REFLECTING ON MY PRACTICE IN THE FRAME OF THE PGMPC

Introduction

The project Voicing the soil in Herefordshire during the Anthropocene epoch is about soil. It is shaped by a geological metaphor and centres on a map of soils, showing the influences shaping soil from mesofauna to the United Nations.

Based on a C19 geological cross-section by the geologist William Smith, the map runs from Snowdonia to London via Hereford. The research enquiry for Voicing the Soil looks at the following points:

•       Critically addressing the new geological epoch (the Anthropocene) in Herefordshire

•       Focusing on the new layer of soil added to Herefordshire Old Red Sandstone.

•       Finding out what voices there are in this layer

•       What social, cultural and political forces shape this new geological epoch?

•       In all the outcomes, when dealing with places and people, Lucy Lippard’s Eight Ethical Principles (1997) inspired me and became part of the outcomes generated.

In this practice-led research, although the above points look ‘tidy’, in fact procedures and methods were emergent, haphazard and sometimes chaotic. As planned, the research produced information through interviewing participants. Yet knowledge was imparted also by ‘l’inframince’ which ‘stretches the limits of articulation’ (Duchamp, The Creative Act, 1957). Knowledge I drew from the interviews was somehow affected by places where participants were happy to meet. For example to talk about his farm, soil and farming, a Herefordshire Councillor chose to meet in the building associated with his official function (Herefordshire council building). How can I account for the way this affected the knowing: a category labelled Learning by Osmosis? How could this be measured as an outcome?  As Irit Rogoff suggests ‘we have been adamant in (…) insisting that each project needs to develop its own methodology and its own structure’ (2010, p 37).

In this spirit, the field work conducted where I live, recording interviews, developed its own structure and wove together subjective experience and facts. Although the format of the interview is included in the Method section of my initial project proposal, Will Edwards’ dairy cows fell in love with the sound recorder’s machine (Perry Walker) and the interview format fell apart. Later, the recorder broke down in a pub when meeting Tim Monckton, the soil biologist, who came back for a meal at mine, where I forgot to record him but enjoyed being together. I felt amateurish and wondered how much value our meeting had? 

Collaborators: artist-fabricators who author the project and sign as JUST DUST

From research to practice: changes and emergence

Voicing the soil is modular. Each piece offers a critical way to view the project and all the modules ‘talk’ to each other and affect the audience.

There are four objects in a broad spectrum of media including

 -a handmade geological section of Wales and England, showing Hereford

-a newspaper published in 2119 and set in the future Federation of the Marches

-a climate walk in the future taking place anywhere

-four short soundscapes entitled Amphibians, Animalia, The Old Red Sandstone, Spiders Sex Pheromone (available here: https://soundcloud.com/user-862516631/old-red-sandstone/recommended)

A. Changes to the project

Voicing the soil is interdisciplinary. On the art side it involves five collaborators including a calligrapher, a technical illustrator, a watercolourist and a graphic and sound designer. They are part of the precariat in Herefordshire, one of the features of the Anthropocene. They author the project and sign it as JUST DUST.

 1. From palimpsest to infographic. Each art discipline has its own material constraints. These dictated some of the project outcomes. For example, originally all the calligraphy was to be overwritten on the geographical features creating a palimpsest. This would have meant writing at angles that were impossible for the calligrapher. There was also the difficulty of applying colour washes over calligraphic ink, with the risk of bleeding. The solution was to produce something close to an infographic.

2. Conditions of making.  Starting from the strata configured by engineer William Smith’s Geological Section From London to Snowdon (1817), I had planned to represent the conditions of making the strata of the Anthropocene. However this could not be made.  As a metaphor and de facto, JUST DUST added the new layer of the Anthropocene to Smith’s map. This layer brings with it the social, gendered and generational inequalities of this new geological epoch also called the ‘Capitalocene (Moore, 2015). My original plan was to ask the highly-skilled makers to write short biographies to enable a glimpse into their lives, with the revelation - perhaps shocking to some - that they are part of the precariat. There were two problems. First, some were reluctant to do this. Second, those biographies were in danger of overloading the piece. Given the constraints of energy, deadlines, and budget, I have decided that it is not possible to do full justice to this within this project. One of the newspaper articles reflects on the treatment of equally skilled farmers by exploitative supermarkets in an article about ‘repeasantation’. The shift from the word ‘farmer’ to that of ‘peasant’ creates a tension. The aim is to highlight questions of ownership of the land and in turn, raises the question of the gig economy in farming.

