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Viewing Room VI: Points of Return

Beyond the Radar

Fiona Carruthers’ project Beyond the Radar is an ongoing series centred on the significant role that marshlands play in protecting and sustaining human and non-human environments and ecologies.

In the East Midlands of England, Lincolnshire’s marshes are hauntingly beautiful, dynamic landscapes with enormous skies, distant horizons and shifting contours. It is easy to lose yourself (or find yourself) in these ancient sites. The agricultural coastline and land that the marsh protects is valuable as well as vulnerable. It yields about 12% of England’s total agricultural produce including around 30% of the nation’s vegetables and 70% of its fish processing. More than 40% of the county’s land, however, is at or below sea level.

With increased incidents of unprecedented flooding and a greater number of coastal storm surges expected, it is evident that life in Lincolnshire is going to change, and that this is likely to happen within the lifetimes of today’s children. The beyond-human-scale abstract notion of the climate emergency has finally become personal.

‘Part of this project is my ongoing commitment to finding ways of opening-up conversations about the fragility of human and non-human ecologies and communities in this region with new and existing audiences. A greater understanding of how marshland contributes to sustainability will develop a greater awareness of the links between local and global issues.

Here on the coast, the saltmarsh offers vital storm and flood protection, essential feeding grounds for migrating birds and fish nurseries as well as an important breeding site for grey seals. The local benefits of the marsh are easy for us all to see and appreciate. Less apparent, however, is the significant protection that they provide globally. Marsh, like other wetland habitats are vital weapons in the fight against climate change. Wetlands absorb large quantities of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it. Pound for pound, these habitats can store up to 10 times more carbon and at a much faster rate than mature tropical forests. This is their super-power. Not everyone lives close to a saltmarsh, but everyone benefits from their many layers of projection.

An understanding of the consequence of the ongoing global loss of wetlands, which is estimated at between 1–2% per year, offers yet another strong message about the importance of these often-undervalued landscapes – when an established wetlands habitat is damaged the carbon it has held onto in its soils, often for thousands of years, is emitted back into the atmosphere.’

In recent months, Carruthers has been exploring and developing several strands of work for this project. We are highlighting two of these in Points of Return. Based on first-hand research, structured experimentation, imagined futures and remembered survival strategies, each is focused on a different survival solution or storyline, and each embodies something of the self-organising properties of the dynamic marsh landscape itself. Ephemeral materials from the land play a strong role. Below, the artist explains her installations.

On Waiting for the King Tide & Below the Radar

Waiting for the King Tide is a series of sculptural works using ephemeral materials from Lincolnshire’s wetlands, exploring the idea that all matter needs to be securely tethered or rooted to survive the twice daily pull and drag of tidal waters. Adapting for drag and resistance is fundamental to surviving a saltmarsh environment. Below the Radar uses ephemeral stalks, dressmakers’ pins, acrylic tiles, fluorescent lighting and DJI drones. It explores the self-organising nature of the marshland itself. To survive, the marsh will move across the surface of the earth in comprehensible timescales.

These are both on-the-point-of collapse events which rely on the interconnectedness of their elements (and viewers’ amended behaviour) to exist and function. Viewers’ behaviour quickly changes to take account of the fragility and precarity of these works. Visitors visibly slow down and become more spatially and socially aware of their surroundings, themselves, and others. Merleau-Ponty describes this as a reciprocal exchange of question and answer in which sensing takes place as the ‘co-existence’ or ‘communion’ of the body with the world.

The single willow rods in this work are bound together with life-boat-orange builders’ line. They are tightly anchored to the metal rod (or rather held in place by forces of compression and tension) to achieve a temporary balance. I want to communicate something of the understanding that all matter, human and non-human, needs to be resolutely tethered to survive the constant friction and drag of the ebb and flow of the twice-daily tides of the sea.

