Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Lamenting Trees

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‘Ghastly by day, ghostly by night, the rottenest place on the Somme’. Such was how soldiers described High Wood, one of the many that peppered the battlefields of Flanders and France. Woods in name only, these once dense places were quickly reduced to matchwood. One officer, writing of Sanctuary Wood near Ypres, declared that: ‘Dante in his wildest imaginings never conceived the like.’

We, in our wildest imaginations can not conceive the like. So how can we remember and empathise with those who for whom it was real? Historian Paul Fussell provides a starting point:

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”

I aim therefore to create a series of pastoral landscapes and accompanying maps which use, as their starting point, portrait postcards of Great War soldiers (in particular, elements found on the studio backdrops against which they were photographed) and Trench maps. Although the pastoral scenes will be empty – devoid of human life – I aim nonetheless to create a sense that people have been there; that the landscape is remembering them – an absence rather than a lack. This will serve to articulate the journeys of those soldiers, from photographic studio to the Front, and for many, death.

Two quotes are useful here; the first from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies:

“Look, trees exist.
The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we
pass away like air traded for air and everything
conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps
half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope.”

The other from Wordsworth’s Guide to the District of the Lakes:

“…we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.'”

In Rilke’s poem, the idea of trees (among other things) remembering through their silence those who’ve passed amongst them is particularly appealing and finds a kind of reversed echo in Wordworth’s imaginings of the primeval woods: where it isn’t the human heart regretting or welcoming the change, rather the trees, regretting (or welcoming) our absence.

Words from war poet Edward Thomas serve to further this idea of ‘remembering trees’. In the Rose Acre Papers, a collection of essays published in 1904 he writes:

“…a bleak day in February, when the trees moan as if they cover a tomb, the tomb of the voices, the thrones and dominations, of summer past.”

His widow, Helen, writing after the war in ‘World Without End,’  described how the “snow still lay deep under the forest trees, which tortured by the merciless wind moaned and swayed as if in exhausted agony.’

It’s almost the same lamenting her husband had described before the war.

Richard Hayman, writing in ‘Trees – Woodlands and Western Civilization’ states that “woods are poised between reality and imagination…” As a child woods were, for me, a means of accessing both my imagination and the distant past; a place “for chance encounters” with historical figures, monsters and knights. Woods, as Hayman puts it, are places which can “take protagonists from their everyday lives” while, as I would add, keeping them grounded in the reality of the present.

As a child I would often create maps of imagined landscapes covered – like my imagined mediaeval world – by vast swathes of forest. And as an adult, the act of drawing them returns me to a place where my childhood and the distant past coexist; “a mixture of personal memory and cultivated myth” grounded in the nowness of the present. As such, the ‘pastoral’ landscapes I’m going to paint, based on those strange and incongruous studio backdrops, become too, landscapes of childish sylvan fancies.

When considering the war, much of our attention is, naturally, focused through the lens of its duration: the years 1914-1918. But every one of those men who fought in the trenches was once a child, and since becoming a father this has become an important aspect of my ability to empathise. To empathise, we must see these men unencumbered by the hindsight which history affords us; as men who lived lives before 1914 and beyond the theatre of war. I return to Paul Fussell’s quote (“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral”) and add that we must also see the soldiers who fought not as men, but as children. Again, the words of Edward Thomas serve to articulate this idea; the “summer past” including perhaps those lost years of childhood. Neil Hanson, writing in ‘The Unknown Soldier’  talks of how, on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, the smell in the air was that of an English summer – of fresh cut grass; the smell – one could say – of memories; of childhood.

Returning to Rilke’s Duino Elegies we find another dimension to these landscapes.

And gently she guides him through the vast
Keening landscape, shows him temple columns,
ruins of castles from which the Keening princes
Once wisely governed the land. She shows him
the towering trees of tears, the fields of melancholy
in bloom (the living know this only in gentle leaf).

These pastoral landscapes become therefore, not only the landscapes of childhood imaginings, of “personal memory and cultivated myth”, but the landscape of mourning. The words of Edward and Helen Thomas are especially poignant in this regard; Edward’s trees mourn for a long-lost past; Helen’s for an empty future.

War and The Pastoral Landscape

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I’ve been thinking these last few weeks about a new body of work based on the First World War. For a long time – as will be evident from my blog – I’ve been looking at ways of using the backdrops of numerous World War I postcards.

A quote from Paul Fussell has been especially helpful in this regard.

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”

The images on the backdrops are these proposed moments.

As a contemporary artist living so long after the war, it is of course impossible for me to create works about the war itself. What I can do however is comment on my relationship to the war (and those affected by it) by creating scenes – pastoral scenes – which use as their starting point the backdrops of World War I postcards.

The pastoral will, therefore, be articulated through the language of war.

These pastoral images will, predominantly, be woodscapes based on places I have visited over the last few years including Hafodyrynys (where my great-great-uncle, Jonah Rogers (1892-1915) grew up), Verdun and the Somme. They might contain  – to quote Rilke – ‘…temple columns, ruins of castles’ as per the slightly less pastoral backdrops. They will be devoid of people; the soldiers absent as if they had melted into the backdrops – as if these pastoral scenes represent the Keening landscape of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

As I’ve written before: it is this absence which the trees express so silently, so eloquently. As Rilke so perfectly puts it:

‘Look, trees exist.
The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we
pass away like air traded for air and everything
conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps
half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope.’

The woods I paint will be based, as I’ve said, on those places I have visited as well as those idealised scenes in front of which the soldiers stand in the postcards. They will be – as Richard Hayman puts it – woods “poised between reality and imagination…” – shame and unspeakable hope.

Again as I’ve written before: After the war, the sense of emptiness must have been everywhere. Every insignificant moment – barely acknowledged before the war – now pregnant with a sense of incomprehensible loss. The world, outwardly the same, had shifted just a little, but it had taken the lives of millions to push it there.

There is in this text a sense of absence but also of movement, of continuation – however slight or small (something I want to record in my work). And there’s a link between this and a quote from William Wordsworth who wrote in his Guide to the District of the Lakes: we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.’ I somehow want to turn this quote on its head and borrow from Rilke, who in his Duino Elegies describes the towering trees of tears. I want to paint scenes where there are no people, but in which their absence is recorded, primarily by the trees silently remembering.

“The painter sees the trees, the trees see the painter.”

Goethean Observation: Compost Heap

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The compost heap is some eight feet in circumference and about three feet high at its highest point. It comprises many different types of vegetative matter, at a glance; apples, the branches of the Christmas tree, twigs, cut-down shrubs, leaves and soil. There are numerous stones too, snail shells and new plants.

[a crow calls behind me]

The apples are in various states of decay, from ripe (and seemingly edible) down through papery brown to black. The black apples, split open, remind me of old leather shoes such as those you might find in a museum.

The sun catches the left-hand side of the heap [a blackbird is calling above the traffic]. There is also a piece of plastic – white and dirty. As I look more closely, I see a number of roots, rusty-brown in colour, stretching across the pile. The wind agitates some of the lighter twigs and the leaves which still cling to their branches. The colour of the leaves is pretty much uniform; brown to darker brown, and with all the dampness of the outer part of the pile – almost black., like the most decayed apples.

