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.