- Venue
- Art Circuit Touring Art Circuit Touring Exhibitions
- Location
FLOW : four ponds , four artists
J ulie Livsey , Julia Barton, Karen Rann , Susan Grant
Curated by Cynthia Morrison-Bell and the artists and organised by Art Circuit Touring Exhibitions
A process of becoming
On the Western edge of the Northumberland National Park is an extraordinary artistic event. Four artists have interacted with four man-made ponds in a spirit of experimentation and investigation creating a multi- sensory experience.
The resulting works demand that the viewer makes a journey to seek them out.[1] Light years away from the modernist idea of art as a discrete and pure practice, these works cross boundaries; not finished entities but fluid and open ended, they represent something that is in the process of becoming.
The artists are researchers, drawing on the laws of chance, microbiology, hydrology and social history in order to do what art does best – make the invisible visible so that through their eyes we see the landscape with a heightened awareness.
One of the artists, Julia Barton, owns the ponds and the land surrounding them, the ponds being sited near the tiny hamlet of Donkleywood on the edge of Kielder Forest, next to a disused railway track. Living and working in the Northumberland area the four artists know the landscape intimately, and it is this intimate knowledge that has inspired and driven the project. On a bright autumn afternoon in September, a day of sun, wind and scudding clouds, three weeks after the project ‘opened’ I was able to view Flow and, through listening to the artists, understand how it was constantly in the process of change.
Julie Livsey, has, for the last ten years, produced work which relates to, is situated in or floats on water. She is interested in the creative process and how water can ‘interrupt’ that process, according to the laws of chance. The first pond contained Drift, one of her investigations into this phenomenon, a chaotic and seemingly random mass of hollow squares of grass, some flattened and floating just beneath the water surface, some with their lush grass poking up like a bad hairdo. Coloured floating balls, placed within the grass squares to identify their drifting movement, bobbed around the pond in no apparent order. On close inspection it was evident that there was a system in place consisting of fifteen squares of grass in groups of three that more or less formed a grid, each unit having a regularity that doesn’t happen in nature except at a microscopic level. This ‘ system ‘ has been put in place by the artist as a means to inform a series of drawings of these random movements.
The artist did not want to know in advance what might happen to the units when they were placed in the pond. She expected them to drift – in fact they remained more or less where they were placed due to the constriction of the surrounding water weed. What did happen was totally unexpected – a heron began to visit the pond and settled on the rectangles, flattening the grass and pecking at the balls which floated out of their grassy moorings. The result was a surface of irregularly flattened grass and free floating coloured spheres, which appeared far more organic than the initial rigid fluffy grass squares. It was the ‘letting go’ of control, a key element in the work of the Dadaists and Surrealists, that intrigued Julie above all else, and this enquiring spirit was also demonstrated in the work of Julia Barton found in and around pond number two. T
The separation of the arts and sciences was a nineteenth century phenomenon and it is good to see that many contemporary artists are welding the two back together. Leonardo da Vinci was known, amongst other things, for his investigations into hydraulics, and Julia Barton is also curious about this phenomenon. The ponds were made by the farmer who owned the land before her, and with a National Parks grant he created the ponds in order to improve the biodiversity of the area. The ponds are on a sliding scale of height so that one drains into the other by means of a plastic pipe that is buried under the boulder clay that lines them. Rain Harvester was Julia’s way of revealing this hydrological system. Clusters of funnels surround the pond attached to vertical tubes which feed into horizontal piping. As the water is ‘harvested’ it is dyed blue and eventually its path through the tubes will be apparent. When sufficient has been collected the valve to the next pond will be opened and the transition from pond to pond will be revealed. Needless to say, after the apocalypse and deluge of the summer, September has been maddeningly dry and this part of the work has not yet occurred. The blue water in the translucent funnels and the transparent pipes glinting in the sun created a quite beautiful vista demonstrating that true mix of science and art.
