Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Big Ships on the Horizon

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The big coal ships have fascinated me ever since I first saw them when I arrived in Newcastle. Like the huge clouds above them, they seem on the face of it not to be moving, but rather – like a photograph – fixed in their shape. Only over a period of time, as one watches, do the ships reveal themselves as moving, changing their course, just as the seemingly immutable clouds change their shape.

Coal Ships - Video Stills

The past too is like this. It appears to us fixed in its final shape by history, but when we observe at length we begin to see things differently – just as with the ships and the clouds, the past changes shape not unlike the way the present constantly changes its shape around us; because the past was once the present.

I have for a long while been interested in old photographs, in the distant parts of photographs where things are not the ‘subject’ of the picture. For example, the image below is a detail from a holiday snap taken some time in the early 1980s. I’ve no idea who the girl is and only noticed her when I enlarged the image.

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Merleau-Ponty once wrote how distance was not a property of the horizon, and distance too – we might say – is not a property of those people occupying the background of these photographs. They are – or were – as much a part of the scene as those of us in the foreground – the subjects of the photograph. We are always as much a part of the distance and the foreground as everyone else; we are both these things at one and the same time. In terms of history, we in the present are like the subject of a photograph, and those in the past are like those in the distance. Everything is the same part of the present, just seen from different perspectives.

The past is as much about movement as is the present (just as the distance contains as much movement as the foreground) and to observe this movement in the past (or the distance) requires us to be patient – to watch and to listen.

It is interesting that watching and listening to the distance has become a theme during my residency here, and that the image above – a video still of the ships and the sky – was filmed from Shepherd’s Point, a place from which the Services would listen and watch for the enemy during World War 2.

Ancestry

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I’m very pleased to announce that my forthcoming exhibition, Mine the Mountain, will be sponsored by Ancestry.co.uk.

I have been researching my family tree for almost a year now and in that time have used Ancestry to search thousands of records (census returns; births, marriages and deaths etc.) to build what has now become quite an extensive tree with roots stretching back to the mid eighteenth century. And although most of this research has been carried out alone, through using the Ancestry website I have been able to join forces with a relative (a second cousin) who I have never met and who lives on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. He had already made good progress on one line of my family (that of my maternal grandmother) and through the website, I was able to merge much of that information into my own research (and indeed, share with him my own first hand knowledge of people he’d never met).
Using the website I made very quick progress, discovering hundreds of people, some of whom had been completely forgotten, swallowed up by time and almost lost to the past altogether. And it was in response to this idea of the anonymous mass, that what had started as a hobby became an integral part of my artistic practice.

I have always been interested in history and the past was always going to feature in the work I wanted to make and much of my work over the last two years has stemmed from a visit I made to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 2006.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

As with many historical and indeed contemporary traumas (whether ‘man-made’ or natural disasters), one of the most difficult things to comprehend at Auschwitz (and indeed with the Holocaust as a whole) was not only the sheer brutality and inhumanity of the place, but the scale of the suffering experienced there. How can one possibly comprehend over 1 million victims (6 million in the Holocaust as a whole)? The only way I could even begin to try, was to find the individuals amongst the many dead; that’s not to say I looked for named individuals, but what it meant to be one.
One of the many strategies I used to explore the individual was that of researching my own past; not just that of my childhood, but a past in which I did not yet exist.

Ieper (Ypres)

Using the Ancestry website I began to uncover names, lots of names which seemed to exist, disembodied in the ether of cyberspace like the names one reads on memorials (such as on the Menin Gate in Ypres), and I was reminded all the while I searched of a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem ‘The Duino Elegies,’ in which he writes that on dying we
“…leave even our name behind us as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy…”

It is interesting that in looking back on our lives and beyond, we inevitably pass through our own childhood, and indeed, I can remember mine replete with all its toys – a fair few of which were inevitably broken. In Rilke’s phrase above, we have an implied progression from childhood to adulthood and the fate that comes to all of us, but travelling back, we move away from death and think of our childhoods, remembering those toys which in our mind’s eye are always new, or at least, always mended. This sense of moving back and the idea of toys, or things, that are mended again, resonates for me with my research and my using the Ancestry website. One can think of the 800 million names stored in their databases as each being a broken toy, one that when it’s found again is slowly put back together.