3. Critiquing the idea of the Anthropocene. The project intended to develop a critical approach to representing the Anthropocene. Writings by proponents of this new epoch, Bruno Latour and Dona Haraway take the Anthropocene as granted. And so did my initial project, the map in particular. However regarding humans as a biological and geological force is not a new idea. This is supported by Christophe Bonneuil, a historian of science. Bonneuil sees a pattern of continuity rather than a break leading to the Anthropocene (2016). Bonneuil rejects the notion of the advent of the Anthropocene because the symptoms and agents responsible for that damage continue to be the same. These recurring problems, from C18 onwards, manifest themselves nowdays on a larger scale.

Given this understanding, how to represent the Anthropocene critically to include this strand, continuity, in the Soil project?

a. Continuity is represented by showing a hand-made map. If I had used a Google map, the representation would have suggested a break, which would be false to my understanding of the concept.

b. The possibility for a viewer to identify with the hands of the map makers is probable and so is their identification with the familiar geographical location of Hereford sited on the map which also aims to acquaint the audience to a local knowledge that is continuous, felt and lived.

c. Using a mock newspaper fictionally printed in 2119 helps trigger reflections on 2019 and its ‘early map of the Anthropocene’. The newspaper is a staging of the map, a ‘mise en abyme’, a playful duplication of the idea of the Anthropocene with a twist: the newspaper reveals the power relations at play in the 2019 map, how various conflicts of social interests manifested themselves: private property, the commons, and their effects on the bigger ecological predicaments of 2019.

The newspaper is a flow of objective facts - in the Map Key - combined to the subjective or opinionated and lyrical tone of articles authored by various voices who provide new metaphors for environmental and economic sustainability. The 2119 utopia is also a dystopia with its ideology and system of representations. Darker sides reveal conflicts with farmers who have become peasants and Nobel prize winners rather than money receive an upgrade to their social credit rating.

B. Emergences in the project

Voicing the soil is modular and all the modules ‘talk’ to each other and affect the audience.

1.Time. What is revealed from this conversation between the different modules is the absence of a fixed time. For example, when one looks at the hand painted geological map, it weaves together the deep past that extends behind you and contemporary references such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring which started the ecological movement in the 1960s.

However this experience of the map is punctured by the newspaper, which re-contextualises the map in 2119 to shift to an imagined future time. This shifting experience of time creates a feeling of ambiguity and ephemerality. This allows the viewer to imagine several possible realities.

The Climate Walk game has a similar effect because it is a request to travel into the future to imagine what future repercussions your behaviour will have.

The soundscape, Old Red Sandstone does the opposite and takes you back into deep time, as the map does. In sum, Voicing the Soil is polyphonic and enables people to view soil in the Anthropocene from unusual angles.

You can listen to Old Red Sandstone: https://soundcloud.com/user-862516631/old-red-sandstone

C. Changes lead to new research and new outputs

1. New philosophers.  I really shifted my understanding of the Anthropocene from Donna Haraway’s coupling of humans/non-humans (2016) and Bruno Latour ’nature does not exist’ (1991) to Virginie Maris who argues that: ‘the destructive patterns of contemporary societies may lie in the hierarchy between humans and non-humans much more than in the recognition of separate realms between culture and nature.’ (2017).

Virginie Maris’ idea is visible in the Newspaper recording the successful rewilding of nature with a picture of a healthy wolf.  Her idea also informs the soundscapes which include side by side two realms that of:

- scientists dealing with nature (culture) in Spiders Sex Pheromone and The Old Red Sandstone

-nature represented in its own right in Amphibians and Anonymous where creatures continue their own life underneath our feet, unseen.

You can listen to the soundscapes here: https://soundcloud.com/user-862516631/amphibians/recommended

Processes: audience(s) and collaborators generate knowledge and authorship

Although in the word ‘collaboration’ there is the notion of ‘relation’ and ‘relationship between’, this project is not about ‘relational art’. RA is the term used to describe a participatory strategy defined by curator Nicolas Bourriaud (1998). RA takes place within the symbolic space of a gallery context. My practice is sited in Herefordshire and includes processes that are often collaborative and participatory but rarely collective.

In this project, there are different degrees of collaboration. Collaborators all contribute ideas and knowledge to the project. Collaborators are also my audiences. One of the great pleasures of collaboration is that this audience is supportive- even if there is no broader response or recognition- so it’s important to me because I am a woman, a foreigner and an incomer in Herefordshire.

1. My primary audience includes

- the collaborators-fabricators- they sign the project as JUST DUST.