The crown of the compost heap is covered with lighter branches no more than a centimetre in diameter.
They stick out to the left of the heap like the spines / quills of a porcupine. Tangled within them are clumps of earth intermingled with dried grass – now the same shadow of brown as the branches. The colour of the heap, taken as a whole is the dark brown of those darkest leaves. (*From a distance of ten feet or so, the compost heap is a single entity onto which some things have fallen. It is predominantly a dark brown colour, but as one approaches, it forms fragments, as those things of which it’s comprised throw out their shapes towards my incoming eyes.)

A few yellowish-green apples prick it and from these the eye gravitates towards the browner types, wrinkled and spotted/flecked. One apple looks like it is made of paper, its skin depressed as if a thumb and forefinger has marked it so.

There is a definite boundary between where the compost heap begins/ends and the rest of the garden, but looking more closely that boundary isn’t as stark as grass and dandelion and other small plants start to encroach. Parts of the heap too have tumbled beyond this boundary.

Near my foot, a black apple has burst its skin and inside, its brown flesh looks like tapenade.

[The crow, sitting on a rooftop behind to my left is persistent in his calling. I can hear too the whistle of a wood pigeon’s wings.]

The compost heap although an entity in its own right comprises thousands of different things. A bright apple catches the sun and is made brighter sill.

Walking around I take up position to the left of where I’ve been. I can see a plastic straw – so at odds with the rest of the heap. A piece of flower pot seems however quite at home next to the apples – large and bruised, brown and putrid. There is a beautiful apple – a pale rust colour ridged and wrinkled, spotted with tiny white fungi. Above that, another rotting apple has abandoned its shape altogether and is now a dollop of brown, gooey flesh.

The core of the compost heap is more exposed here, and upon it, tiny green weeds have planted themselves.

[I have in my head the image of a star – perhaps because of the apples; their spherical shapes and the stages of their decay which go hand in hand – towards their implosion – with their different colours, ending at black, like black holes.]

Around the compost heap is the rest of the garden – the shed, the apple tree, the lawn and the cracked path, on which I am currently sitting.

I cannot smell the compost heap – at least not from where I’m sitting. I move closer and breathe in and see two decaying rose-hips each of which comprises a myriad number of colours and shades. I step around it. The branches crack beneath my feet like branches in a fire. I notice too the thorns snagging the air which agitates the hair-like splinters of some of the branches.

The compost heap makes no sound – at least not that I can hear. Without the breeze it would seem entirely still, a fact belied by its very appearance, vis a vis its changing parts.

Pine needles from the Christmas tree are caked in the mud, a small pool of water has collected inside a hollow eaten out of an apple. The apple behind it appears almost turquoise. Holes in others are perfectly round. The wrinkled skin of some of the apples appear almost like human skin – that of the old.
The perfect shape of the empty snail shell – the random shape of decay.

Part 2

Looking at the papery brown apple, one imagines its flesh returning to fill the depressions in its skin. One imagines its skin colour changing as the apple itself grows bigger, becoming once again green like some of those around it. Freed of the mud gathered around it, it returns to the tree and begins to grow smaller in size until it becomes a blossom, then a bud on a branch in the summer. If it was left now (in its present state), it would over time reduce further still becoming just a collection of pips from which in time other trees would grow.

The branches of the Christmas tree once hung with decorations, bought from a shop, cut down in a forest or a managed plantation. How old was it? You can see the rings in the branches like ripples on a pond. They decrease to nothing, the tree folds itself away, takes refuge in the soil.
The empty snail shells would have their snails, the cut down branches would await the spring when they could surge with sap and grow.

But this compost heap isn’t dead. Nothing is dying here. When it was ‘fresh’ after I had finished gardening last year, it was four times the size. Some of it has been packed up and recycled, but much of it has reduced. There is still colour, even in the blackest apples. There is still shape, fragile like the snail shells.

Left to its own devices the heap would disappear entirely, but what would have disappeared exactly? In the end nothing truly disappears. Familiar shapes change.

The compost heap is never still and never silent, it changes by degrees which we cannot perceive, as with our own faces ageing in the mirror every day.

The leaves too would drift and change their colour, their shape, joining the tree again. Rewinding time they disappear. Fast-forwarding time they disappear but something remains.

Only the plastic straw will stay the same, not knowing what to do. The plastic straw is the one thing that’s truly dead.

Part 3

Feeding on itself.
It is what it consumes, its roots are the flows of energy released into the soil.
Colours are consumed.
It is blind. Deaf.
It feels. Drawing in to its core.
A star imploding.
All that will remain is the memory of its having been there.
It is for the most part invisible.
Just as it cannot see, we cannot truly see it, for it isn’t the shape of its composite parts – the apples, the branches, the clods of earth and pine needles. It is a flow – a slow progress of energy, released by colours, shapes to its heart, to the soil.
The compost heap is a pulse. It is the most un-dead thing in the garden.
It is a conduit.
It is slow, but far from dead.

Absence

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In the Tenth Elegy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies we read:

‘…Our ancestors
worked the mines, up there in the mountain range.
Among men, sometimes you still find polished lumps
of original grief or – erupted from an ancient volcano –
a petrified clinker of rage. Yes. That came
from up there. Once we were rich in such things…’

And gently she guides him through the vast
Keening landscape, shows him temple columns,
ruins of castles from which the Keening princes
Once wisely governed the land. She shows him
the towering trees of tears, the fields of melancholy
in bloom (the living know this only in gentle leaf).
And she shows him grazing herds of mourning
and sometimes a startled bird draws far off
and scrawls flatly across their upturned gaze
and flies an image of its solitary cry….

[…]

Dizzied still by his early death, the youth’s eyes
can hardly grasp it. But her gaze frightens
an owl from the crown’s brim so it brushes
slow strokes downwards on the cheek – the one
with the fullest curve – and faintly,
in death’s newly sharpened sense of hearing,
as on a double and unfolded page,
it sketches for him the indescribable outline.

I’ve read this poem numerous times but on a recent reading, the first and last two lines reminded me of some sketches I made during a visit to Hafodyrynys, a town in Wales where my grandmother was born. My great-grandfather, Elias, used to walk from their house, up ‘the mountain’ as my grandmother called it, to Llanhilleth where he worked in the mine. Following in his footsteps, and walking the path he walked almost every day over 100 years ago, I thought of how the shape of the view had barely changed. I sketched it: an indescribable outline on a double and unfolded page.

Something indescribable is – of course – a thing which defies (or at least seems to defy) description. In my work that ‘thing’ is the ‘nowness’ of a past event. Indeed, if I was to describe what I attempt to do in my work, I would say ‘to walk in the landscape of the past as it is now’.
As a means towards this, I attempt to capture the nowness of the present through single gestures (like the sketches) or a few written words, creating lists of short observations as I walk:

A young boy in a flat cap pulled over his face
A bell tolls
A girl on her computer sits at the window looking out
Blue, yellow and white balloons
Two distant blasts of a train horn made bigger by the stillness of the air
The cackle of a bird

With regards gesture: Rilke said that the “depth of time” was revealed more in human gestures than in archaeological remains or fossilised organisms. The gesture is a “fossil of movement”; it is, at the same time, the very mark of the fleeting present and of desire in which our future is formed.

The concept of a ‘depth of time’ leads me to consider the phrase ‘a distant past’. How can the past be distant (or otherwise) if the past no longer exists? How can we measure that which we cannot empirically observe? My getting up this morning is as much a part of the past as, for example, the death of Richard III, yet of course there is a difference; a scale of pastness. But how can we measure pastness? We can of course use degrees of time, seconds through to years and millennia, but somehow it seems inadequate. For me, pastness can also be expressed through absence (in particular that of people) and it is this absence which the trees express so silently, so eloquently. “William Wordsworth, writing in his Guide to the District of the Lakes, wrote that we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.'”