In their singular form the willow rods are flexible and easily breakable but together, united, they become tougher, more resilient – impossible to bend or snap. Yet, the top-heavy form of this work is extremely unstable. It is supported precariously by the thin and delicate lower parts of the single willow rods. I particularly enjoy the tension of opposite forces working together to create a temporary state of equilibrium. This, as well as a palpable precarity contributes to the work’s sense of movement and change.

The accidental drawings created by the liveliness of the willow successfully carry the eye above and beyond human scale to trigger new connections between the work, the building, and the viewer. Their lightness and triviality and even their delicacy are the very things that give them worth. In their compelling vibrant spread, I discover a renewed awareness that gravity’s irresistible pull on all things effects and connects human and non-human without prejudice.

What I see, feel, and sense in this work is a reminder of being connected to the wider world: my body is not simply in space but lives and inhabits it in relation to the world.

The ephemeral material used in this work was gathered from fields in the marshy Witham valley in the heart of Lincolnshire (the site of a prehistoric timber causeway in use between 457 and 321BC). The stalks were assembled and organised to generate the sense of a unified force moving forward through the vast space of the nave. Their inferred migration engineered to reflect the marshland’s own self-organising solution to changes in water levels. A marsh can move itself across the surface of the earth in comprehensible timescales.

The random pattern of the stalks’ dry and dusty-mud taproots lightly touching, or almost touching the floor of the church generate the effect of a syncopated beat. The structure of these forms is elusive, and rhythmical deviations help to create a balance of predictability and surprise. This in turn helps to communicate the idea that this is a natural phenomenon. The forward flowing rhythm of the unique multiples of assembled stalks too, help to pull the viewer from east to west through the nave.

As sunlight floods in from this magnificent building’s windows the installation is transformed. The allusion to water in the reflections on the reclaimed acrylic tiles point to the landscape that the stalks were gathered from and reveal something more about the nature of this site and space. I am again reminded that it is gravity that causes water to move and that the presence of it passing is all around us.

Yellow lighting has been used occasionally, covering everything and everyone without prejudice, bleeding into the very space itself. Alluding to the inescapable soaking properties of water, its poisonous-yellow adds to the sense of a precarious land.

Various lenses have been used by the artist to document and share the story of this work. The fragility, precarity and vulnerability of Waiting for the King Tide and Below the Radar present themselves boldly in the monumental space of the deconsecrated St John the Divine church, heightened by the building’s vast stillness and silence. These works offer us a point of return, highlighting one of the many natural resources we have – if protected – in combatting the climate crisis.

Fiona Carruthers is a Lincolnshire-based artist working in expanded fields of drawing to investigate the posthuman predicament. Her work is preoccupied by insecurity and collapse, and reimagining possibilities for transformation and survival.

Carruthers gained a Fine Art Degree from Sheffield and Post-graduate Diploma from Lincoln. She received the region’s ArtEscape Award in 2019 and, in 2021, was selected for the Sustainability and Environment residency at Lincolnshire’s Museum of Art and Archaeology. Her residency work will be developed further with the support of an Arts Council grant. Carruthers regularly exhibits and contributes to cross-disciplinary events across the region and is an associate artist with Spike Island in Bristol.

An Ecosystem Under Threat

This series of charcoal drawings explores the breakdown of kelp forest ecosystems along the coast of Northern California, principally as a result of warming oceans and over-harvesting. The project asks the viewer to take a closer, stranger, more intimate look at some of the key non-human actors affecting and affected by this dramatic ecological transformation. It explores the idea that before we can steward with integrity and wisdom we first need to enter into an intimate, non-judgmental, witnessing relationship with the space and entities we are working with.

Since 2014 more than 90% of the kelp along the Northern California coast has disappeared. This is just one instance of a phenomenon that is occurring globally. We are losing kelp forests four times faster than rainforests. Kelp forests perform essential ecosystem functions not only through carbon sequestration but also by providing habitat for a diverse ecosystem of species. In Northern California the decline in kelp forests resulted from a complex interaction of ecological events. In 2013 a disease known as sea star wasting hit sea star populations up and down the West Coast, wiping out their populations. Its spread has been linked to climate change-driven warming ocean temperatures. Sunflower sea stars (Pycnpodia helianthoides), the top urchin predator, was hit particularly hard and are now locally extinct.

