free event, giving performance and installation artists an opportunity to put something on ‘for one night only’. Not only that, but the current exhibitions are open, and free, and the cafe/bar stays open for the evening. It’s a monthly event, but I’ve heard rumours that it may have fallen victim to recent cuts, in which case it’s likely to be scheduled less frequently – what a shame.

http://www.scva.org.uk/whatson/late_wednesdays/?id…

I’ve just been printing out little A6 flyers about Howe to leave on tables and perhaps even feel brave enough to hand out to anyone who looks friendly. When I say ‘about Howe’ there’s actually no information at all, other than the address of this blog. But that’s as far as I’ve got, and once there’s a project website I’ll be linking it from here anyway. So I think it’s worth the small effort of making flyers, especially so if the rumours are correct and there’s to be a longer gap between Late Shifts after this month.

I’ve been enjoying Nicholas Hedges’ blog, A Line Drawn In Water, so I checked out his website, which I’ve been dipping into and finding very rewarding.

http://www.nicholashedges.co.uk

I see some similarities in the ways we work, and I’ve found it valuable to really consider his approaches and compare them with my own. This is from his biography, and it certainly struck a chord:

Walking, both as a means of creating work and being a work in itself (as with artists like Richard Long) has become an increasingly important element in my practice. Phenomenological approaches to archaeology and landscape have enabled me to articulate ways in which we can remember those who’ve left nothing of their existence. Through being in the landscape and researching the ‘nowness’ of the present, I see paths as traces left by ‘place-making’ people, where every path is a story, comprising tens of thousands of others.

Human beings, ‘leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route’. When we consider in light of this, the etymology of the word writing (derived from the Old English term writan – meaning to incise runic letters in stone) we can say that human beings write themselves on (or in the case of my forebears, deep beneath) the landscape – they leave a trace. Henri Bergson wrote that our ‘whole psychical existence is something just like this single sentence… I believe,’ he said, ‘that our whole past still exists:’ the whole past does indeed exist, upon and within these pathways, as sentences, written in the landscape by people over countless centuries.

Across this meshwork of pathways, we record our own stories and play back those of people in the past. History is a dialogue between us….

This is partly how I see Howe – the need to take a phenomenological approach, so that the experience of ‘now’ (with the understanding that some aspects of my experience will be shared with people who lived ‘then’) is the key. Walking may well be important in this. I’ve already undertaken several walks to the tops of named hills, and plan to formalise or structure these in some way. I also plan to carry out certain actions on the tops of hills; actions (or perhaps staged photography with props) that refer to the names of those hills, and thereby make reference to human interaction with the landscape.

‘Our whole past still exists’ – yes, it does, and I hope to find ways to express this. I won’t be working with my own family history, as Nicholas Hedges does so poignantly. But in a way I will, as surely the point is that however hazily distant our Anglo-Saxon or even Neolithic ancestors lie from me, they are very much part of my own family history, and have had a very real input into who I am.

Child Rowland, setting out from Carlisle towards Elfland, comes to a round green hill terraced from top to bottom, walks round it three times widdershins and calls for the door to open. It leads to a long passage, studded like a rough grotto with gems. At the end he finds himself in a vast hall. From the arched vault hung a carbuncle which by magic illuminated the room, and by its light Child Rowland saw his lost sister, and the king of Elfland, whom he slew. The fairy hill in Child Rowland might be a distant memory of chambered tombs such as Maes Howe.

In later years Maes Howe was haunted by something called a hogboy, the Norn version of Norse haugbui, ‘barrow-wight’. Gravemounds in Scandinavia are haunted by these creatures, and rocks or crags by the bergbui; we also hear of alfar who, like the Scots elves and English fairies, could be consulted on magical errands. In Kormaks Saga the witch ordis sends a man in need of healing to ‘a hillock not far from here, in which dwell elves; take the bull which Kormakr slew, and redden the outside of the hill with bull’s blood, and make the elves a feast with the flesh; and you will be healed’. The similarities with British rituals are clear, but the difference lies in the fact that the Norse haugr would contain, and be known to contain, an ancestral burial; there are in fact a great many stories about the hero descending into some howe in search of treasure, and there grappling with the dead man within. Such an animated corpse, or draugr, is a figure of horror and not to be compared with the peaceful and benevolent dead, usually ancestral kings, who responded with good luck and fertility to the living when people venerated their mounds.

Olaf of Geirstad received offerings made on his gravemound, and for that reason was known as an alf – which very much suggests that the dead man was seen as approximating to the world of natural spirits, and that the spirits were not simply an extended group of dead men. In Christian Norway it was forbidden to believe (and therefore evidently was believed) that the landvaettir lived in groves, waterfalls and haugar. The early Icelandic settlers, shortly after landing, made compacts with certain Otherworldly beings living under stones and hills. This cannot have been a cult of the ancestors, for there were as yet no ancestors to cultivate.