‘Look,’ says Rilke, ‘trees exist.
The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we
pass away like air traded for air and everything
conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps
half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope.’

In his book The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes: “The painter sees the trees and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects… The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to how a mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders for him something that would otherwise remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… the trees and mirror function as other.” 
When the painter leaves, it’s as if the trees remember him.

When speaking of distance in relation to the past (the distant past), I think of distance as it’s perceived in the landscape; a measurement defining the space between me and something else. Putting the two together, the ‘distant past’ becomes something internal, carried in relation to the external world; the sum of those absences I carry through the landscape.

Rilke’s description of the Keening landscape reminded me too of the landscapes which I created as a child (see also Maps). These were ‘places’ based on how I perceived the landscape of the past; in particular, its swathes of ancient and unspoiled forests. As Richard Hayman puts it: “woods are poised between reality and imagination…” Whenever I was in a wood – however small – I always experienced it with my imagination.

Which brings me round to recent work I’ve been doing on World War I backdrops.

Seeing the young soldier standing before a bucolic backdrop, one is reminded of the youth in Rilke’s poem being led through the Keening landscape.

For some time, I’ve been wanting to create landscapes based on these postcards, landscapes about the Great War which do not seek to illustrate its horrors but articulate our present day relationship to it. A quote by Paul Fussell is important in this respect:

“…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”

The landscape behind the soldier becomes the Keening landscape described by Rilke, a moment of pastoral as described by Fussell. In the right hand image, the soldier has gone; the landscape is one filled with ‘the towering trees of tears, the fields of melancholy.’ It is an image of the past: as Ruskin wrote: a tree “is always telling us about the past, never about the future.” It is an image of absence, a kind of which only the trees can speak.

Paul Nash Quote

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“Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful – the mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze, while clots of bright dandelions, clover, thistles and twenty other plants flourish luxuriantly, brilliant growths of bright green against the pink earth. Nearly all the better trees have come out, and the birds sing all day in spite of shells and shrapnel…”

The Keening Landscape

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World War 1 Serviceman
I sometimes think of these images as pieces of theatre. There’s the stage on which a man stands wearing his costume. He leans on a prop – a chair, the scenery hanging behind him; a pastoral scene with trees and flowers; a path and a bridge crossing a river. And as in any piece of theatre, the costume, scenery and props combine to tell a story. But what is the story?

The First World War: this young soldier would have played his part; perhaps one of the nearly 900,000 British men killed in action. Or one of the over 1.6 million wounded. But there is nothing in the backdrop or prop that points us towards that tale. Just the costume.

So what story does the scenery tell us? A soldier stands in a landscape; an idyllic world seemingly untouched yet threatened by a war in which the soldier has yet to play his part. (Or rather, the war has yet to play a part in the soldier’s life: an important distinction, for if the story or ‘play’ is History, then this soldier’s part would be a minor one. Imagine a vast stage, filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of actors. Most of them would say nothing, remaining part of the anonymous ‘chorus’ (exiting and entering the stage) leaving the lead actors, playing the parts of named politicians and Generals, to speak any lines. Yet of course, in his own life story, this soldier would play the lead. It would be as if towards the end of the ‘play’, one of those hundreds or thousands of extras making up the chorus, would step forward and begin to speak.)

There is another story. The war is over. The threatened landscape is secure, or perhaps the traumatic landscape is healed. The trees have returned, as have the flowers. But what of the story? The soldier still wears his uniform. The actor is still in his costume, seemingly unscathed.
It was as I considered this, that I recalled reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In the Tenth elegy we read:
And gently she guides him through the vast
Keening landscape, shows him temple columns,
ruins of castles from which the Keening princes
Once wisely governed the land. She shows him
the towering trees of tears, the fields of melancholy
in bloom (the living know this only in gentle leaf).
And she shows him grazing herds of mourning
and sometimes a startled bird draws far off
and scrawls flatly across their upturned gaze
and flies an image of its solitary cry….
Dizzied still by his early death, the youth’s eyes
can hardly grasp it. But her gaze frightens
an owl from the crown’s brim so it brushes
slow strokes downwards on the cheek – the one
with the fullest curve – and faintly,
in death’s newly sharpened sense of hearing,
as on a doubled and unfolded page,
it sketches for him the indescribable outline.
For me, the story told by these postcards is not one of war, or indeed the imminence of war, but rather the war’s end. The soldier has played his part.

Quotes from ‘Trees’

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Trees – Woods and Western Civilisation by Richard Hayman

“…the forest provides the setting for chance encounters that take the protagonists away from their everyday lives. Woodland is the gateway to a parallel reality of the underworld, but it is also a refuge where the real world is held in limbo.”

“Woods are poised between reality and imagination…”

It establishes not so much a physical as a psychological space structured by the need for whatever is not found within the compass of ordinary life.
A Tolkien forest is therefore a mixture of personal memory and cultivated myth.
His livelihood depended on an urban readership that expected to find the peace and simplicity in nature that they could not find in their own lives, and in many case whose reading was a substitute for actual experience.
In the Rose Acre Papers, a collection of essays published in 1904, he described a wood in the dead of winter in a highly wrought manner typical of its author: “a bleak day in February, when the trees moan as if they cover a tomb, the tomb of the voices, the thrones and dominations, of summer past.”
Ruskin: “[A tree] … is always telling us about the past, never about the future.”
The roots of a tree are in the earth and its branches reach up to the sky, so a tree is “the animation of the dust and the living soul of the sunshine.”
Intercourse with nature, it follows, is a way to revisit experiences without fear of contradiction or interruption.
Woodland was the ideal place in which to lose oneself in order to find oneself.
…a forgotten landscape that had a past but no present.
[woods are a place] where the real world is held in limbo.
Like the classical texts, the forest provides the setting for chance encounters that take protagonists from their everyday lives.
The theme of the forest as the threshold to the otherworld is amplified by mediaeval romances, where woody places are the landscape of adventure and self-discovery.
Such unbroken stretches of woodland were places where, as Wordsworth put it in his Guide to the District of the Lakes, we can only imagine ‘the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.’ Hoskins was thrilled by the prospect of being able to see the natural world ‘through the eyes of men who died three or four thousand years ago.’

Trees

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In his book, Trees – Woodlands and Western Civilization, archaeologist Richard Hayman writes:

“…the forest provides the setting for chance encounters that take the protagonists away from their everyday lives. Woodland is the gateway to a parallel reality of the underworld, but it is also a refuge where the real world is held in limbo.”

“Woods,” he says, “are poised between reality and imagination…” They have “roots in the ground and reach up to the sky linking earth with heaven.” They “span many lifetimes” and in this sense can be seen to link the past and present too.

When I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2006, it was the trees (pictured below) which most unnerved me. The way they moved in the breeze – just as they would have done at the height of Holocaust. It was this ‘everydayness’ which, for a second, enabled me to straddle past and present.

Portals to the past, these trees were once gateways to death. It was amongst these trees that victims were kept before being sent to the gas chambers nearby.

A work I created in 2009 – The Woods, Breathing – took the form of words taken from two books: one the Diary of Adam Czerniakow, the other, Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl, a book which Czerniakow had read in the Warsaw ghetto.

The words were planted amongst the trees of Shotover. Some of them – quite mundane – could almost have been describing the place in which I had placed them. For example, ‘Silver birches’ pictured below.

