“We think place is about space, but in fact it is really about time.”[1]
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby.
In developing my body of work “Seven Stations” ( “Saith Gorsaf”) over the last year or more, my initial line of enquiry was first informed by Tim Ingold’s anthropological eye for the interrelationship of the human and natural worlds. He inspired me to think about the way art can function as not just a process of making, but also of thinking. He encouraged me to experience, to experiment and to explore, a mantra I took with me to Anglesey. Later, I was also much influenced by Robert Smithson’s mysterious and enigmatic approach to the exploration of landscapes and by his site/non-site duality. I was excited to contrast the disused railway line (site) with a contemporary art exhibition (non-site).
Of course, this was all disrupted by the Covid-19 lockdown. For me, the “site” was suddenly both conceptually and physically closed off to me. (I was not able to return to Anglesey until mid-July, an interval of over four months).
Without access to site/subject, workshops, space and even some materials, I found myself reflecting in my small Oxford studio on what appeared to be a significant impediment. I no longer felt that I could authentically engage in the way that I had planned with the land, the railway line, and the people I had met. (e.g. Lein Amlwch, the volunteer group seeking to restore the line to use - they too had suspended all work on the line.) But, in time, this just became an opportunity to encounter the railway line in a different way. The cultivation of flexibility and resilience is time well spent for any artist, so, I turned to my own memories, records and research. Thus, the very themes of memory, remembering, and the often vanishingly thin line between remembering and forgetting (and restoration and loss) became more prevalent themes.
Memory became another key component of my conceptual approach, alongside place and time as described by Solnit: my own memories, too, as well the social, historical and industrial memory I found on Anglesey; of which the railway line is such a potent emblem.
And also …. making and unmaking: several of my works seek to explore and occupy that liminal and ambivalent point. I have found many such juxtapositions arising out of my exploration of an industrial artefact that is, to a very great extent, dead or moribund, and yet I was fascinated to experience the way it became something more complex, nuanced and still, yet, very vital. It has suited that part of my practice in which I gather a selection of themes, ideas components and “clusters” of work and experiment with their combination, dissolution and recombination (e.g. Much Is Forgotten. (But Not All.)”)
I have come to understand the railway line as a sort of “drawing upon the landscape”. It engaged my fascination with drawing (in multiple forms, including writing) but also inspired me to go beyond it. So, a line became a shape (especially through the drawn pieces); and in turn it became a form, an experience, a sound, or a reflection, through wider applications. In the end, I find my destination in this body of work has grown from the interplay between these different elements.
My work has been described as operating “between the systematic and the poetic”, a phrase I have found revelatory. Systematic or diagrammatic qualities associated with the construction and operation of railway lines, and the associated (and often marginal or arcane) information that comes with them, can be highly attractive for “railway enthusiasts” and historians of all stripes, and for those, like me, who are interested in the narrow delineation between remembering and forgetting of marginal things. But they also carry a wonderful potential to transform into something altogether more poetic, connected with time and memory, and with our industrial and social heritage; all of which is richly apparent in the landscape of Anglesey.
My work has also become a combination of something linear and finite (relating to a line - a journey delineated by a beginning and an end, just like a railway) with something cyclical and repetitive (implying a cycle of creation, decay and renewal, with the potential to repeat and return - an implication of return or repeated journeys). This is a more uncertain, and I think more poetic, space to occupy, and this ambivalence made my journey much richer and more interesting.
My subject has, in this way, taught me to place these and so many other dualities alongside each other and to facilitate dialogue between the two. There is value in presenting/revealing without the need to be authorial, or to force an interpretation or solution. This is particularly important learning where a subject has political and social overtones. (Railways, I have learnt, are very political things, having to do with economics, land and who gets to connect with whom.) The last thing the people of Anglesey need or want is to be told by an artist from Oxfordshire what to do or think about the railway line and its different potential futures. We see landscape and history through our own eyes, and make our own meaning from it, but must always be conscious that what we see is only our one view. There is always more, and so much is unseen yet hiding in plain sight.
On Anglesey, I found my practice and the path to explore it further beyond my MFA. I have found myself following not a journey to the death of a railway but, in fact, a journey to a transformation; perhaps even to a rebirth, linking back to my choice of title. This transformation also applies to me and my art practice, something I am overjoyed to discover in myself at a relatively late stage in my life. So much in life is about exploration and discovery and I am very much looking forward to continuing this journey.
[1] Solnit R, (2014), The Faraway Nearby. London, Granta.
Rhoddion stone. July 2020. Copyright: Mark Clay