In the third pond Karen Rann has utilised the science of microbiology to create The Littoral Zone, which is the area of water in ocean or lake nearest to the shore. Specifically it is water that is less than 15 feet in depth, the combination of water and high exposure to sunlight resulting in the zone being home to most aquatic plant life. It was the micro organisms of the pond that intrigued Karen and she had a sample of the pond examined at Newcastle University and worked from the resulting photographs. At the macro level geometric forms are obviously man made, (an example being Julie Livsey’s floating grass squares) yet at micro level organisms are often found to be geometric. Karen found that the pond was teeming with life so she selected three representative types of microbes, those that formed mats, those that formed rectangular strips and those that were almost flower-like in appearance. She created three forms of plant life, which like a sci-fi fantasy had grown and emerged from the pond’s surface. Firstly floating mats made from bubble wrap stuffed with plastic bags which glowed in shades of blue and green, the subtle changes in colouration echoing the mutation of microbes through differing exposure to sunlight. Secondly some strips of plastic parted the water weed. Representing the rectangular chains of organisms they shimmered and shivered on the surface. Finally some large transparent flower forms were both floating on and partly submerged in the water, the combination of the floating forms and the light falling on them created a surreal and hallucinogenic experience.
Susan Grant’s installation in and beside the fourth pond, Dispossession, was the result of her investigations into the social history of the area. Sue chose her location because of the railway hut nearby. Running alongside the pond is the remains of a railway closed in the Beeching cuts of the 1960s around the time Kielder Water was created. [2] To make this reservoir a valley was flooded and 30 homes were submerged beneath the water, the inhabitants having been the recipients of a compulsory purchase order. Newspaper cuttings showed the passionate debate that ensued, between those that felt the deliberate flooding of houses was a social outrage to those who believed that the Kielder reservoir would ensure a reliable water supply to the area; and, with its attendant water sports and sailing would bring much-needed tourism. Sue’s response to her research was simple and elegant. She floated tiny red Monopoly ‘houses’ at each end of this last and very long pond, indeed it nearly earned the title of ‘lake’. This evoked the notion of the submerging of the houses and the way the railway track reverted to nature. It also acted as a metaphor for the way in which history covers over unpalatable truths only to have them revealed by future researchers. The tiny, vulnerable red houses bobbing at both ends of the lake surrounded by a sea of green were achingly beautiful, the whole suggesting a Constable landscape. (It is worth remembering that Constable is noted for painting many of his harmonious rural idylls at a time when agricultural workers were destroying farm machinery and setting fire to hayricks.)[3]
Adding to the vista were red ribbons tied to the trees between railway track and pond printed with comments gathered from the artist’s interviews with local inhabitants. Sue had set up a table with blank ribbons and had invited the public to write comments on the events surrounding the flooding of the houses and the closing of the railway, so new ribbons were continually added to the trees introducing the dimension of oral history.
Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change. [4]These words written by the playwright Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s are equally valid today. The variety of the installations in and around these four ponds, and the way the work is more about process than final resolution is a clear demonstration of the breadth of practice, depth of research and excitement found in the best of contemporary art.
Josie Bland [email protected]
Josie Bland is a lecturer and writer
[1] Two examples are The Lightning Field, (1977), by the American sculptor Walter De Maria, is a work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of southwestern New Mexico and Robert Smithson's monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) which is located on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. [2] The Beeching Axe is an informal name for the British Government's attempt in the 1960s to reduce the cost of running the British railway system. The name derives from the main author of the report The Reshaping of British Railways, Dr. Richard Beeching. Although this report also proposed the development of new modes of freight service and the modernisation of trunk passenger routes, it is best remembered for recommending the wholesale closure of what it considered to be little-used and unprofitable railway lines, and the removal of stopping passenger trains and closure of local stations on other lines which remained open. The Kielder Reservoir was constructed between 1975 and 1981 and was opened by the Queen in 1982. It took two years for the valley to fill with water completely once construction was completed. [3] The social and political context of Constable’s work is discussed in BARRELL, J. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730 -1840. Cambridge University Press. 1983 [4] BRECHT, B. ‘Against Georg Lucaks’ republished in New Left Review 1988