Others, like ‘Identity Papers’ (below) called to mind the reality of Czerniakow’s world; one not so dissimilar from ours, in terms of the fact it was real.

A quote from his diary illustrates this: “In Otwock. The air, the woods, breathing.” It describes a moment of respite from the horrors of the ghetto and while we might find it hard, despite our greater efforts, to empathise with life in such appalling conditions, we can empathise much more readily with that moment in the woods.

Below is a painting by Paul Nash entitled ‘We are Making a New World.’

The trees in this landscape have been splintered by shellfire. The following extract from Neil Hanson’s book The Unknown Soldier is a vivid description of the landscape Nash is depicting.

Clearly visible on the skyline, High Wood was a long low hill, a natural strong point, the highest ground in this low-lying area. Densely forested when the fighting began, the months of incessant shelling had left it a wood in name only, reduced to a wasteland of of shell-holes, over-running with water, its trees splintered to matchwood, leaving smashed stumps barely two feet above the ground, and shattered rock and churned earth, like a sea all heaving in anger.

Below is a trench map showing various woods in an area of The Somme.

Trench Map 1916

One could say the Great War was the start of the modern age; the past, in the form of dense woods had been obliterated.

The woods have grown back and walking within them, it’s almost impossible to appreciate what they were like for soldiers during the Great War. As in Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was the nowness of my being there, of experiencing the present in, for example, the moving of the trees, that enabled me to establish some kind of connection with those who had lived through such a catastrophic event. With the return of the trees comes the return of the past.

Correspondence
As a child, woods were a means of accessing the past; that vast landscape covered by swathes of trees in which I would wander in a bid to find mediaeval knights and kings. I created my own worlds, which like my imagined version of the past were always deeply forested.

A Backdrop to Eternity

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Below is a typical, early 20th century studio portrait. The subject – a boy – sits on a prop. Behind him hangs a backdrop on which is painted an idealised scene – something like the view of a country estate with trees, balcony and lake.

When I first got the photo (as part of a job-lot of old photographs) I gave it a cursory look and that was that. I hardly noticed the backdrop behind, which is perhaps the point.

The image below is another studio portrait from around the same time. The subject rests upon a prop – in this case a chair. Behind him hangs a backdrop – a bucolic scene replete with woodland path, flowers, river and bridge – and again, when I first looked at the photograph – given to me as part of a collection of around 200 – I hardly noticed the backdrop; my eyes were drawn only to the soldier. But as I began analysing the backdrops of other postcards in the collection, becoming more aware of the differences between studio-based portraits, and those taken in more informal, often domestic settings, I started to think more about these backdrops.

The photograph is of course that of a soldier bound for the Front in the Great War of 1914-18, and it is this context which makes the backdrop interesting. In the picture of the boy above, the backdrop – when considered a little more deeply – becomes an aspirational image; that of the boy’s idealised future: the image’s inherent sense of distance perhaps adding to this idea. Which is probably what makes the backdrop in the image of the soldier so provocative. For many of those bound for the battlefields of Ypres and The Somme, the future had cast distance aside and charged headlong towards them, dragging with it, that erstwhile companion of their old age – death.
It is strange to think that this image of the soldier, clutching his pipe, his arm resting on the wooden chair, might be all that remains of this man. An insignificant moment in front of the camera is all that’s left to tell of a whole life lived.
Death of course is the ultimate distance. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote:

“We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.”

World War 1 Serviceman

That click of the camera, that moment, would, when pressed against the face of eternity, encompass all that has so far come and gone since the Universe began. It’s a concept quite impossible for the human mind to hold and so – in some – the void is filled with God and an afterlife. After the war, many of the bereaved tried to fill the void left in their lives through Spiritualism, attempting to contact their loved ones in an eternity filled perhaps with pre-war, picture-postcard landscapes; trees, fields, flowers, rivers and so on. And in many ways, the photographs of the soldiers above, become not images of insignificant moments made before their departure, but images of their place in an eternal moment once the war was done.

After the war, the sense of emptiness must have been everywhere. Every insignificant moment – barely acknowledged before the war – now pregnant with a pervasive sense of incomprehensible loss. The world was outwardly the same, shifted just a little, but it had taken the lives of millions to push it there.

Redshift

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Anyone who has stood on the edge of the Lochnagar crater at La Boiselle in France, cannot help but be overawed by its vast size. The result of a huge mine, detonated below ground at 7:28am on 1st July 1916 (the first day of the Battle of the Somme), the crater is almost 300 feet in diameter and 70 feet deep.

“The whole earth heaved and flashed, a tremendous and magnificent column rose up in the sky. There was an ear-splitting roar drowning all the guns, flinging the machine sideways in the repercussing air. The earth column rose higher and higher to almost 4,000 feet. There it hung, or seemed to hang, for a moment in the air, like the silhouette of some great cypress tree, then fell away in a widening cone of dust and debris.” The words of 2nd Lieutenant C.A. Lewis of No. 3 Squadron RFC who witnessed the blast.

The image and video clip below shows a similar explosion, which took place a few minutes earlier at Hawthorn Redoubt, also on The Somme.

The obvious thing missing from this clip is the sound. Standing on the edge of the Lochnagar crater, one is aware of the noise this blast must have made – a sound so loud, it was said to have been heard in London. It’s almost as if the crater itself is an echo; one made from the mud of The Somme.

Thinking more on this, I had in my mind’s eye an image of the past receding – a past moving away from us here in the present-day. I thought about sound and how, as it moves away, its pitch shifts due to the fact its wavelength stretches (what’s known as the Doppler effect). I thought then about light, how as it moves away, its wavelength stretches and shifts towards the red end of the spectrum. It’s through this redshift that scientists can deduce how far away an object (such as a star) is from the Earth and how fast it is travelling. Redshift is often used as a way of explaining the Big Bang. If you imagine the Big Bang (or indeed any explosion), you can easily visualise how everything emanating from within it would move away from its centre. Everything we see in space today is a result of that first explosion. As a result, everything is moving away – something we can see in the redshift of distant galaxies.

As we move away from the catastrophic events of World War I, and as we approach its centenary, the craters and shell-holes that pockmark the old Western Front, become – like the trenches – filled with earth. They become grown over with grass, flowers and trees; and this gradual retreat towards the natural world is, I think, a kind of redshift in the landscape.

I want to explore this idea and to think more about an audio piece I’ve been working on: a recording of my mum and aunts singing Where Have All The Flowers Gone in 1962.

WWI Portraits: Inside, Outside

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Below are two portraits, each of a soldier about to leave home to fight in what we now know as the Great War.

I’m interested in these two particular pictures because they reveal how differences in their immediate surroundings affect out ability to empathise with them as individuals.

In the first picture, taken in a studio, the soldier is pictured in front of a painted backdrop. In this idealised landscape, the leaves of the trees are out,  the flowers are always in bloom, and behind an incongruous chair a river flows nowhere beneath a bridge. In the second picture the trees are bare, there are no flowers and a path leads to the rear of what appears to be a garden.

In the first picture, the soldier could almost be an actor standing on a stage. In the second, the soldier is – one assumes – at home, although in a sense, he too is playing a part. His however is a picture of departure; an image pregnant with the weight of all we know was about to befall him and thousands like him. The image of the soldier standing in the studio, tells me only about that time between the shutter’s opening and closing. There is no sense of an entrance or indeed an exit – whereas with the second image, one can imagine the soldier standing in place, then leaving once the picture was taken.