Having discovered hundreds of names (or broken toys) in my own family tree, I’ve started to put the pieces back together, looking beyond the names to discover who these people were, and therefore, who I really am. And the more I discover, the more I find myself looking at history in an altogether different way. History is sometimes seen as being nothing but a list of dates, but like the names on Ancestry, there are of course a myriad number of things behind the letters and the numbers (the broken toy in the attic has been to places other than just the attic – and has been things other than just a toy).
Now when I think of an historical date, I relate that to my family tree and consider who was alive at the time. For example, when reading about the Great Exhibition of 1851, I know that at that time Richard Hedges, Ann Jordan, Elijah Noon, Charlotte White, William Lafford, Elizabeth Timbrill, John Stevens, Charles Shackleford, Mary Ann Jones among many others were all alive; what is for me a distant event described in books and early black and white photographs, was for them a lived moment whether or not they visited the exhibition itself.

When this photograph inside the exhibition hall was taken in 1851, they were a part of the moment, even when farming in Norfolk. When the guillotine fell upon Marie Antoinette on October 16th 1791 (I’ve just been reading about the French Revolution), Thomas Sarjeant, Ann Warfare Hope, David Barnes, Mary Burgess and William Deadman were going about their normal lives somewhere across the channel in England, and it’s by understanding their lives – of which I am of course a consequence and therefore a part, that I can begin to understand history as not some set, concrete thing that has happened, but something fluid, made of millions of moments which were at one time happening. Every second in history comprises these millions of moments when the world is seen at once by millions of pairs of eyes.

Therefore, as well as being a huge database of names, Ancestry can be seen as being a database of moments, the more of which we discover for ourselves, the greater our understanding of history becomes. This, in light of the project’s origins at Auschwitz-Birkenau, is particularly pertinent; the Holocaust, as a defined historical event, becomes millions of moments and the Holocaust itself not one single tragedy, but a single tragedy repeated six million times.

In effect, Ancestry allows users to map themselves onto history and the family tree becomes not just a network of relationships between hundreds of people but a kind of physical and geographic biography of the individual. Places we have heard of but never been to, places we have never known before become as much a part of our being as the place in which we were born and in which we live. For example, if there’s a place with which I can most identify physically or geographically, then that place would be Oxford, the town in which I was born, grew up and in which I live. Its streets which I have walked and its buildings which I have seen countless numbers of times, all hold memories – and what are we in the end but these.

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Of course there are numerous other places which I have visited and which make me who I am (seaside towns in Dorset where I holidayed as a child for example) but as well as these places are those which, until I began my research, I had either never heard of or never visited: Hafodyrynys, Dorchester, Burton Dassett, Southam, Ampney St. Peter, Minety, Ampney Crucis, Cefn-y-Crib, Kingswood, Usk, Eastleach, Wisbech, Walpole St. Andrew and so on. Furthermore, places I had known and visited were shown to contain memories extending way beyond my own lifetime but of which I am nonetheless a part, or at least, a consequence. I have been to Brighton many times and have many memories of that place, but all the times I have been there, never did I realise how much it and the surrounding area had come to make me who I am.

Hafodyrynys and Surrounds

So, as well as being a vast database of moments, Ancestry can be seen as an equally vast set of blueprints, each for a single individual – not only those who are living, but those who’ve passed away. And just as the dead, through the lives they led, have given life to those of us in the present, so we, living today can give life back to those who have all but been forgotten. Merleau-Ponty, in his ‘Phenomenology of Perception’, wrote:

“I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them.”

Of course our existence does indeed stem from our antecedents (and as we have seen, our physical environment), but what I like about this quote is the idea of our sustaining the existence of our ancestors in return. The natural, linear course of life from birth to death, from one generation to the next, younger generation, is reversed. Generations long since gone depend on us for life, as much as we have depended on them.

In his novel, ‘The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,’ Rilke wrote the following:

“Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because one has always spoken of its masses just as though one were telling of a coming together of many human beings, instead of speaking of the individual around whom they stood because he was a stranger and was dying?”

Mine the Mountain - Creatures

This quote brings me back round to what I spoke of earlier; the idea that the past is made up of countless millions of moments – that History is not the concrete thing that has happened, but something more fluid, something which was once happening, and which, given Merleau-Ponty’s assertion above, is still happening, or at least being sustained. These moments are the world as seen by individuals. In Rilke’s quote, the history of the world, represented by the masses, has its back turned against us. We cannot see its face or faces, only the clothes that it wears. But the stranger in the middle, around whom history crowds is looking out towards us, and if we meet their gaze, we make a connection, we see the individual. And for a moment they might be a stranger, but through the dialogue which inevitably begins, we get to know them and the world to which they, and indeed, we, belong.

