Abstract
This chaper moves from animate to inanimate intercessors and enquires into the value of found, replaced and rebuilt human-made objects used to restore creative communication with the land, its features, its names and its past. Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds project and Alec Finlay’s Company of Mountains shed light on the complex procedures by which the absence of the referent can be staged by the artists.
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Notes
- 1.
http://www.antonygormley.com/projects/item-view/id/211#p0. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 2.
See also Will Maclean and Marian Leven’s public work of art titled ‘An Sùileachan’ (the Crofters Memorial Cairn) at Reef, Uig, completed in 2013. The work was commissioned by the people of the Bhaltos Community in Uig to commemorate the nineteenth-century Lewis Land Clearances, the twentieth-century land raids made by the Reef Raiders and the Scottish Land Reforms. It consists of a series of stone walled walkways and circular folds engraved with the names of the land raiders and left open in order to metaphorise access to land and landscape.
- 3.
Goldsworthy’s restored Red Gill washfold in the Howgills Fells bears the marks of the artist’s own temporary exclusion from the site, with one of the fold’s corners being left unfinished, ‘an allusion to the experience of being excluded from the land’ (Goldsworthy 2007, p. 137).
- 4.
‘The cradle of absolute space—its origin, if we are to use that term—is a fragment of agro-pastoral space, a set of places named and exploited by peasants, or by nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists. A moment comes when, through the actions of masters or conquerors, a part of this space is assigned a new role, and henceforward appears as transcendent, as sacred (i.e. inhabited by divine forces), as magical and cosmic. The paradox here however is that it continues to be perceived as part of nature. Much more than that, its mystery and its sacred (or cursed) character are attributed to the forces of nature, even though it is the exercise of political power therein which has in fact wrenched the area from its natural context, and even though its new meaning is entirely predicated on that action ’ (Lefebvre 1974, p. 234).
- 5.
The term ‘sentinels’ is used in reference to the three cairns that Goldsworthy erected in the vicinity of Digne-Les-Bains, Haute-Provence, in 1999 as part of the Refuges d’Art project. Some are drystone cairns, some are cemented into more permanent sculptures —a feature that is difficult to comment on as most of the cones were commissioned and therefore depended on the commissioners’ acceptance or conversely rejection of the principle of ephemeral art.
- 6.
‘Like the cairns that define paths in the mountains and fells of Britain, the cones have become journey markers to my travels—leaving a trail. Some made in ice or branches remain as memories, others still stand in America, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, France and England. There is however, another journey that is for me possibly more important than travelling, which is the journey and exploration into the form itself. What may appear as repetition is in fact a deepening awareness of the richness and variation contained within the form. Sometimes differences can only be seen and understood through repetition. I learn something new with each cone. When I stop learning I will stop making them.’ http://www.sheepfoldscumbria.co.uk/html/news/news02b.htm. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 7.
See Goldsworthy’s 1990 iconic sculpture ‘Taking a wall for a walk’, which is now literally crumbling to pieces in Grizedale Forest.
- 8.
On issues of enclosure and openness in Scottish outdoor sculpture , see also Doug Cocker’s Beneath the Screaming Eagle (1985).
- 9.
See, for instance, the arches that were commissioned by Alan Gibbs, which now stand on the shore of Gibbs’ Farm sculpture park in New Zealand. The arches were built with stone specially quarried in Lead Hills, Scotland, close to the place of origin of the art collector’s forebears. Similarly, Goldsworthy’s American and Canadian arches were built using Dumfriesshire sandstone that was shipped to its destination as a reminder of the ballast carried by timber ships on their journey back to North America. See Andy Goldsworthy, http://www.stridingarches.com/striding.html
- 10.
It is useful here to recall one of herman de vries’ ‘10 theses’: ‘art in nature is totally superfluous art can add nothing of significance to nature the statements of nature are perfect’. herman de vries 1999, ‘vegetation and art. 10 theses’, in Trans’plant. Living Vegetation in Contemporary Art (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag) pp. 130–131.
- 11.
Andy Goldsworthy, http://www.stridingarches.com/striding.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 12.
This list is neither exhaustive nor exclusive. There is also, for example, Dan Graham’s neon installations, Robert Montgomery’s burning poetry sculptures and Nancy Holt’s buried poems. On the installation of words in American Land Art, see Craig Owen’s influential 1979 essay ‘Earthwords’, in Kastner and Wallis (1998), pp. 281–282.
- 13.
‘A decade or so ago I adopted the letterbox as a means to compose walks within landscapes. Letterboxing is a kind of hide-and-seek hiking, a hobby-pursuit invented on Dartmoor in 1854, and the predecessor to geo-caching. What drew me to the letterbox was that, like the nest-box, it is an informal sculptural form, an everyday container which conceals meaning and offers itself as a “blue flower” to search for.’ http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013/03/letterboxing-and-circle-poems.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 14.
‘Letterbox-guides, word-maps , rubber-stamps, ink-pads, take-away poems’; ‘These poems, they have homes’, from Finlay’s Hill of Streams renga poem.
- 15.
