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.

Finding resources and ways of working

During a crit, I presented a literature search for soil-words, together with soil samples.  These ranged from clay to mud. People were divided within themselves on whether this was soil. Part of them felt that it was, while another part defined soil only as say humus. Collecting soils around Herefordshire led me to understand that I needed to find a soil biologist to learn about local soils. I extrapolated from this to conceive the idea of a Herefordshire word hoard, inspired by Landmarks, written by Robert Macfarlane in 2015. The word hoard would be presented on a beautiful roll of heavy Fabriano paper, with soil running from the wall into the room.

What emerged in October is the difficulty that arises from my being an in-comer in Herefordshire and a foreigner in the UK. I cannot have a voice, but I can be a catalyst. How to find these people for face-to-face interaction, encounter local communities and their social and cultural significance for soil?  Hence an early action was to put together an Advisory Group, including a local sponsor, Nick Read from the Brightspace Foundation, Katie Brymer a young local graphic designer, Franca Luz a mindfulness practitioner and Perry Walker a game designer. I used interviews as practice to learn both about soil and Herefordshire (see Analysis of work process below).  

2. Work Process and Research Methods part 1

My practice is sited in Herefordshire. It is a kind of field work, engaged, holistic and emphatic.

My research is based on the Harrisons’ collaborative work process – responsive to the particularities of local soil, place and people. The Harrisons also provided a research method to understand the scope of the project. (See blog 06-12-18)

How big is here and how long is our Now - understood as an instant, but the instant may be 250 years long? How can what’s happening here be understood and engaged? What patterns are forming or reforming? And how can we, and those with us, add to the well-being of the now of this place? (A MANIFESTO FOR THE 21ST CENTURY)

Given that I work in a collaborative manner I needed ethical principles. I borrowed these from art critic Lucy Lippard. Lippard’s list of eight criteria for ‘an art governed by [a] place-ethic’ (1997:286) has been adapted to fit the context. The criteria are:

SPECIFIC enough to engage people in Herefordshire on the level of their own lived experiences of soils, to say something about their native soil and place as it is or could be.

COLLABORATIVE at least to the extent of seeking information, advice and feedback from these people.

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

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.

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.

EVOCATIVE enough to make people recall related moments, places and emotions in their own lives.

PROVOCATIVE and CRITICAL, yet safe enough to make people think about soil and its issues.

Work Process and Research Methods part 2

-Empirical research Interviews:

Collaborators: When I started the Soil project, I collected soil samples, comparing and contrasting them, not knowing why they looked so different nor how to talk about them. I inferred that I needed to learn about soil. That’s an example of why I need collaborators – some of whom also became co-creators of the project. There are three kinds of collaborations:

Working with the Advisory Group is the most vital collaboration. Nick Read from the Bright Space Foundation sponsored the project by identifying participants and communities involved in current soil challenges. This saved vast amounts of time.

Voicing the soil, Advisory Group, December 2018

Working with Interviewees: How do I choose who to interview? I seek interviews where the encounter is relevant, the person concerned has values, perspectives and information that relate to the project, and where I am able to draw that out in the course of the interview.

I let conversations drift. Most are recorded by the sound engineer, Perry Walker, who is also a member of the Advisory Group. My role is to question and listen and not to advance a point of view.

Perry Walker, sound engineer, with an affectionate cow at Will Edwards 's farm near Ross on Wye, December 2018

To illustrate my method of collaborating, I found my way to Tim Monckton (January 2019), a local soil biologist. I asked Tim questions about the types of soils in Herefordshire. What of soil and its health in differing contexts:  intensive agriculture, medium, small farmers? Soil biodiversity? How did Tim see the future of soil in Herefordshire: Precision agriculture? Agrochemicals? Protecting soils? Carbon capture? Future generations and food security? Should his voice contribute visibly to the project, Tim’s prior agreement will be sought.  