I can empathise with the second soldier much more readily because I know what it’s like to stand in a garden in winter. Somehow, the fact the trees are bare, along with the hedge running the length of the garden helps me make a connection. The branches and twigs are stark, vivid, real. With the first soldier, the backdrop is a fantasy and connecting with him is like trying to connect with someone else’s dream.

The main difference between the image above and those below is that in all those below I can feel the scene I’m looking at. I can almost hear it.

It was, I think, taken as the sun came up in the morning or as it set in the late afternoon…

You can almost feel the dampness of the grass and smell the earth…

Looking at it, I’m reminded of a photograph from my own childhood (below), taken in the winter of 1984.

Sukey and Her Ball
The bare cherry tree at the bottom of the garden echoes the tree in the one above (as does, in some respects, the path). I can clearly remember the dog (Sukey) and the places beyond the limits of the photograph; the image – and my memory – opens out like a flower. 
The same is true in part of the image of the soldier standing in his own garden; his world opens out, not in terms of the surroundings beyond the limits of the picture (the gardens of his neighbours for example) but rather the history of the war about to be played out. I know what happened on an historical level, but now I can imagine this war from a different angle; from that of this small patch of ground in an undisclosed part of the UK; from the perspective of this particular soldier in the cold, milky light of a winter’s morning or afternoon.
I look at his image not only with my eyes but with my body – with an embodied imagination. I use my own memories to ‘colour in’ this image taken almost a hundred years ago, not in terms of green for grass, blue for sky etc. but in terms of the cold, the sharpness of the temperature. With the the soldier in the studio, there is very little to support any sense of an empathetic connection. His image is, a sense, just that – an image; one no different to the painted backdrop in front of which he stands. 

Shadows 3

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I was looking at something recently which made me think of the work I’ve been exploring around the backdrops used in World War One postcards, such as that below:

WW1 Backdrops
The idea of movement has played a key part in my ongoing research, and I’ve been thinking for some time of giving these backdrops a sense of movement which, I realised I could do by videoing the shadows cast by trees onto a canvas, as per the video below.

Another shadow is that in the photograph below, taken on the stairwell of William Wordsworth’s school in Hawkshead, in the Lake District. The shadow is something he might well have seen in that very same place over 200 years ago and as such, is something that is simultaneously both ancient and fleeting – much like history itself. 

SAM_2150.jpg
History of course comprises events that are by their nature transient. A shadow is also an everyday occurrence – something quite insignificant; and yet behind every significant historical event – including those of our own personal histories – lies a vast, incomprehensible network of everyday events. It is mind-blowing to think that every one of my ancestors had to lead their lives exactly as they did in order for me to be born me. From the time (literally) they got up every day, to when they went to bed, everything they did in between had to be as it was. One step out of place and I would not be here. 

Beneath the floor

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I’ve always found it amazing, when, on a programme like Time Team, an apparently empty field is shown to have once been the site of some vast Roman villa; how something so grand and seemingly permanent can one day be lost to both memory and the landscape; a memento mori of inscribed lines on quite an epic scale. The recent discovery of the tomb of Richard III is perhaps the most vivid illustration of this; how the grave of so eminent a man could be buried (albeit hastily) in the choir of a friary, only for all trace (of both the grave and the friary) to be lost beneath the tarmac of a nondescript car park. In Urne Burial (1658), Sir Thomas Browne wrote:

“There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years; Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.” In the garden of the house in which I grew up, there was an oak tree – now lost; a victim of the relentless drive to build flats and houses on every scrap of space ‘available’.

In the shade of that tree (visible above on the right hand side) and the lawn beyond its reach, I spent many childhood days, playing football, high-jumping (badly), playing at being ‘The Professionals’ and, on one occasion, holding a sale to raise money for charity. But in the last year, a few years since my dad sold up and left, half the house has been pulled down (including most of my bedroom) and a new one built alongside, covering most of the garden.

The lawn on which we had picnics, over which the rabbit – Patch – thundered, chasing Sammy the cat – and the beds beneath which those same animals, amongst many others, were interred, is now itself buried beneath new concrete floors and builder’s rubble.

It’s strange to think of someone standing in a kitchen, or sitting in a living room, on the exact same space where we once played.

And that’s what made me think of those Roman villas lost to the past beneath the ground; all those memories attached to those buildings which have soaked away like water, into the ground over the course of two millennia.

The garage is now a particularly mournful sight. Here, I spent many hours (often with enormous hair as evidenced by the photograph) on the drive, playing football with my brother and friends – or sometimes by myself (I can still hear the sound of the plastic ball skitting across the concrete and the bash of the blue metal door which was sometimes the goal). The sounds too at night of my dad arriving home in the car, the radio blaring as the wooden gates were opened; the whoosh of the garage door being lifted, are memories more permanent than the concrete drive itself. Now the garage is a sorry looking creature, whose full demise is certain, along with the shed tucked away behind (in which we sometimes slept on warm summer nights).

The photo below of me and my cousins (on my dad’s side) was taken when I was a baby in the summer of 1971.

The patch of grass on which we’re sitting would soon become the garage….

The Material World

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“What, then, is this material world? Of what does it consist?”

So asks Tim Ingold, in his book, Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. It seems an obvious question, or rather, a question for which there is an obvious answer, but in terms of the field Material Culture it would seem to be not so straightforward. Citing a number of works on the subject, Ingold writes how “their engagements, for the most part, are not with the tangible stuff of craftsmen and manufacturers but with the abstract ruminations of philosophers and theorists.” Furthermore, “literature in anthropology and archaeology that deals explicitly with the subjects of materiality and material culture seems to have hardly anything to say about materials.” Ingold then goes on to cite an inventory of materials one might expect to see when dealing with this subject, as can be found in a book by Henry Hodges called Artefacts.

pottery
glazes
glass and enamels
copper and copper alloys
iron and steel
gold, silver, lead and mercury
stone
wood
fibres and threads
textiles and baskets
hides and leather
antler, bone, horn, ivory
dyes, pigments and paints
adhesives

In an array of books on his bookshelf, all dealing in some form with the subject of material culture, Ingold states that one looks in vain for any “comprehensible explanation of what ‘materiality’ actually means, or for any account of materials and their properties.” 

To cut a long story short, Ingold goes on to question what the material world actually is – thus the question at the top: “What, then, is this material world? Of what does it consist?”

He writes:

“Christopher Gosden suggests, we could divide it into two broad components: landscape and artefacts. Thus it seems that we have human minds on the one hand, and a material world of landscape and artefacts on the other. That, you might think, should cover just about everything. But does it? Consider, for a moment, what is left out. Starting with landscape, does this include the sky? Where do we put the sun, the moon and the stars? We can reach for the stars but cannot touch them: are they, then, material realities with which humans can make contact, or do they exist only for us in the mind? is the moon part of the material world for terrestrial travellers, or only for cosmonauts who touch down on the lunar landscape? How about sunlight? Life depends on it. But if sunlight were a constituent of the material world, then we would have to admit not only that the diurnal landscape differs materially from the nocturnal one, but also that the shadow of a landscape feature, such as a rock or tree, is as much a part of the material world as the feature itself. For creatures that live in the shade, it does indeed make a difference! What, then, of the air? When you breathe, or feel the wind on your face, are you engaging with the material world? When the fog descends, and everything around you looks dim and mysterious, has the material world changed, or are you just seeing the same world differently? Does rain belong to the material world, or only the puddles that it leaves in ditches and pot-holes? Does falling snow join the material world only once it settles on the ground? As engineers and builders know all too well, rain and frost can break up roads and buildings. How then can we claim that roads and buildings are part of the material world, if rain and frost are not? And where would we place fire and smoke, molten lava and volcanic ash, not to mention liquids of all kinds from ink to running water? … If, moreover, they are part of the material world, then the same must be true of my own body. So where does this fit in? If I and my body are one and the same, and if my body indeed partakes of the material world, then how can the body-that-I-am engage with that world?”