-there are also six participants- interviewees

- three people form the advisory group (Perry Walker a game inventor, Katie Brymer, graphic designer, and Nick Read). This group contributes useful ideas and contacts to the project. Perry adapted the climate walk game to fit into the format of the project. Katie is commissioned to design the identity of the project. As a reciprocal gesture for Nick Read’s time (Director of the Brightspace Foundation in Herefordshire), the Herefordshire Word-Hoard produced while researching Voicing the Soil will exhibited at the Cider Museum (28 June). The Word-Hoard links up with his foundation’s green activities. 

Participants- interviewees can appropriate parts of the project.  Malcolm is organising a Climate Walk in his local pub. Moira’s voice, the geologist, makes up one of the soundscapes (The Old Red Sandstone). The knowledge of Councillor Price and Duseline, a garden specialist, inform the newspaper content.

2. The secondary audience is my peer group and teachers, and people who come in touch with the project and react to it. For example, we wanted to publicise the Climate Walk in a village newsletter, Julie the editor found the original description hard to understand. Her difficulty changed the way in which I explain the game. 

Climate Walk game participants will create self-knowledge, in that they discover what choices they make (are they prepared to give up flying to leave oxygen for future generations?)

Myriad living species unwittingly inform the soundscapes which reveal sounds of others, normally beyond human auditory range in Spiders Sex Pheromone, Amphibians and Animalia.

3. Why these collaborations?

-Just as the railway brought the popular press to the villages with mind stretching ideas, I hope participants and audiences can find in the project a space where thinking, about a mundane material like soil, is possible. The project creates a space where audiences can think critically about the visual, intellectual or aesthetic aspect of soil.

-My concern is neither about transforming behaviour nor about convincing. Both my primary and secondary audiences contribute to the project and I treat my audience as intelligent. Hopefully this project provides them with a window on other worlds. They do the same for me.

- I am no longer the main person responsible for the artwork.  I value inclusiveness, reciprocity and pluralism, because the outcome is more layered and richer than being the sole author. And this is reflected in the project’s title voicing the soil. The general public is used to the myth of the artist making and signing their work of art. They may struggle to believe that works of art are rarely made in a solitary garret.

Critiquing my practice

My practice and the gig economy. I commission artist-makers who are also housekeepers, doctor’s receptionist, reluctantly self-employed, over qualified and demotivated. They would rather work full time at their trade. In this sense I am part of the gig economy even though I have developed a sensitive relationship. I am part of this system and wish it were different. I am also an agent experienced in and attentive to problems of the precariat. Rather than going for lowest quotes and just skills, I apply other values when choosing artist-makers. One thing important to me is trust and my personal connections to them.  

My research has led me to question rurality. What is contemporary rurality when 50 percent of the global population now lives in cities and 98 percent of the world’s surface is the countryside? From the rural point of view almost 50 percent of the global population lives in the countryside, most of them are a peasant population. During the Anthropocene, is the countryside the future of the city and of the world?  Is rurality to be globalised and urbanised?

My map is based on geological resources. It could instead have studied the local Agri-food sector (apples, bulls, lambs and chickens), permaculture, seasonal workers etc. Entire rural spaces in the county could have been represented as white areas to suggest that these areas are irrelevant in terms of the national economy as a whole. Just as this is shocking now, would it not have been shocking for people living in the era of William Smith’s map to see that their world had been reduced to geology? Similarly in the future will entire areas of rurality be mapped as reserved for nature, as a ‘nature deposit’? (Alter-rurality, 2014)

How do I situate my practice in rural contexts and what paradigms could I use?

Evaluating my work using Lucy Lippard’s criteria. Lippard’s criteria underpin my analysis and critical thinking. Below I reflect on the criteria that I have not already covered above.

-Criterion: OPEN-ENDED enough to be accessible to a wide variety of participants and people from different classes and cultures, to different interpretations and tastes.  

How I met it:  I am engaging both formally and informally to achieve accessibility online as well as through bricks and mortar. I do so formally with local institutions such as Brightspace and the Cider Museum to display the Word-Hoard. This is a piece of art which links with the sustainability mission of the Brightspace Foundation in Herefordshire. The piece will add value to the exhibits of the museum through July and August. The visitors to the museum come from across the country. I am also engaging informally in the town of Hereford and in the village of Kinnersley through the piece entitled Climate Walk which is accessible to all and free of charge. Turning to online accessibility, the QR barcode (Quick Response Code) is free to all, and in particular youngsters, and will make available the map, its key and the four soundscapes.

-Criterion: APPEALING enough either visually or emotionally to catch the eye and be

memorable. SIMPLE and FAMILIAR enough, at least on the surface, not to confuse or repel

potential viewer-participants. 