The absence of sea stars had a two-pronged effect on urchins, their primary prey. Fewer predators meant that urchin populations began to grow. The urchins also began to change their feeding patterns. Where they had previously stayed hidden and safe in crevices, waiting for their food – scraps of kelp – to float by, they were now leaving those crevices actively in search of growing kelp. Adding to this, in 2014–15, a mass of warm ocean water known as the “blob” (which some scientists have linked to climate change) formed in the Gulf of Alaska and began moving south, affecting the entire West Coast. It short-circuited the yearly upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water which in turn stunted kelp growth. This also meant that scraps of kelp were no longer circulating to the urchins in their crevices further encouraging the hungry urchins to wander out in search of the remaining kelp.

Abalone, the area’s iconic sea snails, which also rely on kelp for food were beginning to starve. Already suffering from decades of human over-harvesting, the abalone fishery was finally closed in 2018 to protect what remained of the population. Along the South Coast of California, sea otters who feed on urchin have helped maintain stands of kelp forests by keeping urchin populations in check. Along the Northern Coast however, sea otters have not been seen since the early 1800s when fur trappers decimated the population.

This cascade of events has caused what ecologists call a shift in alternative stable states, where the kelp forests have become urchin barrens. These barrens are spreading throughout the world and have proven to be very stable.

Tanja Geis holds an MFA in Art Practice from University of California Berkeley, an MRM in Marine Management from the University of Akureyri, Iceland, and a BA in Fine Art from Yale University.

‘I make research-based paintings, drawings, sculpture and videos that explore how creating intimate relationships with human-disturbed edge ecosystems/spaces, such as intertidal zones, mudflats and sidewalks, can shift our ecological perception. Influenced by my past work in natural resource management, my practice explores the profound material and psychological entanglement of the human and non-human, labours towards a radical acceptance of this complexity and begins to imagine a new eco-relational ethic. My projects begin with extensive time spent researching and physically engaging with a place or species. The experiences, materials, artefacts, and imagery I collect during this process guide my creative trajectory and comprise the raw material for my work. In the studio these collections are transfigured physically and representationally into resonant mediums, symbols and ciphers, often referencing ritual patterns and anthropomorphic/zoomorphic forms. Re-envisioning these ecologies as unstable, mongrel, collective and adaptive entities helps me imagine how we might earn their grace.’

Geis’ work has been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and galleries in Iceland, Scotland, England, Hong Kong and Japan. She co-founded Wildfjords Artist Residency in Iceland and has taught at University of California Berkeley.

Impressions of a Geologic Afterlife

Here, we are featuring recent bodies of work by Erin Woodbrey – The Carrier Bag Series and The Continuing and Spreading Results of an Event or Action. These distinct but interrelated bodies of work draw from the artist’s research into the history of objects and offer philosophical, existential, and material investigations of time and materiality.

Inspired by objects, ancient building materials and methods, analog forms, and the urgency to rethink materials and cycles of waste and consumption, The Carrier Bag Series is a recent body of work named after the seminal essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin. In this text, Le Guin retells the story of human origin by rethinking and redefining narrative and technology as a cultural carrier bag. Rather than a weapon, a tool of domination, or a narrative of colonisation and conquest, Le Guin upends the record of human origin that proposes rather than a spear, a stick, a blunt object, a sword, and the first tool was a kind of net, a basket, a piece of cloth, a carrier bag, something to gather things with, something to carry something else.

‘Continuing to explore my interests in objects and how they mirror, form, and inform our experiences, relationships, and understandings of place, environment, culture, history, narrative, and time, The Carrier Bag Series specifically examines the object of the container. Thinking about ideas of containment, specifically around ideas of sustainability, scalability, consumerism, distribution of food, and other life-things, as well as the paradox built into materials that are intended to be discarded but not intended to decompose. Looking at vessels, this series began a month before the first lockdown in the United States. Undoubtedly informed by living arrangements defined by a new dimension of containment, closeness, proximity, and isolation, this series began in part as a material exploration but turned into a kind of experiment with my own life and patterns of consumption.