No artist has all the knowledge required for an Anthropocene project; hence the value of several viewpoints plus a discursive and multidisciplinary approach. The views of specialists and people close to the soil were collected and they inform the project. The participants are four farmers: Will and Debbie Edwards in the south of the shire and Malcolm Lewis and Antony Williams, his adviser, in the north west of the county. Then there is Duseline Stewart in the east, a very experienced gardener and a member of the Royal Horticultural Society.  Tim Monckton is a soil scientist. I met Lucinda Lewis, a Herefordshire ecologist, agronomist and a farmer also working for an NGO (the Wye and Usk Foundation) at a meeting organised by Hereford Wild life Trust in November 2018. An unnamed Herefordshire farmer and Councillor from the Conservative party said he did not believe in climate change. His ideas also inform the project. Moira Jenkins is a member of the Woolhope Club. In a January 2019 interview, she describes the Anthropocene from a geological standpoint and evidences the changes in soil over hundreds of years. Moira concurred with the idea of William Smith’s map. 

I attended a meeting with the Herefordshire branch of Extinction Rebellion (XR), whose demands in a letter to Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) include that soil health be part of ‘public good’ within the Agriculture Bill.

Moira Jenkins, geologist and member of the Woolhope Club, January 2019

Will and Debbie Edwards's worm rich pastures, near Ross on Wye, December 2018

Working with artists-fabricators: At the XR event, I met two militant youngsters who are on the Art Foundation Course at HCA. One of them, Sam Townley-Evans, contributed to exploring soil as audio experiment (see blog, October 2018) and later as part of a performance. After this, I made one of the many decisions that the project has required: I decided to omit humans from future sound and video  in order not to distract from soil.  

Sam Townley-Evans, performing art student, impersonating a flower blooming. HCA  green screen studio,  December 2018.







This led to another problem. Could the sound of soil have been replaced by another material such as flour or sugar, like with Foley, the reproduction of everyday sound effects that are added to film? 

I answered this by observing myself, to discover how my brain was seeking to put a name to a first-time-heard sound and associate it with an identifiable sound. This almost inevitable brain process could obscure my critical listening to a new phenomenon: instead of listening to understand, I was probing my memory for something familiar. Which if extrapolated could be strange: for example when I listened to spiders’ mating call, I saw a moped running in the street as both sounds can be similar. So who would know sugar from soil? In this project sound has a direct link to its origin, there is no manufacture.  This is an aesthetic decision. The intention is for the listener to discover, in the directness of real life, mediated by a microphone, how a realm beyond human auditory perception feels. This solicits a different hearing which challenges limits, as ‘sound is always moving away from a source; it abandons its origins…in migrating…it sweeps through the social field’ (Brandon LaBelle, 2018).

It took me four weeks to form a team of collaborators (January 2019) comprising Nicky Barter a technical illustrator, Alison Barter an aquarellist, Christine Oxley a calligrapher, Katie Brymer a graphic designer and sound designer Hayden Bail. The project cannot happen without them. I chose them because they live locally, are skilled, with a variety of experience, are reliable, and enjoy working as a team. I have to accept, though, that, in the context of the art market, viewers are not familiar with multiple authorship.

Desk research for the Anthropocene

I really shifted my position on the Anthropocene. I started from the perspectives of sociologist Bruno Latour and feminist Donna Haraway, both of whom couple together human, nature and machine, thus erasing the difference between living and non-living nature. My views evolved towards the perspective of humanist philosophers Frederic Neyrat and Virginie Maris and the necessity to rehabilitate the “great divide” between nature and culture:

‘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.’ 