How I met them: The map is hand-made with beautiful water-colours. Its aesthetic is persuasive and stimulating. It is simple and familiar in that it represents local knowledge which is felt and lived

-Criterion: LAYERED, COMPLEX and UNFAMILIAR enough to hold people’s attention once

they’ve been attracted, to make them wonder, and to offer deeper experiences and references

to those who hang in. 

How I met it: The project is a multi-layered construct which shows the geological history of the region, including its tracts of coal. The newspaper, which critiques the map, encourages readers to look closely at mundane elements like soil and complex issues like private property and the commons. The unfamiliar is that there is no fixed point in time. This helps people to explore challenging subjects such as a new climate and the extinction of species.

Lucy Lippard’s criteria include:

Bibliography

Sarah James, The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966–79, Frieze 30 Mars 2013

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield, 1982 New York & 2015 Milano

The Harrisons, Survival Piece, 1970-72

Littoral Arts Trust, Hyper-rural the end of urbanism? Symposium, 2018, Manchester School of Architecture

Whitechapel Gallery, The Rural Assembly: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection (June 2019)

RSA, God’s Lone Country, 12 minutes film, 2019

Littoral Arts Trust, The New Creative Rural Economies report, 2018

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring,1962

Tomás Saraceno, The Cosmic Dust Spider Web Orchestra, 2017

Michael Bravo, North Pole, 2019

Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks, 2015

Brandon LaBelle, Sonic Agency, sound and emergent forms of resistance, 2018

Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to see the world, 2015

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, 2015 

Sophia Meeres, Pieter Versteegh, alter-rurality, exploring representations and ‘repeasantation’, 2014

Myvillages, The Rural, 2019

Virginie Maris, La part sauvage du monde, penser la nature dans l’Anthropocene, 2018

Jean-Michel Valantin, Géopolitique d'une planète déréglée, 2017

Philippe Bihouix, L'Âge des Low Tech, vers une civilisation techniquement soutenable, 2014

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucen, Experimental Futures, 2016

Irit Rogoff, Practicing Research: Singularising Knowledge, maHKUzine 9, Journal Of Artistic Research Summer 2010, page 37

1. Context of project Voicing the soil in Herefordshire, in the Anthropocene.

        I was unable to submit work at the same time as my cohort on 31st January because I was off sick. As a result, I am writing this retrospectively, in April 2019, as part 2 of my submission of the PGRP to Hereford College of Arts in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA Fine Art. Since it is now April 2019, and I have continued working on the project, I now have a different perspective, just like a farmer, time has provided its harvest.

This project, Voicing the Soil in Herefordshire, the Anthropocene, is not clear-cut. This is because my research method is heuristic and iterative, the research is on-going and the project emerges from this. For instance, when I wrote the Literature Review, in early December, I had hardly started to conduct interviews and the nature of the project had yet to emerge, let alone a final piece of art. My critical approach to the Anthropocene itself only began to take form from books that I read after my operation.

The outputs started with a collection of soils and words to define soil samples, video of spiders on compost heaps (See blog, October 2018 ), audio recording of soil manipulated in a studio and Duseline Stewart, an experienced gardener, explaining the formation of soil in an interview (Blog October 2018). This then developed with a line of soil and the cross-section of geological layers, drawing on the work of C18 geologist William Smith. The geological cross section represents the region of the world where I live. The data on the map re-present the categories thrown up by my research. The way they are placed on the map is arbitrary.

An early draft of an Anthropocene map for Voicing the soil, based on the geological cross-section of William Smith (1817) Saunders Waterford’s watercolour paper, 300 gms, cold press. The paper is distressed with red soil from Herefordshire.

As an artist I approach the ‘task of research not just from the side of the image (or of materials, my note), but from that of text’ (Dronsfield, 2009). The publication that accompanies the map, a newspaper, tells a story about the map ‘image and text become indiscernible’.  The newspaper is published in 2050 and includes a picture of the map and its key. It looks back at the discovery of an early map of the Anthropocene and comments on the arbitrariness of the data, which has become story.

What is the Anthropocene? (Crutzen, Stoermer, 2000) A name for a suggested a new phase of geological time in which human activity is considered so powerful an influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long term signature in the strata record (Macfarlane, 2017).  Inevitably the Anthropocene intrudes into every aspect of our lives. We have to imagine ourselves as emerging from and impacting earth’s ‘deep time’. We need to question the vulnerability and guilt that exist between us and other species as well as between us and future generations, and wonder is nature gone?  We also need to be sceptical about the novelty of the idea, its universalising rhetoric, how it ‘enters into visuality and its politics of representation’ (T.J. Demos, 2017) using advanced technologies and the assumption of technocratic planetary mastery they encode:

“A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted, large scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to ‘optimize’ climate” (Crutzen, 2002).