In March 2020, I stopped going to the recycling centre, where I would ordinarily deposit my plastics, glass, metal, and paper. Instead, my studio turned into a de facto recycling centre. Where I could compost things, I did – setting up a worm bin in my house and a kind of experimental compost bin for some paper and fibre-based waste. Plastic containers and fragments of other packaging materials were sorted from glass, metal, and styrofoam. Composed of materials in and around my everyday life, with this work, I hope to illuminate a new capacity for objects and materials and subvert their typical evolution. Rather than discarding the emptied object and waste material, in this series, the container is animated from within, becoming a central figure in a narrative about consumption, accumulation, and new materiality.

To create the sculptures in this series, single-use containers and repurposed objects are covered in ashes from wood-burning stoves, grills, and campfires. This ash came from my studio and from my friends and neighbours, who I traded their ashes for vegetables from my garden. The entombed objects are then arranged around one another using dilapidated wire plant supports.

Imagined as a whole installation and often installed in groups, each piece is a stand-alone object that acts in conversation with one another. The loosely gestural works, sometimes seeming to be animate characters (as often alluded to in their individual titles), can also appear to be objects suspended in time, perhaps displayed in some dystopian/utopian museum of the future. Or maybe it was something lost, forgotten, and then found in the rubble of a demolition site, or at the bottom of the ocean, or unearthed from a volcanic eruption. Embedded in each of these objects are registers of time that speak simultaneously to the present and the past. Some of the objects feel very much of this time, while some things have likely been unchanged for the last decades. In looking at these containers covered in ash, one can see multitudes – histories, the legacies of consumption, capitalism, the environmental crisis, issues of food distribution, habit, function, use, value, repetition, and accumulation.’

As an extension of The Carrier Bag Series is a body of ephemeral photographs made using plant matter, paper, and single-use objects. Coating paper with a photosensitive emulsion made from vegetables and plant matter, objects are rested on the surface and exposed over the course of several days to months. The process is slow. As time passes, the sun permeates through the objects and “bleaches” the areas most exposed to light. The more opaque areas remain pigmented. The resultant prints produce photographs often referred to as anthotypes and shadowgrams. In using insubstantial materials – spinach, beetroot and cabbage for the emulsion and discarded objects as the subject matter, these photograms bear witness and depict the tension of time, permanence and transience, decay and growth.

The artist’s most recent work comes from the ongoing series, The Continuing and Spreading Results of an Event or Action. ‘This work is created from collecting rubbish and discarded debris on daily walks. Some of the objects were of clear and recent origin – a discarded beer can with a legible logo, a plastic bottle rendered brittle and frosted from exposure to the sun, heat, cold, sand, and rain. Some objects, long fragmented from their original form, have been transformed by exposure to time and the environment and were largely unrecognisable. Each of the collected objects is brought back to the studio, washed, and carefully dried. In a form of recycling, the objects are arranged in a circle radiating outwards – the centre representing “the event” of time and the outside being implications and things that accumulate over time.

Through this work, I view art-making as a means for communication, reflection, and a gesture of caregiving. What is made visible by the things we leave behind? Through art, how can we honour each other and the landscape as well as listen, relearn, unlearn and create a better future?’

Erin Woodbrey (b. 1985, Portland, Maine) is a New England-based visual artist whose body of interdisciplinary work utilises sculpture, printmaking, photography, and time-based media.

Woodbrey’s work seeks to parse the fused and knotted qualities of the global environmental crisis as examined through objects, the landscape, and the relationships between bodies and architectures. Woodbrey’s work is presented, piece by piece, as a study of fabricated and naturally occurring units of space and time. Her gaze, wide in scope, is trained on the interrelated qualities of process, time, material, nature, the body and architecture. Using sometimes insubstantial materials to depict what seems simultaneously indestructible and delicate, Woodbrey’s work, explores the tension between permanence and transience, growth and decay. Often involving a dialogue on contemporary ecological discourse and new materialisms, Woodbrey’s work asks essential questions about how the functions of objects and space inform, mirror, and tend to the human condition and, more broadly, conditions of being.