‘When I began the project I had only recently identified myself as an artist, and I was drawn to projects that combined modesty of means with a wide, even ambitious, reach. Still shy of making objects of stone and bronze, avoiding scale, wary of bombast; the idea of installing 100 letterboxes, over ten years, in locations around the globe, offered itself as a BIG-little idea. It allowed me to work imaginatively with places I had never been, signalling a network of friends, who would site the boxes and write the guides, creating a kind of world-book.’ http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013_03_08_archive.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 16.
- 17.
From Finlay’s collaborative translation of Celan’s ‘Irish’ (1967): ‘Gib mir das Wegrecht/grant me the right of way/Give me the right to go/Give me the right to pass the way/Give me leave to tread/Tabhair cead mo chos dom/Give me the right of way’, in Celan, Paul, Alec Finlay et al. (2002) Irish 2 (Edinburgh: Morning Star). The idea that the impact of written language on art is more of a cognitive and sociocultural than visual nature is developed by Esther Pasztory in Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art (2005).
- 18.
On the garden of Little Sparta as attack, see Gairn 2008, pp. 142–144.
- 19.
‘The Nietzschean return closed once and for all the curve of Platonic memory, and Joyce closed that of the Homeric narrative. This does not condemn us to space as the only other possibility, for too long neglected, but reveals that language is (or perhaps, became) a thing of space. That it might describe or pass through space is no longer what is essential here. And if space is, in today’s language, the most obsessive of metaphors, it is not that it henceforth offers the only recourse; but it is in space that, from the onset, language unfurls, slips on itself, determines its choices, draws its figures and translations. It is in space that it transports itself, that its very being “metaphorizes ” itself.’ (Foucault 1964, p. 164)
- 20.
From Sorley MacLean’s poem ‘Ceann Loch Aoineart/Kinloch Ainort’, MacLean 1989, p. 36–37.
- 21.
See Finlay’s reference to Antonio Gramsci’s process of presentification in his video presentation of the exhibition ‘a-ga: on mountains’ (2014, Sleeper Gallery, Edinburgh). https://vimeo.com/111398283. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 22.
The following excerpt from MacDiarmid’s poem is now permanently engraved on the Stones of Scotland in Regent Road Park, Edinburgh: ‘So I have gathered unto myself all the loose ends of Scotland, and by naming and accepting them, loving them and identifying myself with them, attempt to express the whole’.
- 23.
‘when i visited these places, i found not forest but moorland, or grazing land realising the impoverishment of this landscape, i studied all the topographical maps and made the text of a book, in memory of the scottish forests, containing the names of all those lost forests but with a book you don’t get back a forest’ (de vries 2007).
- 24.
http://gathering-alecfinlay.blogspot.fr/p/word-mntn.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 25.
On the subject of A Company of Mountains and The Road North (2010–2011), which took Finlay and Cockburn on a journey across Scotland to retrace Basho and Sora’s 1689 oku, Finlay writes: ‘It was “Bashoing”, as Ken and I came to know it, writing in places, that we began to notice the change: being in the places, working with the poem-labels, recalibrated the conventional brief of landscape poetry as recollective description.[…] We knew our journeying poets—Gary Snyder, Alice Oswald , Hamish Fulton, Gerry Loose —and understood our Bashoing as kin to ginko, the traditional practice that translates, roughly, as walking-to-be-composing-poetry’. http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013/03/a-company-of-mountains.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 26.
On the subject of ‘Dùn Caan’: ‘A conspectus appears to follow the supposed objectivity of cartography; it is in fact entirely subjective. As everyone knows, a little hill that is nearby is larger than a great mountain that is far away’. http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013/04/conspectus.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 27.
In his influential 1990 work Médiance, De Lieux en Paysages, Berque defines médiance as an emplaced relation and reciprocal absorption between humans and their milieu , or as the interpenetration and intercomposition of the subjective and the objective and of the sensible and factual elements of the latter. See Berque 1990, p. 38. He later speaks of ecoumène to refer to the relation between humans and the world at large.
- 28.
‘a-ga: Sanskrit, “mountain,/that which does not go”’ (Finlay et al. 2014, page unnumbered). The term was in all likelihood borrowed from Arne Naess’ essay ‘Modesty and the conquest of Mountains’: ‘Mountains are big, very big, but they are also great. They have dignity and other aspects of greatness. They are solid, stable, unmoving. A Sanskrit word for them is a-ga, that which does not go’ (Naess 2008, p. 65).
- 29.
See ‘The significance of the hut’, Bachelard 1958, pp. 29–37.
- 30.
In Roy, Claude (1971) Renga: A Chain of Poems by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson (New York: Braziller).
- 31.
http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013_10_08_archive.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 32.
See Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques (1999) ‘La géopoétique ou la question des frontières de l’art’, Philosophique, Number 2, pp. 3–13, http://philosophique.revues.org/236. Accessed 9 January 2019.
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Finlay, Alec. A Company of Mountains. http://www.company-of-mountains.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
———. Blog. http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
———. Website. https://www.alecfinlay.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Goldsworthy, Andy. Sheepfolds. http://www.sheepfoldscumbria.co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Gormley, Antony. http://www.antonygormley.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Striding Arches. http://www.stridingarches.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
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Manfredi, C. (2019). Things of Space: Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds and Alec Finlay’s Company of Mountains, or, Materialising as Re-siting. In: Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_6
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