While sociologist Bruno Latour christens the Anthropocene earth ‘our contemporary Frankenstein’, philosopher Virginie Maris and historian of sciences Christophe Bonneuil suggest that we need to fix ourselves and our systems rather than nature (Maris, 2018. Bonneuil, 2016). These tensions traverse Voicing the soil in Herefordshire.

The project is interdisciplinary as a result of its subject. The Anthropocene requires many minds from various disciplines - economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to respond to its implications.

This leads to another question: can this way of working turn into an information gathering exercise? Is it art or is it research or is it infographics? When does data become story? At some point I decided to focus not on making an object called art, but on what is happening in Herefordshire, with the felt local knowledge of soil in the Anthropocene. If the process of gathering information evidences aesthetic decisions and values, then I think of it as creative, generous for participants and spectators who can generate their own story-telling of soil. This is why with the geological cross- section of William Smith, I blur the line between infographics and something that is unique and handmade, in an era where the Anthropocene is aestheticised (Walter Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics) by mainstream presentation  (Globaïa) which blurs the line between GPS’ visualisation and photography, with the former often taken for the latter (T.J. Demos, 2017).

In the Anthropocene epoch, does this map represent an anachronism? The map juxtaposes different times: it re-presents Deep Earth time, C18, C19, C20 and C21- the times of the rise of capitalism and the commodification of nature, and the slow time needed by Alison and the rest of the team to create the watercolour, together with future impacts.

It may be an anachronism to call Smith’s piece an infographic, as the word did not exist then. It is now considered an artwork, deserving its own room in a museum (Cardiff) and shown in an exhibition meant by definition to create an experience of artworks for visitors.

Summary of previous blogs from 25th October up to 5-12-2019

              It has also always been my intention to create a diptych, following up my previous project, Voicing the Wye, with Voicing the Soil. The unifying thread of both projects is to collect, collate and re-present the stories of people in Herefordshire in the Anthropocene. The project places the focus on soil, the main actor, to show the social and political forces that are at play in its formation.

The project is sited in Herefordshire as a whole: why didn’t I choose a narrower geographical area? 

I learn by talking to people and I needed the variety and scale that comes from covering the whole county. Herefordshire contains a great variety of soils. I also discovered the mutability of soil, how its nature and fertility can change, and the countryside with it. Hence, by extrapolation, the key question of how soil is created.  A smaller area would miss out a great deal. Finally, dealing with a smaller area would have been no less complex, because I would still have had to address all the issues raised by ‘the Anthropocene’.

Returning to the point about variety and scale, soil in the Anthropocene project was inevitably an accretion of micro and macro scales from soil biota to deep time.

Can information gathering be aesthetic? For example, I experimented with the possibilities of listening to the sounds of soil’s biota, based on my visiting A Sound Not Meant To Be Heard at the Oriel Davies Gallery (Anthony Shapland, 2018). I also experimented with the possibilities of using geology to explain the creation of soil as a historical element, resulting from deep time processes. William Smith’s Geological Section from London to Snowdon, Showing the Varieties of the Strata, and the Correct Altitudes of the Hills (1817), which runs through Herefordshire soil, queries our relationship to our origins as a species (Darwin) and simultaneously, as a continuum from birth to death, that of soil and the survival of species on the planet (the Anthropocene).

William Smith, Geological Section from London to Snowdon, Showing the Varieties of the Strata, and the Correct Altitudes of the Hills (1817). Oxford University Museum of Natural History

I could have represented Voicing the Soil by focusing on a local plant and its soil profile. Both this and the map above could provide the spectator with an X-ray vision of earth’s history and human influences. They both survey the terrain by using a direct relationship to soil, rather than current remote  sensors. However, Smith’s offers a geological cross-section left to right, a panorama which narrates his travels from ’the slate and granite mountains of Snowdonia, through the coal tracts [and Worcester], the chalk hills and ending at the plains of the Thames’ (Edwards, 2018). This tells a personal story that goes far wider in time and space.

Watercolor #22 by Walter L. Kubiena (both Podzols with bleached E horizons underlain by Bhs horizons rich in illuviated humus and iron). The Atlas of Soil Profiles,1954

The painting was done by Gertrude Kallab Purtscher and Anton Prazak. Kubiena interpreted the profile morphology, sketching and demarcating horizons, and collaborated with the two illustrators on the colour renderings.