“The Great Lines”
Watching Countryfile with my mum was a revelation, who would have thought that in 1774 scientists using a mountain in Perthshire – in an attempt to ‘weigh the world’ – would inadvertently invent contour lines. On Arran, James Hutton is famous for ‘unconformities’; I first thought it was him tracking and tracing on Schiehallion Mountain. After many days blissfully conflating 2 Huttons, I realised it was Newcastle born Charles Hutton who is responsible for the invention.
I was tracing and scaling contour lines in my first draft model islands; an early idea was to use the boundaries of the NTS on Arran to create a coastline thus cutting the Estate adrift from its surroundings. One polyethylene foam model was inverted and anchored in the water with a lump of granite; weighting with a material more closely equated with up-thrust.
Whilst it looked ‘interesting’, the symbolism associated with isolating and ‘sinking’ the Estate was too negative to pursue.
Since the programme I have discovered a great book by Edwin Danson ‘Weighing the World’ in which he describes Charles Hutton’s invention:
He constructed a map on stout paper 4 feet square… After some cogitation he thought of interpolating unit heights between the spot heights and “connecting together by a faint line all the points which were of the same relative altitude”. “These calculations” wrote Hutton in something of an understatement “were naturally and unavoidably long and tedious”.
Thus were “the great lines” born.
Desire Lines
With note-books bulging, ideas badly in need of an edit and the ‘nub’ of the artwork still not found, I went walking with a Ranger. As we talked, walked and ultimately climbed, instead of materials and ideas percolating out, I found ever more facets and angles to ‘change’ in a landscape (on an island) flooding in.
According to Scottish Natural Heritage’s latest assessment, we were walking in the ‘wild’, though since the late 1980’s the Ranger Service has been discreetly laying paths. The teams of volunteers supporting the work are reminded to lay stones ‘top side up’ – so their brilliant white underbelly won’t detract from the feeling of following a desire line through nature rather than a path cut, filled, laid. I have been considering drawn lines and outlines: contours, raised beeches, tree-lines as a way to distil and contain ideas.
Reaching Cir Mhor, nose to granite, its presence is solid, daunting, awe inspiring and seemingly a different animal to distant snow-decked cool white Goatfell. Granite, I was informed, made for a species poor terrain in terms of flora. Yet a chance remark about a rare cross between Rowan and Whitebeam that has led to a new tree on Arran (S. Arranensis) turned thoughts back to the nature of scarcity and abundance and the qualities of islands in evolution. Could the changing shape of a leaf – evolution in action -contain the heart of an idea?
Recipes for Dyeing
Rangers, Gardeners and Estate Workers, have all been intrigued by my water experiments. A weaver from the island was called up regarding natural dyes; black oak galls were suggested. Gardeners checked the estate inventory, sadly no Quercus velutina on the Estate. Popping into the Arts and Mind workshop a member suggests regular oak plus cedar bark.
I’d trawled the internet too, then last night the strangest thing happened; my latest bedtime read is a book by Tim Ingold and in the chapter Materials Against Materiality, this: “… from the twelfth century… oak galls are collected crushed and either boiled or infused with rainwater. The other main ingredient is copperas, manufactured by the evaporation of water from ferrous earth or by pouring sulphuric acid on old nails… [] The copperas is added to the oak-gall potion and thoroughly stirred with a stick from a fig tree. This has the effect of turning the solution from pale brown to black. Finally gum arabic – made from the dried up sap of an acacia tree – is added in order to thicken the concoction”. The recipe is for black ink. And after all this research, I know I won’t be dyeing the water. I could if the artwork were to be a ‘closed system’ – no liquids in or out. The truth hit home during yesterday’s mid-deluge walk into Brodick. I kept losing the path, high-tide had sucked away the beach and swollen tributaries tumbled over low bridges. Sloshing ankle-deep I tried to keep to a notional divide between sea and flooded marsh, water everywhere.
Water in a landscape is rarely still; water within the artwork will be replaced and replenished by Arran’s fantastic rainfall, only sunken material at the bottom of the pool will have any chance of remaining.
Vision in White
The first ‘vision in white’, floating in a dark pool, was originally to be Goatfell; as it would have appeared in the last Ice Age, a jagged granite apex piercing a sea of snow. Then came the reversal; so often during my stay low cloud has removed just those peaks the ice would have left revealed, perhaps my ‘isle’ should be inverted seen only in reflection.
On trips around the island I’ve been collecting materials for my experimental pools, from brilliant white west coast shells I created an island as ‘raised beach’ hovering above the water. Tectonic plates of fine red sandstone sand swivelled and collided captured and held suspended in surface tension. The workspace is scattered with abandoned ideas: raised beaches, miniature mountains, atolls, carboniferous swamps and peat bogs, plus a bit of ‘land clearance’ wool.
Framing
So: black and white, charcoal and granite, which – rather erroneously – I’ve referred to as ‘colour choices’ (there are others: red and green but more about those later).
There’s a chapter in McKerrow’s geology guide called “Arran In Time And Space”. He begins “When we stand in Arran on sediments originally deposited by turbidity currents in an ocean basin, it is natural to enquire about the nature of…” he goes on… what I’d like to think he’s thinking is how we define space and place, particularly the Arran-ness of Arran: a place framed and contained by a distinct liquid border.
Within the NTS estate there are few defined spaces, the most prominent is the walled garden, there’s also the cemetery: railings keeping lush grasses and three simple gravestones within, tall trees without add height and shade creating almost a box-like space.
Many artists begin with a clean sheet of paper or canvas. I look for a space, a place. On high Northumbrian moorland the hazy outline of the ‘old pheasant field’ became the frame within which to work.
On the estate the place that’s drawing me in is by the ‘Spanish Gate’. The removal of rhododendrons and a fallen tree has left a gap – a gash almost – in the woods near to the castle. The soil is dark, soft and rich; I love the coolness of it and can imagine it all as darker, richer, liquidity.