In her own words, ‘recently my work has been motivated by trying to decipher the global environmental crisis as seen through objects, forest and mountain landscapes. Taking cues from the ecological art movements of the 1960s and ’70s, contemporary Ecofeminist discourse, and humanities-based ecological studies, I work to illuminate the urgency of preserving the natural world as well as the parameters of our understandings of time, space, wilderness, and ecology. Through examining the history of how humans have shaped and are shaping the environment, I am interested in the temporal, corporeal, and spatial notions of history, time, and site and what they may illuminate about the present. My work is centralised on the inquiry: how do we create space and, in this process, affect nature? What is the shape of the exchange that takes place between the environment and human activity? What are the terms and histories of these relationships, and how can we better create space for each other?’

After the Fire

Life always finds a way, and even after a devastating forest fire, nature has strategies to heal itself and bring life back. This is the extraordinary phenomenon that artist Tamara García explores in her new experimental film Después del fuego (After the Fire), which highlights the key role of trees as the building block of Life. With a soundtrack created by sound artist Ganzo, the film takes us on an immersive journey through our planet's history, from Earth's early stages to the Anthropocene.

Synopsis:

After the Fire is a visual experiment where the artist reflects on the notions of time, living space, uncertainty, resilience, possibility, and desire. It presents dystopian landscapes using several techniques based on the artist’s own and appropriated materials.

The soundtrack was developed in a live mix session with four CDJs using bird whistles, fire sounds and tracks from the first electronic pioneers, many of whom were women forgotten by history. The session was completely improvised and recorded live while the artist was playing the video.

Born in Santander in 1980, Tamara García is an artist interested in creative processes and multidisciplinary experimentation.

She takes inspiration from the everyday, the domestic – studying the fabric of our social, political and cultural relations and investigating how they are shaped and modified by unwritten laws, customs and traditions. ‘I try to observe the way in which we live, how we adapt to geopolitical impositions and how we transit between the public and private. My work is about rethinking the behaviours and attitudes that condition and classify us.’

A live screening of After the Fire was presented on Earth Day 2022

Jungle on my Mind

Koh Kong is a region suffering from severe deforestation due to illegal logging and endangerment of many of its endemic species. Poverty and lack of governmental support for development led locals to the only available source of income: hunting the wildlife.

Mr. Koun, 39,
Mr. Rith, 39,
Mr. Sean, 44,
Mr. Meuon, 58,
Mr. Sok Out, 53,
Mr. Ngeth, 52,
Mr. Rattanak, 36.

Listed here are villagers from Chi Phat who used to poach animals for a living. Then the conservation NGO Wildlife Alliance approached them with awareness initiatives and training, convincing them and other locals about the need to conserve the forest and the ecosystem. Now the majority earn their living through eco-tourism businesses and a few are being employed as rangers to patrol the jungle in search of those who do not comply. They destroy animal traps, look for signs of illegal logging and arrest hunters.

This is a series of conceptual portraits of these former poachers turned forest rangers. They are photographed holding pieces of broken mirrors in front of their faces with the reflection being the forest – as a symbol of their new care for nature, the breakthrough that led them to see beyond and keep the jungle on their minds.

It’s also a reminder that better ways are possible, rejecting old practices in favour of more responsible and ecologically sound ones, always working with the community and co-creating approaches that benefit all: forest, animals, people.

Miguel Jeronimo is a freelance photographer, artist, curator, poet and vagabond writer from Portugal, based currently in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

He loves using artistic collaborations and visual storytelling to raise awareness for social and environmental topics, besides working for NGOs and other organisations to share the impact of the work they do. In the artistic field, he is interested in the bridge between documentary and conceptual photography, besides working on more abstract photo-installations, multimedia and objects made by upcycling simple materials.