(Maris, 2017)

I decided to re-present the Mesofauna group who live under our feet. I found banks of sounds from worms, spiders, small invertebrates etc. on the internet, to design soundscapes and add the voice of members of other species to the project. 
This is a test for a soundscape: Scientists recording spiders mating
https://soundcloud.com/user-507948161/naming-spiders-mixdown

Regarding humans as a biological and geological force is not a new idea. The Harrisons’ Survival Piece (1970-72) exposed half a century ago the destruction of biotopes, climate change and the necessity to shift away from science, market place and mega technology. Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), a best seller, documented the adverse effects of the use of pesticides. Thus the Anthropocene which purports to be a new concept, an advent, is a concept fraught with tensions. Bonneuil, a historian of science, sees a pattern of continuity rather than a break: from the commodification of soil (C18 & C19) and severe industrial exploitation (C20) to the disappearance of topsoils (C21). Bonneuil therefore rejects the notion of an advent, because the agents responsible for that damage are the same.

Given this understanding of the Anthropocene, how to represent it? A representation that suggested a contrast, a break, such as a Google map, would be false to my understanding of the concept. ‘Besides being historically false, [it – the notion of an advent] depoliticizes the long history of the Anthropocene’ (Bonneuil, 2013).

To represent the Anthropocene as a sign of a new era with a different audience, rather than continuity would ushers in a false narrative of awakening, with technology the solution now we are awake. But the Anthropocene is complex and there is no clean slate that absolves those 90 or 100 at most coal and oil companies, cement, car organisations etc. – and the many of us with a finger in those pies, particularly via shares and pensions.

Appropriation and Détournement or Intervention?

Is using William Smith’s Geological Section from London to Snowdon, Showing the Varieties of the Strata, and the Correct Altitudes of the Hills (1817) an act of appropriation or détournement? Or is it an intervention?

Appropriation is the adoption of the iconography of another culture, using it for purposes that are unintended by the original culture (Wikipedia). The original culture is voiceless. This is not what I am doing since I work within and re-present my own culture; that of capitalism Smith helped to create.

Détournement is the subversion of a work of art. Peter Kennard’s (b.1949) Haywain with Cruise Missile uses a détournement of John Constable's The Hay Wain, created for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1970s (Tate).

I am not subverting Smith’s work: I am adding another layer. How is this done? It is created outside the conventional studio by sharing skills and knowledge, with artists and farmers, so that the piece plays a more active role in society. This layer is indeed an intervention. The Artist Placement Group (APG, 1966-89) used art interventions to reposition the role of the artist in a wider social and political context.

What is my role in the art practice?

My role is to think out the initial concept. My role evolves as the project progresses. It is to carry and develop the initial concept, listening to the team. My role is to not have the mastery of voice as my practice is essentially participative. However, I am not adopting the model of arts practice put forward by art historian Grant Kester, which proposes ‘the creative orchestration of dialogical exchange’ within a community, with the implication of transformational promise (Kester, 2004). Socially engaged art, dialogical aesthetic and relational aesthetic etc. won’t be explored in this blog and Bourriaud, Bishop, Kwon, Leeson, among others, have constructively critiqued these.

In addition, Voicing the Soil does not represent the participants aforementioned, in the sense of being their advocate. I do not aim to identify or resolve any conflicts (the conflicts that Chantal Mouffe believes to be inherent, hence her concept of agonism). I do not aim to synthesise participants’ views, or to draw conclusions from them. I simply intend to re-present them, through recording their knowledge and allowing that to inform the project.

While it is the aim of the project to raise awareness of how soil is created, it is not the aim of the project to educate. Educating the public on climate change is often based on the deficit model. This is a one-sided, top-down, binary system assuming two categories of people: the specialist and the public. It presumes that people are blank slates, uncritical non-agents. I prefer to think of the viewer as the author of their own story, free to draw their own conclusions and to decide for themselves the relationship between the different voices.

Mediums and techniques up to end of January 2019 include

Sound design

Video

Water colour

Saunders Waterford’s watercolour paper; 300 gms; cold press; Length: 160

Hand painted map (watercolour)

Herefordshire red soil to distress the paper

Soil, humus perhaps

Infographics, Photoshop

Text (Newspaper/InDesign)

Online sound bank of soil mesofauna

Recording people’s voices