As I’ve said, Ancestry is more than a network of discovered (and undiscovered) relationships between hundreds of people; it’s also an immense collection of dialogues; one can imagine the lines which connect individuals as being like telephone wires carrying conversations between the past and the present. And the more one thinks of all these nodes and connections, the more one begins to see that Ancestry is also a metaphor for memory – after all, what are memories but maps in the brain, patterns of connections between millions of neurons which make a picture of what once was: history as it really is.

Mine the Mountain will run between 1st and 8th October 2008 in Oxford. Download a PDF for venues.

Creatures

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Yesterday, as part of my MA, I showed a collection of photographs entitled ‘Creatures’. Some of the photographs and the supporting text can be found in the Gallery section of this website, under ‘Creatures‘.

In the feedback session afterwards, the response was, I felt very positive, but what was interesting for me as an artist was the discussion around the different media I employed to show the images. There were of course the photographs on the wall, there was a book which contained the same sets of photographs, and finally the website, which comprised the supporting text and interactive versions of the images.

Different things appealed to different people, but what most people agreed was that the book was particularly engaging. Why was this? What is it about the book which holds our attention, or rather captures our attention so much more – or rather so differently – than pictures on a wall?

One aspect is the fact that on looking at the images on the wall (or any collection of images) one moves; one has to walk from one picture to the next. It may seem an obvious point but it’s one which I hadn’t considered when setting up the exhibition. With a book of course, one is sedentary. Obviously one can walk with a book, but even then there is a difference, with a book the viewer is in control, the viewer has control of time; when images are on a wall, there is inevitably a sense that at some point one must move on. There also is something very personal about a book of photographs as opposed again, to those on a wall. We are all familiar with photograph albums and have no doubt at one time or another spent idle moments looking through the pages of our own family collection. There is then, I believe, a sort of empathy which exists between viewer and artist when images such as these are presented in book form. It is the act of looking at a book which is very personal, it’s a remembered action, one which we do quite unconsciously which connects the viewer with the images.

When the images are on a wall, they become objects, that sense empathy is broken – or rather, it doesn’t exist. A phrase used by someone during the feedback was ‘mechanical’. The selection of the photograph, the enlarging of a detail soon becomes clear as a process which almost threatens the work in terms of its actual content. Someone said that he first viewed the work on an intellectual level, and then, at this point where the intellectual/process part of the work threatened to dominate, this intellectual engagement became an emotional one; this was when he realised the images were my old family photographs.

This was an interesting point in that during the feedback, I began to think that it would be better to show the original, unmounted, photographs rather than mounted copies, or at least, copies which more accurately reproduced the original image. There needs to be a greater distinction between the two. One set are my family photographs, they are intensely personal – the others are photographs of different people; they are not personal (although the contributed in some way to a personal moment). Also, someone suggested – in terms of work shown on the wall – that there needs to be fewer images and perhaps larger details. This however wouldn’t be the case with the book. Again, time is at play here; with a book, one has control over time, one can flick through the pages, put the book down, open it again moments, days or weeks later. In a gallery, or with images on a wall, that engagement is, as I’ve said of a very different quality. One has to (physically) leave images behind, and, in a sense, this is no bad thing. The present passes and moves behind us, the present exists for as long as we are consciously aware of it being present. We hold the image before us, as we consciously hold life before us, and then we move on.

So there is a sense – one that needs to be explored in greater depth – that the temporal aspects of perceiving an artwork are at play here. There is the emotional engagement which might be stronger when images are presented in a book. It is interesting in that during the show of work, a colleague told me about friends of his who’d been to Auschwitz and who had seen a wall of snapshots found in the camp. I told him that I had the book and after the feedback began to think about how different my engagement with these images would be in terms of seeing them on a wall and seeing them on the page. Turning pages makes one subconsciously think of one’s own family albums and this gives the photographs of a stranger a somewhat personal quality.

Thinking back to the suggestion then that there needs to be fewer images and details which are physically larger, I would suggest that the opposite might be true. Perhaps the details should be shown on a scale identical with those of the original photograph? Perhaps they should be places in an album all of their own? Perhaps they should be shown as a pile which one can pick though, or in a cardboard box or suitcase from which one can take them.

There are many possibilities which need to be explored. I believe the photographs as they are, work, but I am intrigued by the emotional and temporal aspects of the way in which they are shown.

