If Everything Is Moving Where Is Here?
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If everything is moving where is here? Critical Practice Paper - MA Drawing. UAL Wimbledon London Helen Goodwin Introduction As I tread upon the topography of place in the environments in which I choose to mark-make, I consider the ever shifting landscapes beneath my feet. While my body moves in space and across the surface of place, leaving my temporary prints, I choose to create my own marks in response to these chosen locations. I consider Sprackland’s (2012) account of ephemeral archaeology. She describes seeing footprints which have been covered and so preserved in the Holocene sediments from the Mesolithic and mid-Neolithic time. Due to the shifting of sediments, sands and tides, they are once again revealed, briefly, before the incoming tide finally and permanently takes them. I am always reminded of the shifting earth as the pull of the tide licks the edges of this island. Anthropologists Ingold and Vergunst (2008a) write about landscapes having temporal existence, and suggest how one footprint in front of the other can be seen to have a narrative thread. I am interested in the impermanence of these marks I make, and how indeed nothing is permanent. How we create our own stories and threads through the landscape of our lives. How we may, according to Rebecca Solnit, step outside of the stories we tell about ourselves and others, in order to become who we really are: ‘....one person’s story becomes the point of entry to larger territories.’ (2013, 194) Art critic Lucy Lippard (1997) writes about how she weaves herself and her own experiences into her book, The Lure of the Local, as her lived experiences are central to her writing about the subject of place. I too, from time to time, weave the thread of my own story into this paper, aspects of a life I have lived so far, staying as true as possible to my personal history as I touch and mark-make in the shifting landscapes and locations I have chosen to re-visit, those that hold meaning or in which I have found a sense of familiarity. My experience of living in different continents, and then my subsequent return to my birth land, my feelings of personal 1 displacement as well as sudden close family deaths are also explored. Finally, I find how I have been looking for that ‘fixed point’ only to realise that such a point cannot exist. The exploration and weaving together of this story is like a thread, a red-veined thread from which others lead off but are dependent on that main one red artery. It is also a thread of my practice which my research has led me to disentangle. Japan Tsunami 2011 Previously I had been looking at what binds us to place, the fixed points we look for and our sense of belonging. Whilst on an arts residency in Japan, in 2012, I visited the Tohoko region which had been devastated by the 2011 tsunami. I observed how people were re-looking for their fixed points amidst such devastation in order to re-build their homes, and communities, even in the knowledge of future tsunamis. Seeing such devastation, homes and lives so swiftly swept away, made me realise impermanence in its truest sense, how we cannot depend upon any fixed point in this forever shifting world. The visit also made me stare loss in the face on a scale that was hard to fully comprehend; one that was painful but unexpectedly cathartic, due to my own experience of sudden personal loss, which has continued to have an impact upon my practice. Yuko Mihara offers prayers to her ancestors in front of a family Buddhist altar inside her house. Fukushima prefecture, Japan. Image: Franck Robichon 2 The Fukushima nuclear power plant has adversely affected the immediate area and has since had a 12 mile exclusion zone surrounding it. The residents from there are still displaced, living in temporary accommodation, yet wait to hear if it is safe, wishing desperately to return to the place which still holds memory for them. Maybe it is only the memory which is relatively fixed on place, but even this changes as we continue to weave our own stories. Wearing white protective masks and suits, Yuzo Mihara, left, and his wife Yuko pose for photographs on a deserted street in the town of Namie, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, on Feb. 22, 2013. Image: Franck Robichon Material Culture I was born in England but for over a decade of my life I have lived intermittently in a series of diverse cultures: Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and more recently East Asia. In order to make sense of these locations and explore my engagement with each new physical space I have often collected local material culture. At the end of the last century, I went to live and work in the south of China in a culture so very unfamiliar, a place in which I found few reference points at first. Each time I felt I had got hold of some semblance of understanding of this new place it appeared, as quickly, to slip away from me. It was here I found a much stronger desire, than I had in Europe, to collect local 3 material culture. By surrounding myself with a collection of objects I believe was my way of helping to reference my new place through the physicality of the objects used in the everyday or for specific cultural purposes. They helped me provide meaning to place and form some sense of narrative. I have always used these collections in my practice. Artist Cornelia Parker says that ‘man has created cultural artifacts that embody that culture......I like using real materials with a history.....cultural things to hand, the things which are ubiquitous in our society to make a mark with’ (Massen and Southern 2011,56). Lorimer and Lund describe collecting as a ‘propensity peculiar to humans’ (2008,185) and ‘a most British sort of preoccupation’ (2008,198). They describe this in the context of people who keep collections of particular Scottish summits climbed, where the actual mountain being too big to collect physically, instead collections of tables are kept, recording the walks and climbs achieved. Whilst in China I built up a varied collection including paper, ceremonial masks, costumes and also carved wooden panels from houses being knocked down to make way for new roads and modern apartment blocks, due to the fast paced development and so-called beautification of China. I was equally fascinated by the paper and cloth clothes made to be burnt for the ancestors. They were culturally very different to anything I had seen before and researching further I realised the importance of these objects for the funerals of the deceased as well as their being burnt at significant times to keep the ancestors content in the afterlife, so to protect and look after the living. I have reflected on how examining objects can help understand locality and therefore help form a connection to place which in turn has sometimes helped to feed into my own sense of the belonging to place. But anthropologist Andrew West writes about how ‘material culture can challenge fixed ideas, support alternative ways of seeing and understanding the world....they demand attention and investigation’ (2011,1). Also that, ‘Different meanings and values are attributed to objects in different places so it is important to identify how things are “inscribed with meaning in and across different cultural contexts”’ (West 2011,3, citing Henneare 2005). By using material culture from other places in my practice, I am interested in how I may convey a connection to the meaning of the object as well as how it may be re- 4 interpreted within a different cultural context. I consider this when combining material culture and the fabric of location, such as soils, chalk, sand and water which have become linked and entwined in my practice: for example, combinations such as a Chinese ancestral jacket and chalk from the edge of the English landscape. I recognise both the object and the fabric of landscape are both to do with memory, loss and re-generation: memory and loss of place and person, and the destruction through burning of the material object, the ancestral jacket, which in turn brings re-generation to the living. Ancestral suit for burning, cloth, South China; own collection. On my return to the UK in 2007 I was surrounded by the familiar and objects with meanings I could read, so therefore I no longer felt the desire to collect, although in 2012 my fascination was re-awoken on the arts residency to Japan. There I again became interested, specifically in materials to do with protection and loss. Ancestral worship, as practiced in Japan had been in decline until the 2011 tsunami which created so much human and physical devastation. This experience fed back into the use of objects I had collected when living in Asia, that were made as offerings to be burnt for the dead. 5 Edge of Landscapes - erosion In recent years my practice has taken me to work mainly on the edge of landscapes, to coasts and cliffs, places which are experiencing erosion of some kind. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-21313524 As these places erode, settlements fall off the edge, leaving people and communities displaced. Two decades ago I lost a small wooden dwelling to the sea; I managed to hold onto it for five years before it was washed over the cliff due to the erosion in this particular part of the Holderness coastline in East Yorkshire.