Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

P is for Pastoral

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In her book H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald writes [my paragraphing]:

“Long walks in the English countryside, often at night, were astonishingly popular in the 1930s. Rambling clubs published calendars of full moons, train companies laid on mystery trains to rural destinations, and when in 1932 the Southern Railway offered an excursion to a moonlit walk along the South Downs, expecting to sell forty or so tickets, one and a half thousand people turned up. 

The people setting out on these walks weren’t seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour: to Merrie England, or to prehistoric England, pre-industrial visions that offered solace and safety to sorely troubled minds. For though railways and roads and a burgeoning market in countryside books had contributed to this movement, at heart it had grown out of the trauma of the Great War, and was flourishing in fear of the next. 

The critic Jed Esty has described this pastoral craze as one element in a wider movement of national cultural salvage in these years…”

This quote interested me in that it tied in with another by Paul Fussell who wrote:

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

Putting these together, I’m reminded as I’ve often written about before of my childhood, when I would create maps of imagined countries (which were in effect imagined pasts) in which I would mentally walk whilst out walking.

Landscape Therapy

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It isn’t uncommon, when faced with an issue or issues in one’s life, to seek help from a psychotherapist or counsellor. I have recently done just that and found it a rewarding experience. I spoke at length, the therapist listened intently, then aimed a well-honed question. In an instant the angle from which I’d been viewing my problem shifted; there wasn’t an answer as such, but an increased sense of clarity. It was almost like walking lost through a thicket, meeting a guide and being taken to hitherto unknown vantage points from which the landscape could be seen more clearly. By the end of the session, I not only had a better understanding – and appreciation – of the ‘terrain’ through which I’d come, but I could see the path along which I’d walked, with all its twists and many wrong turns.

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Traumatic landscapes have always interested me and my work over the last six or seven years has looked at how we – through art – can empathise with those who suffered in such environments, for example in the Holocaust or World War I. These landscapes – and I’m thinking in particular of battlefield sites on the Western Front – have suffered incredible trauma and as we walk through them, the relationship between landscape and walker becomes like that between patient and therapist.

In those moments of clarity I mentioned before, it was as if my therapist and I had for second become one and I have often experienced the same thing when walking, where for a second, I become one with the landscape and vice-versa. A turn of the head, a shift in viewpoint becomes the well honed question, to which the landscape responds with an answer; a depth is revealed, empathy established with some unknown person in the past. Often its fleeting, but one’s understanding of that particular place is enhanced beyond measure.

The landscape knows itself a little better. So does the walker.

“For the things of this world are their stories, identified not by fixed attributes but by their paths of movement in an unfolding field of relations. Each is the focus of ongoing activity. Thus in the storied world… things do not exist, they occur.” Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description.

Walking and Memorials

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Having written in the previous entry (about Belzec) ‘Walking is itself a vital part of the memorial’, I was interested to read the following in Neil Hanson’s book, The Unknown Soldier.

“However, no-one, not even a Prime Minister could impose a meaning unacceptable to the public on any memorial, which ‘by themselves remain inert and amnesiac, dependant on visitors for whatever memory they finally produce.

Days 13 and 14

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Spent much of the day (day 13) walking and painting paper cups. I did make a few attempts at reading through and recording the prose versions of the walks but I wasn’t happy with the results. I also played around with data, downloaded from my new GPS receiver: very exciting. I surveyed the route of my walk around the castle but twice lost satellite reception in Bulwarks Lane which is a bit frustrating. Anyway, all quite amazing really, especially viewing the data on Google Earth and, via GPS Visualizer on Google Maps too (even if it goes a little wayward once in the city centre).

That was yesterday. Today (day 14) I showed the work so far as part of the Research and Development module, itself a part of my MA. The response to the work was a mix of muted and positive, but as always I was intrigued by which pieces made the most impact. As with last semester, it was my drawings which most people identified with, followed I would say by the text pieces. The word ‘memorialising,’ was also used which is very apt for that which I am doing.

The key now is to start pulling all the facets of my work together, to make a whole, not by forcing a common theme, but by seeing why I have made these various pieces and discovering exactly what unites them.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024