When I read this, I thought about the dig I went on last year at Bartlemas Chapel in Oxford, when I found a small but rather beautiful piece of mediaeval (I think) pottery.

Bartlemas Chapel Excavation

There are many ways in which one could interpret this find, but what I thought about was how this was like a missing piece of the present, and how, before it was lost to the soil, it had existed in a mediaeval present that was (save for the obvious differences) just like ours today. There was the wind, there were trees and flowers, the clouds, the sky and of course the sun, by whose light the beautiful glaze could be seen again, just as it had been by someone living hundreds of years ago. Reading what Tim Ingold has written about materiality and material culture above therefore made perfect sense.

And as regards my work with empathy and the importance in this respect of materiality and material culture, the idea of the body as part of the material world was also of interest. We are not set outside the material world but are an integral part – therefore it’s easier to engage empathetically with an individual through the objects those individuals once used. Empathy is as I’ve said before an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge. Knowledge as Ingold writes derives through movement: “It is by moving that we know, and it is by moving, too, that we describe.” When I discovered the piece of pottery (through moving), I uncovered not only the object itself, but the material world by which it was once surrounded, including those people who once used it, or the person who even made it.

Maps and Ivory Gurney

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On the bus into work this morning I read the following in Robert Macfarlane’s ‘The Wild Places.’

“Woods and forests have been essential to the imagination of these islands, and of countries throughout the world, for centuries. It is for this reason that when woods are felled, when they are suppressed by tarmac and concrete and asphalt, it is not only unique species and habitats that disappear, but also unique memories, unique forms of thought. Woods, like other wild places, can kindle new ways of being or cognition in people, can urge their minds differently.”

Woods have always been places of intense interest to me, particularly as a boy when I would love to imagine England as being covered in ancient woodland. My interest in history wasnt so much an interest in the characters and machinations of past times, but a means of accessing the landscape of those times – a way into the woods. 

I would create maps of imagined places, all of which would be home to vast swathes of untouched and unspoiled forests. And while those maps were ‘of places’, they were much more a means into a place, a path into and through my imagination.

In the same book ‘The Wild Places,’ Macfarlane briefly discusses the poet, composer and songwriter Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) who like the poet Edward Thomas, loved to explore the countryside of his native county – Gloucestershire. In 1915, Gurney enlisted to fight in the Great War, and in the battlefields of the Ypres Salient, discovered what Macfarlane describes as an ‘anti-landscape,’ a place in which the only evidence of forests ‘were upright bare dead trunks, stripped of leaves, branches and bark by shrapnel and gunfire.’ As Macfarlane writes: ‘On the military maps of the area that Gurney used, some of the old names of the landscape remained. But many of the new names spoke of the avoidance of death, or of its arrival. Shrapnel Corner, Crump Farm, Hellfire Corner, Halfway House, Dead Dog Farm, Battle Wood, Sanctuary Wood. The woods were no longer there, however; these were ghost names only. The trees had been felled for revetting, or blasted from the earth by shells.’

As someone with an interest in maps and in trench maps, the above passage interested me, particularly as I’ve often thought about how the landscape of the First World war, replete with all its new names and new features, had been superimposed, or rather gouged out of the landsape, only to smoothed over with the passage of time. Its was a sudden landscape. A few scars, smoothed over with grass – or hidden by trees – are all that’s left, but the wounds are still weeping in its names – not so much those of soldiers inscribed on the thousands of headstones, but rather the names of places – Arras, The Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele. 

Trench Map 1916
Trench Map (1915)

In many places the woods have returned, and while the landscape today bears little resemblance to that of the war  – in which ‘the rich and complicated pasts of the trees that Gurney cherished’ had been so utterly effaced, it is nonetheless within those woods that one’s imagination picks up the voices of the past – of the fallen; voices which spoke in the midst of battle, of places and people cherished back home.

The Somme
Woods in The Somme

After returning from the war, Ivor Gurney, like so many others suffered a breakdown (he’d suffered his first in 1913) and a passage in Macfarlane’s book, which describes the visits to Gurney – within the Dartford asylum – by Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward Thomas is particularly moving. Helen took with her one of her husband’s Ordnance survey maps of Gloucestershire:

‘She recalled afterwards that Gurney, on being shown the map, took it at once from her, and spread it out on his bed, in his hot little white-tiled room in the asylum, with the sunlight falling in patterns upon the floor. Then the two of them kneeled together by the bed and traced out, with their fingers, walks that they and Edward had taken in the past.’

The map they laid on the bed was one that showed the familiar trails and paths of the countryside. But it was also one which, like that I made in my childhood, gave Gurney access to his imagination – to his own past. Together, the patient and his visitor read it with their fingers, following the trails as one follows words on a page. A narrative of sorts was revealed, memories stitched together by the threads of roads, paths and trails.

Heavy Water Sleep (Paintings) III

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I worked again tonight on the studies for Heavy Water Sleep, working in landscape elements such as trees and sky. The original text from which the words are taken, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ by Grey Owl, is set chiefly in the forests of Canada. And in the ‘secondary text’ which inspired the work in the first place, ‘The Diaries of Adam Czerniakow’  there is a moving passage in which, following a visit outside the Warsaw Ghetto to the woods of Otwock, he writes simply, ‘… the air, the woods, breathing.’ Trees then seem integral to the work and have indeed been a recurring them in much of my work, particularly work to do with the Holocaust and World War I.

I wanted then to use trees in these works and found myself using a stylised form which I’d scribbled one day in my notebook based on lines you find in Family Tree diagrams.

This symbolic tree was in part inspired by some work I did on the First World War in which I used the dividing lines on the backs of original wartime postcards to symbolise the bond between the anonymous individuals who died in the war and their families back at home. These ‘T’ shaped divides reminded me of photographs in which hastily dug graves were marked on battlefields with crude crucifixes. I therefore created landscapes (based on my visits to battlefield sites on what had been the Front) and used these T-shapes to represent graves.

Battle 2

From these T-shapes I derived the forms for the trees below.

Heavy Water Sleep

Heavy Water Sleep

The link between them and the Ts above is an obvious one – even more so when one considers the original inspiration for this work.

Goethean Observation: World War I Trench Map

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Less a Goethean observation and a more general observation with reference to the Goethean method (click here to read more about Goethean Observation).

Note: The aim of this observation is not to write a beautiful prose account of the map, but rather to look, observe and find a hook upon which to hang the next piece of research into this subject.

Trench Map 1916

The map has been printed on a large sheet of paper creased vertically and horizontally with lines where the map has been folded and opened. The paper itself is a brownish-white, darker along the lines of the folds and around the edges in places. The corners on the left hand side are a little dog-eared.

The map on one side shows the area concerned – a part of France as the map tells me at the top. This side of the paper is smooth to the touch, but on the reverse I can feel a tooth. Folding over the first fold, I can see the tooth on the ‘reverse’ very clearly. The [fabric of the] paper is made up of very straight vertical lines, with wonkier lines running horizontally. There are four ‘squares’ (actually rectangles) to each folded column and eight folded columns (7 creases) in all. There are four folded rows (3 creases).