Wallpaper

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Today I started wallpapering the drawings I described in the previous entry to a wall in my studio in order to see how they would look and to see what techniques would be best for the installation at MAO. After a while, it became clear that the effect wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. I must admit I’d expected as much given that the drawings are all very similar – practically identical – being as they are, drawn on white A4 sheets of copy paper.

Dreamcatcher (Work in Progress)

What I need to to is to create many more drawings (still including those on A4 sheets), drawn on different types/qualities of paper and of various sizes. I need to give the impression that this is the work of an obsessive mind to some degree, and therefore, the idea of scribbling drawings on whatever comes to hand would best be served by this change in approach.

Another thing to consider is the installation of the work itself. How might I create readymade wallpapered walls?

As it stands, there are things about the way the work looks that interest me. One things is the way it calls to mind the wallpaper one might find in a child’s bedroom; repeated motifs – the stuff of nightmares after dark, which, incidentally, ties in with a related project based around the story of Hansel and Gretel.

Dreamcatcher (Work in Progress)

Talking of wallpaper has brought to mind an extract in Eric L. Santer’s book, ‘Of Creaturely Life, taken from Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel, ‘The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.’

“It was, so to speak, not the first wall of the existing house (as you would have supposed), but the last of the ones that were no longer there. You could see its inside. You could see, at its various stories, bedroom walls with wallpaper still sticking to them; and here and there a piece of floor or ceiling. Near these bedroom walls there remained, along the entire length of the outer wall, a dirty white space through which, in unspeakably nauseating, worm-soft digestive movements, the open, rust-spotted channel of the toilet pipe crawled. The gaslight jets had left dusty grey traces at the edges of the ceiling; they bent here and there, abruptly, ran along the walls, and plunged into the black, gaping holes that had been torn there. But the most unforgettable things were the walls themselves. The stubborn life of these rooms had not let itself be trampled out. It was still there; it clung to the nails that were left, stood on the narrow remnant of flooring, crouched under the corner beams where a bit of interior still remained. You could see it in the paint which it had changed, slowly, from year to year: blue into mouldy green, green into grey, yellow into a faded, rotting white. But it was also in the places that had been kept fresher behind mirrors, paintings, and wardrobes; for it had traced their outlines over and over, and had been with cobwebs and dust even in these hidden places, which were now laid bare. It was in every flayed strip of surface; it was in the dame blisters on the lower edges of the wallpaper; it fluttered in the torn-off shreds, and oozed from the foul stains which had appeared long before. And from these walls, once blue, green, and yellow, and now framed by the broken tracks of the demolished partitions, the air of these lives issued, the stubborn, sluggish, musty air which no wind had yet scattered. There the noons lingered, and the illnesses, and the exhalations, and the smoke of many years, and the sweat that trickles down from armpits and makes clothing heavy, and the stale breath of mouths, and the oily smell of sweltering feet. There the pungent odour of urine lingered, and the odour of soot, the grey odour of potatoes, and the heavy, sickening stench of rancid grease. The sweet smell of neglected infants lingered there, the smell of frightened schoolchildren, and the stuffiness from the beds of pubescent boys. And all the vapours that had risen from the street below, or fallen down from above with the filthy urban rain.”

Herodotus and the Morning Paper

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One has to remove the future from a past event to really understand its ‘presentness’. One has to view historical (‘Herodotus’ – see Walter Benjamin and Objects) events as being on the periphery, whilst the mean and the commonplace (‘morning paper’) take centre stage. It is the distance which interests me, the distance from the heroic or ‘main’ event and the historical perspective this gives us.

“Thus the whole emerges simultaneously with the accumulation of the parts, not because it is the sum of the parts, but because it is immanent within them.”

Bortoft’s theory of authentic wholeness could be applied to history. A great event, such as a coronation (let’s say, that of Elizabeth I), is not a whole in itself. Step outside the ceremony, outside the city and into the countryside; walk into a tavern… what is happening there, at the exact moment of the coronation? Let’s say a man sits at a table eating his dinner, enjoying a drink. The moment of the coronation is not simply about the ceremony but the moment in time (some time on January 15, 1559); that moment, of which the Queen and the man in the house are equal parts, although history has forgotten one and kept alive the other. Within both these people (parts), the moment (the whole) is immanent.

The man in the tavern pours his wine from a jug; 450 years later and that jug is in a display case in a museum, freed as Benjamin would have it from the ‘drudgery of its usefulness.’ For us to see it properly as it stands behind the glass, we need to re-impose that drudgery, we need to see it as it was, when it was useful.