It is curious is that the Norse colonists of Orkney and Shetland had been accustomed to bury their dead in gravemounds right up until the introduction of Christianity in the eleventh century, while the Gaelic settlers in the Hebrides came from regions where barrow burial had been virtually unknown for two thousand years. Yet you could not discern any such difference in their fictions, or insights, about haunted mounds. It is enough to persuade me that the folklore of barrows does not derive from memories of their historic role or prehistoric origin, but from something else entirely.

And there ends Hollow Hills. For my earlier project Festial, I did make reference to the Childe Roland story, by walking around the church widdershins three times, holding a video camera on a long pole (yes, really). And I have never used that footage. It was part of the work I did in response to medieval Palm Sunday. That was over two and a half years ago now, and I’m uncertain about how valid it would be to develop at this point, such a long time later. But perhaps it has relevance again now?

The Childe Roland story might be interesting to revisit for Howe, especially as it feels quite Northern with its reference to the King of Elfland. I also like the idea of elves, or ‘barrow-wights’ residing in hills – which, if I understand Jeremy Harte’s argument correctly, might in this country be any hill-like feature in the landscape. A final point to remember is that the magic of hills may equally lie in the experience of them now rather than purely as a sort of repository of ancestral memory.

The persistent legends of secret passages into hollow hills invite links with the megalithic legacy of chambered tombs, because these are . . . well, secret passages into hollow hills. But would medieval, or Roman, or Iron Age people have shared that experience? Even today, after archaeological restoration has done its best, there are not many sites in England and Wales where a tunnel leads into the hill. Nine times out of ten the fate of a chambered tomb was to have its mound robbed and the capstones of the passage and side chambers slid away for building purposes. The original entrances had been covered not long after the disuse of the sites by earth slipping from the mound, so that it is fair to say that between 2500 BC and AD 1800 no-one in southern Britain had access to these ‘secret passages’.

This is not to suggest that the great mounds of the Neolithic were not venerated for long ages after their construction. It is just that none of the later worshippers had any idea what was inside them. At Newgrange a golden hoard of Roman workmanship was buried, and coins were offered, by strangers from outside the Irish world – presumably local people were also making gifts, but of more perishable things. All these offerings were made, however, around the standing stones before the tomb, while its decorated kerbstones and entrance passage remained hidden under earth until the mound was cleared in 1699.

There is a paradox here. As a physical object, Newgrange was, until 1699, a rather ragged looking hill with some stones at the foot of it, and to all appearances was no more hollow than Ben Bulben. But as an Otherworldly place, the Bru na Boinne, it was not only hollow inside but positively capacious, containing inter alia the Dagda, his son Oengus ind Oc, three fruit trees which were always in fruit, an inexhaustible cauldron, and three times fifty sons of kings. Moreover it contained these things as a hill, not as a tomb or gravemound. When dispossessed by the sons of Mil, the Tuatha De Danann went into the hills, or sidhe, becoming the People of the Hills, the Aes Sidhe. They did not die but transformed themselves into a invisible people.

Jeremy Harte seems to be re-stating his opinion that people in the past had no idea of the significance of ‘hollow’ hills as grave mounds – it was the hill in itself that was the subject of respect or worship. Of course, people may have known something of the significance of ‘hills’ such as Newgrange; even if only as a hazy folk-memory. So I’m not sure whether the continuation of this line of reasoning is adding anything new to my ideas.

What is worth thinking about, though, is the persistent idea that ‘special’ hills are larger on the inside than on the outside. The example given is Irish, which makes me a little wary as I don’t feel much connection with the West – indeed, my project is partly about the Northern/Germanic influences that (may) re-echo here. But the ‘capacious hill’ motif can be found in Scandinavian folktales like The Elfin Hill by Hans Christian Anderson, and it’s something I definitely want to explore in my own work.

I can see that Howe has to be rooted here in Norfolk – I can’t help that; it’s what draws me to wanting to do the project at all. Does that matter; does it sound too ‘local’ and narrow? If I’d been commissioned to make work based on a particular area or landscape feature, I wouldn’t have that anxiety. Hopefully, something about the work will resonate with others. But can I plan that in, or will it happen by itself, if it’s going to happen at all? I’m not sure, but at the same time I don’t think I have it in me to ‘get it right’ before I even begin…

It’s just going to be a case of seeing what happens, but I need some definite structures in place, and mustn’t let myself obsessively cut hill names from newspapers without having other areas of the work planned and hopefully started.