The ‘square’ at the top of the first vertical fold on the reverse side of the map tells me this is a ‘Trench Map’. Like the bottom square, the colour of the paper is much darker than the rest. The two squares in between are like the colour of the map on the reverse side – possibly even lighter. This shows how the map, when folded, has a front and a reverse side. Having turned over the map so that this first fold appears on the right I can see all 32 ‘squares’ that make up the map. The folds are particularly prominent, some darker than others. Some of the squares show no sign – or at least – very little sign of wear. There are some splits in some of the folds – caused of course by the repeated action of opening and closing the map.

Trench Map 1916

Six ‘squares’ along the top two are covered with words – French words and their English translations. The words are the names of landscape features such as tree (arbre), gate/stile (barrière), oak tree (chêne) and pond (etang). The rest of the squares, including one on this top row are blank. All one can see is the pattern of the paper’s fabric.

Turning the map over, one is aware of the holes and the sound the paper makes. It reminds me of a soft version of the crackle of a fire.

The drawing of the landscape takes up much of this side of the paper with explanatory texts and a key beneath as well as to the right of the map.

Looking at the details of the map, one can see the various features of the landscape – the woods, roads, hills (through contour lines), rivers, ponds or lakes and of course various towns and villages. All these features, along with the names and the grid are printed in a ‘black’ ink which actually appears as a light ‘browny’ grey.

Trench Map 1916

What one’s eye is drawn to straight away however are the patches of colour on the right hand side of the map; blue and red. The colours have been used to colour a multitude of lines which run from the top of the page to the bottom. The majority of these are red. There is one dashed blue line which snakes from top to bottom to the left of the furthest-most red line and to the left of that, the same colour has been used to mark out the landscape features showing rivers, lakes and what appears to be marshy land.

The red lines themselves have been drawn in a sort of ‘stepped’ way and cover a quarter of the map up to the right hand side. Looking closely at these lines, one is made aware of the other lines of the map – black curved lines, straight vertical and horizontal lines; straight vertical and horizontal dotted lines – these lines divide each square (delineated by the other straight lines) into four quarters.

In each of the large squares there are numbers, the greatest of which appears to be 36. Among some of these numbers, there are also letters – P, Q, R, V, W, X.

As I look at the map I begin to notice the mix of French and English words/names. The place names are clearly French; La Boiselle, Thiepval, Authuille, Contelmaison, Beaumont-Hamel. In amongst these however are names like Tara Hill, The Crucifix, Railway Copse, Brickworks, Pond Bridge and Cemetery. There also appear to be instructions: ‘35 to 40 ft deep: Impractical for Cavalry.’ There is also a largish hole above Pozières.

Folding the paper up, it fits entirely in my hand. It is like a concertina, about an inch thick without too much pressure applied.

Trench Map 1916

Looking more closely at the front of the folded map, I can see the words:

Trench Map
France
Sheet 57D S.E.
Edition 2.D.

There is then a diagram – an ‘index to adjoining sheets’ beneath which are the words and numerals:

Scale: 1/20,000

On the left hand side of this ‘face’ are what appear to be two initials, DM. The map smells of its age, a musty smell of something that for a long time was forgotten.

On the diagram I can see a small square which has been shaded in to distinguish it from all the others. One can see that this piece of paper is part of a much larger map measuring ‘eight maps’ wide and ‘eight maps’ high.

The map is clearly old. The date 1916 has been printed on the ‘map’ side, but even without this, the style of the printing and the condition tells me it’s of some age. Through its age it has expanded in its folded form. The folds aren’t as crisp as they were. It has no doubt lain forgotten in an attic or some such place, acquiring its patina and its smell. As the dust has grown, the text has faded, although the edges of each letter are crisp. And still I can see the ‘DM’ in pencil on the left hand side.

It doesn’t resist being folded again. First vertically and then horizontally.

I unfold it and instinctively flatten it down. The folds in places rise up. The fold which runs vertically through the red lines does especially. This part of the map won’t remain flat unless I press it down with my hand. As I do, my head instinctively lifts a little and my eyes move along the lines of red to rest around the village of Thiepval.

These actions would no doubt have been repeated in the past when the map was perhaps more pristine – when the folds were sharper and the map lay flat.

The map, when I lift it up, seems to want to fold into a particular shape. It doesn’t want to be put away, but rather be folded so that two columns remain in view. The folds which delineate this part are a darker brown than all the others. In this section of the map is a concentration of red lines and blue lines.

The way it folds suggests that this was what was most important. When I pick up the map to fold it completely, it folds so that the ‘front’ and ‘reverse’ are tucked away. The front now is one of the segments or ‘squares’ containing French words (Sondage) and their English equivalents (Boring – as in cut).
The past movements associated with this map are therefore recorded in its folds. It resists being folded any other way.

We know the map was made in 1916 with minor corrections to details on 15.8.16. This is just six weeks after the first offensive in the Battle of the Somme. Shortly after this period the map would have been replaced with another as the landscape changed with each offensive.

When I look at this map from the comfort of my own front room I see history – albeit one written in a less conventional way. It still has words and pictures.

For much of its life it was no doubt a curiosity. Maybe it was a reminder for those that were there who when looking at the lines would have seen something very different – not on the map but in their minds.

Those who used the map would have seen something else. By August 1916, the colossal tragedy of the first day of the Somme would have been etched on everyone’s mind. The contour lines can hardly tell the reality of the ground’s undulations, and yet it was these which meant the difference between life and death. The map serves to distance us from reality.

Considering its past, the action of being folded and then unfolded over and over, one can almost imagine a bellows lifting and then depressing, letting out air like a breath – a last gasp.

The map is like a palimpsest, albeit one which is just a single print. One can see the original landscape which over the years changed as landscape features assumed English monikers. It is a place that appears at once to be real and imagined – a non sort of place.

‘The Poodles’, ‘The Dingle’, ‘Willow Patch’, ‘Round Wood’, ‘Birch Tree Wood’, – they all have the sound of something made up – a children’s story. ‘Middle Wood’, ‘Villa Wood’, ‘Lonely Copse’. There is even marked ‘a row of apple trees’. These names – these alien names – all appear on the right hand side of the map; on the left, large swathes of woodland go unnamed.

The same is true of road names.

Observation of certain parts of the map has changed the way it moves – these movements seem impressed into the map’s fabric.

When I stand to look at the map, I stand as, no doubt, others stood around it. I can again imagine the creases as sharper, the colour of the paper whiter, the lines more vivid.

Looking at the map, unfolding it and folding it, smoothing down the paper, one gets the sense of an individual. 1/20,000. The map as an object tells me about the individual who looked at it. What is pictured tells me – when I think of the scale – about the thousands of men killed on that first day of the Somme.

One gets the sense of other maps printed before this one, upon which this one is based – each one covering over the horror of the most recent losses of life. They become like shrouds.

Each one would have been used to plan the next map, and the next, and so on, until there weren’t any red lines left.

Past and Present Postcard

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The image below is the last in a series I’ve made using both an original World War One postcard and a photograph I took in Verdun. All are works in progress.

I’ve been fascinated with the backdrops in some of these postcards for quite some time now and have been looking at ways of using them in works relating to the Great War and, in particular, the issue of empathy.

The original postcard is of course in black and white (with a greenish tint) and shows a soldier about to head to the Front, standing, leaning on a chair.

