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| From Calvert End looking west towards Little Dun Fell. |
Leverhulme Artists in Residence
University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne
Oct 2013 to Aug 2014.
Art in the Weather World follows the work and ideas of my current residency with Northumbria University. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Departments of Geography and Fine Art and places an artist (myself) alongside climate change scientists in the department of Physical Geography (led by Prof John Woodward, international expert in glaciology) who are modelling past climate -paleoclimatology- based partly on data gathered in peat moorland.
The residency aims to explore connections between scientific methods and processes and my artistic practice in an exploration of atmosphere, land and past climate. We live in the atmosphere with just the soles of our feet on the land but I want to join the two realms up, bringing the stuff of land into the sky and noting that the plants themselves take from the sky to build cells which then lay partially decomposed in vast domes and flows of peat building in depth at approximately 1mm per year. The palynologist (Dr Matt Pound) samples the bog to look for pollen and spores from plants on and around the bog blown there by the wind. With this and other data he can estimate what the likely vegitation was at different times in the past which helps build a global picture of past climate.
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| Tree pollen from Wolf Crag Moss, Threlkeld |
Part of my work is to draw in the North Pennine peatlands and at a research mire, Wolf Crag Moss in the northern Lake District, to make direct, embodied responses to being in the weather on the skin of the earth.
Here's one of the 70 or so drawings made so far in one of 15 high altitude locations in the central North Pennines.
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| Drawing Set 3 LFS12 Water, peat, chinese ink stick, wax crayon on 300gsm cotton paper. |
Each drawing is generally one of a set of 4 in which I more or less cover the direction of the 4 winds from one location. At one level the drawing is a conventional view of how the world looks from a particular spot, looking in a particular direction but, given that the each work takes up to an hour, that a brisk wind is often blowing, that temperatures at this time of year are between -2 and +10 deg C less wind chill, and that nothing stays still, including the clouds and sun light, these drawings are for me a trace of what it was like to be there at that time.
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| Looking towards Round Hill from Calvert End |
The use of materials found to hand, such as peat, clay and water and the physical effects of wind and variations in light all contribute to the unfolding and outcome of the drawing as an event that fully engages my senses and mind in what is going on around me and not just in the visual field. If there was an audience this would be a performance whose presence would affect its unfolding. In fact the drawing, though predicable in some respects, and limited by it's shape, surface and size, is uniquely sensitive to my bodily experience and is, temporarily, an extension of my mental and physical domain.
Here's another from the same set of 4 at Calvert End just above the source of the river South Tyne and over looking the river Tees and the source of the Tees on Little Dun Fell.
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| Drawing Set 3 LFS11 Water, peat, clay, chineses ink stick, wax crayon |
Here is my pseudo scientific record of conditions:-
Weather: Temp: degC: 8-10 less wind chill. Wind: W moderate breeze. Rain: none. Sun: longer spells later. Clouds: voluminous and varied in scale, single layer basing 650m at times.