Returning to the idea of distance and perspective: the distant elements in my old holiday photographs on which I have been doing some work, as well as those in old photographs (windows and bicycles) coincide to some degree with what I have written above. When I look at a photograph, taken during a family holiday in the late 1970s, I see the people I recognise, whether that’s myself, my brother, parents or grandparents. But there are often others, all of whom were a part of that moment (such as the girl below who was standing in the distance of one of our snaps).

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Returning to objects: how do we re-impose the ‘drudgery of an object’s usefulness’ back onto the object? Think of the old musical instruments in the museum. How did I give it back its usefulness? By using the Goethean method of observing, and, in particular, by placing it back – through use of the imagination – in its own time. Although I wasn’t looking at the specific ‘gesture’ of things at that time, I believe I found the gesture of the lira di braccio nonetheless.

So, returning to the man in the tavern; what are the elements of that place which one would need to understand in order to re-construct it through the imagination? Objects (contemporary and old), environments (the room itself and elements thereof), conversations…

On Old Photographs

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Over the course of the past week, I’ve been scanning in what amounts to almost my entire collection of family photographs. I started, initially, a while ago with just a few that I particularly liked, but after a time, began to think of scanning all those contained in various old albums, a plastic bag and a dilapidated cardboard box. The possibility that one day they would be lost was as good a reason as any; that and the fact it would be easier to view them and to organise them (through the joys of Flickr) were my principal motives.

So, staying up late into the night, I have, over the last few days become somewhat obsessive, and scanned in a few hundred photographs, covering a period of time between c.1946 to c.1997. And, although at first this was a purely practical exericse, it soon became much more than this. It was, and still is, a journey of discovery, for in these small, ‘chemical annexations’, I can see again faces long since lost to the past; revisit once familiar places, and perhaps most poignantly of all, find long lost objects as if I were rummaging through the contents of an attic.

I will write about this experience at length, but will conclude with a summary of what I’ve been thinking when looking at these images. Firstly, I’ve come to realise how drawn I am to ‘bad’ photographs such as the one below:

Unknown Seaside

There is something about this photograph (and many others like it) which I find particulary haunting; something about its amateurishness, which makes it seem somehow more genuine. It has the freshness of a sketch as opposed to a finished painting and contains references to an experience which is both direct and profound. Perhaps it is the footprints in the sand, long since washed away which I find so affecting? Or maybe the unknown swimmers and the water-skiier: distant then, and as just as unknown to me now. What course did they take through life after this picture was taken? Did they yet survive the sea, in which, in time, we all will come to be drowned?
As Barthes said:

“I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake… Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”

The photograph above seems to illustrate this perfectly, as do many ‘bad photographs’ I have found. Perhaps it’s because they contain this reference to the less than falable human holding the camera (a difference between chemical and digital).

Following on from this, I’ve become very interested in the peripheral parts of photographs, particularly in relation to images taken near the sea (distant swimmers, ships and so on). I have already written about windows in relation to other photographs, but having recently scanned and observed so many images, I’ve come to realise that it’s these areas which are the most ‘genuine’, perhaps because those inhabiting the distance are freed from the artifice of a pose, or because at the moment the picture was taken (just as they were for the rest of their lives) they were oblivious to the photograph’s principal subject and the one taking the picture.

This obliviousness is something I find quite compelling, particularly in relation to my work on the Holocaust, whose victims were by and large anonymous, both in life and now in death. Although I wasn’t living at the time, many members of my family were; they were the ones on the periphery, the specks in the distance, oblivious to what was going on behind them.

This is a photograph taken in c.1976. It shows my brother in the foreground playing tennis, a lovely image of a fondly remembered family holiday. But what interests me, in relation to my thinking, is the distance.

Looking out to sea we can see a ship, a tanker, sailing under the direction of more (and no doubt large numbers of) human beings, hidden away and quite unknowable. Yet for a time we shared the same stretch of the planet. Those onboard would have had no idea as to our existence, they would have seen at best a mass of coloured dots on the horizon. Yet this degree of separation does not make us any less human, any less feeling. Distance does not negate our hopes and our ambitions. Those few unknowable dots, in the eyes of the ship’s crew, were my family, and have in the years that followed, seen more members come and go. And whether the distance between us is measured in years or miles, we must never forget, that what we see as specs on the horizon, or dots that make the picture on the TV screen, are, in the end, the same people as us.

For more on this subject, click here.

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

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