Behind him is an idealised image – an idyllic, invented landscape, a far cry from what he was, perhaps, about to encounter, but close in some respects to what we find on battlefields today; where there were trenches, arms, barbed wire and bodies, there are now trees. And amidst the trees, incongruous concrete Pill Boxes stand and watch as the seasons come and go. Everything is slowly reclaimed. The trees in the image at the top of the blog spill to reclaim the past – the interior of the studio – through the gap left by the missing soldier.

I have placed the solider back beyond the gap left by the vague shape of his own body, to remind us that people like the soldiers we see in all these postcards, were once like those of us who have visited the battlefields. They too would have known what it was to stand in a wood. To listen to the wind blowing through the branches.

To stand and do just that, is one way to remember them.

An Unfinished World

by

First thoughts on Graham Sutherland, ‘An Unfinished World.’ Modern Art Oxford

Graham Sutherland, Dark Hill – Landscape with Hedges and Fields, 1940. Swindon Museum and Art Gallery © Estate of Graham Sutherland

 In his excellent book, ‘A History of Ancient Britain,’ historian Neil Oliver writes:

“All of Britain was a work in progress as nature set about reclaiming the land. The period of hundreds of thousands of years known to archaeologists as the Palaeolithic – Lower, Middle and Upper – was over. The remote world of the mammoth-hunters of Paviland, even the lives and times of the Creswell artists and the butchers of Cheddar Gorge belonged to the past. The ice of the Big Freeze had drawn a line that separates them from us, then from now.”

This line in our history, this schism carved through time in much the same way as valleys were carved and gouged by ice from rock, is a place I find myself observing when I look at some of Sutherland’s haunted landscapes. They are silent spaces, from which it seems humankind is quite estranged; banished even. In some, it’s as if Man has yet to appear, as if the world is part of a parallel universe, similar in some respects, but altogether different. There are, as well as those landscapes which seem divorced from knowable time (from history), landscapes from the recent past; ruined prospects of towns wracked by war. And while the source of this ruination is Man himself, the sense which Sutherland creates is one in which Man again ceases to exist. It’s almost as if through both types of landscape (those we might – very loosley- describe as rural on the one hand, urban/industrial on the other), Sutherland is reminding us that for the unimaginably greater part of its existence, the world did not know us; that for the equally ‘impossible’ span of time that stretches ahead, the world will have no need of us either.

This sense of oblivion haunts Sutherland’s landscapes; Earth’s indifference towards us – in the grand scheme of things – permeates almost every canvas and drawing, no matter how small. They each seem to echo the wonderful words of the 17th century writer Sir Thomas Browne, when he writes in ‘Urn Burial.’

“We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.”

On some of Sutherland’s drawings, the artist has drawn a grid of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. Grids like these would often be used when scaling drawings up to full-size works, and perhaps that is what the artist intended them for. When I see them however, I see them not as something detached from the work itself – a mere tool for reproduction – but rather an integral part of the work. It’s as if the artist is trying either to order the chaos which he’s rendered on the page (and which he’s no doubt observed in the real world), or do battle with Man’s certain oblivion and relative obscurity, imposing his mark on the landscape; his dominion over the world.

A Farmhouse in Wales 1940. Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales

If the Farmhouse in Wales above is slowly dissolving back into the landscape, then perhaps it can be seen as a metaphor for man’s own ineveitable fate. The grid therefore, this means for scaling up, for seeing more clearly and in greater detail (the bigger picture as it were) is perhaps then a means for trying to understand that fate, for comprehending those ‘pillars of snow,’ so beautifully described by Browne in 1658.

Welsh Landscape with Yellow Lane 1939-40. Private Collection, London

In a video to accompany the exhibition, curator (and artist) George Shaw, describes how the use of yellow gives the appearance of a landscape which is jaundiced; perhaps sick. I however see this sickness not as a part of the landscape, but a part of our own vision of ourselves; our place in the ‘grand scheme of things.’ Even where Sutherland has painted machines (which by their very existence would seem to point towards the existence – and therefore relevance – of mankind), there is still the sense of Man’s complete absence from the world. It’s as if, as I’ve said, these paintings depict those two great and awful spans of time, between which Man’s existence is pressed, like rocks beneath the vast sheets of ice, which once crawled and covered this place we call home. (Even those gargantuan glaciers – in places almost a mile thick – which smothered the country for so many thousands of years, would seem like Browne’s ‘pillars of snow’ when considered against the backdrop of eternity.)

In the exhibition’s first few paintings, we find these same desolate landscapes, replete with standing stones (for example, in ‘Sun Setting Between Hills’ below) such as those found at ancient sites throughout the country.

Sun Setting Between Hills 1937. Private Collection

At once these landscapes become charged with mystery, and like those paintings which show, for example, cranes gorging themselves on the landscape, we are presented with evidence of Man’s existence. The standing stone and the ruined urban landscape, mirror one another. Poles apart, they seem to delineate this landscape in which we, for a short time, have strutted the stage of our existence. No-one is likely to walk the yellow roads which cut through the world above – yet someone must have been there.

Interlocking Tree Form 1943. The Whitworth Gallery, University of Manchester

Despite this apparent absence of Man, the trees in some of Sutherland’s landscapes seem almost human, at least in their gestures. Some such gestures echo the agonies of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, (for example, in ‘Interlocking Tree Form’ above) while ‘Study for a Blasted Tree,’ calls to mind Goya’s ‘Disasters of War.’

Fallen Lift Shaft 1941. Junior Common Room Art Collection, New College.

It was whilst looking at the painting above, that I found myself thinking of William Blake. In this work, ‘Fallen Lift Shaft,’ there is a small patch of red which is reminiscent of some of the poet’s own paintings. The lift is on the one hand a casualty of war, a victim of Man’s aggression. On the other it’s a symbol of his descent. It is perhaps the Fallen Angel.

The exhibition is titled ‘An Unfinished World‘ and whilst reading Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The Ancestor’s Tale,’ I found a quote, which for me encapulsates what that title means. The world, with or without Man, is always unfinished. Dawkins writes:

“The second connected temptation is the vanity of the present: of seeing the past as aimed at our own time, as though the characters in history’s play had nothing better to do with their lives than fore-shadow us.”

In other words, we are not the end, just as we weren’t the beginning. And it’s this conceit which Browne cautions against in his meditation on death discussed above. Sutherland’s landscapes are for me, the equivalent of trying to imagine one’s own non-existence in a world which is always, as Neil Oliver writes, ‘a work in progress,’ one in which nature will one day set about reclaiming from Man.

One might think it’s possible therefore to view Sutherland’s paintings as a warning against this conceit. But to do this is in itself a kind of conceit. The fact is, we are just another part of the landscape. The yellow road was there before us, and after us the yellow road rolls on. Sutherland’s paintings are not warnings, but statements of fact.

And while this might sound somewhat depressing, another quote from Dawkins (again from ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’) might just lift our spirits:

“As physicists have pointed out, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for stars are a necessary part of any universe capable of generating us. Again, this does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars.”

Landscape 1969. Harry Moore-Gwyn (Moore-Gwyn Fine Art)

In many of Sutherland’s works, our very own star, the sun, is present such as in the work above. In one of the first paintings within the exhibition, to the last (painted just four years before his death- see below) the same sun is in view.  

Twisting Roads 1976. Private Collection.

And we – like Sutherland – can only see it, we only know it, because we exist. 

Perhaps therefore, in Sutherland’s work, humankind is in evidence after all.


© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

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