Landscapes in Limbo part2

Geopoetic reflections, exhibition notes and images from the Limbo Landscape Lab

An exhibition at Wheal Martyn Museum, Cornwall, UK (July-Nov. 2018) 

by Antony Lyons, Heritage Futures senior creative fellow.

Assembling human and non-human stories in a transforming landscape

#Transformation theme of Heritage Futures

“It is the children born now who will see if
we humans can turn it around…can re-balance?
It’s not us. We’ve messed it up.
They will fix it…or they won’t.
I would like to be around in 75 years’ time to see 
which way it will go; what they do; what is done to them
…but I won’t be there”
(a worker at Wheal Martyn, Aug 2018)


a) DEEP-MAPPING in the mists of DEEP-TIME

"This film is time-compressed. I recorded it - hand-held - for over 30 minutes, from the shelter of my trusty mobile studio/campervan. The circumstance was happenstance, serendipitous. The occasion presented itself after many visits, over the course of a year, in the environs of the Sky Tip mound of mining waste outside St Austell in Cornwall - the centre of the long-established industry of kaolin mining. The Sky Tip has slowly, yet inexorably, inserted itself on my radar, and also now it is the focus for a project by a group of photography students - from the local Poltair School - with whom I’m working.

Invitation to The Black Wood

This is a re-post of something recently published on EcoArt Dialogues, which is a record of my ongoing conversations with Glasgow-based environmental artist duo, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, supported by an a-n Re:View bursary.

Waking up to Glasgow sunshine, I was transported by my generous hosts to the world of The Black Wood of Rannoch - 

Eco-Art Dialogues

 Revegetated clay waste-lands, Cornwall, 2013

Some preparatory musings, questions and themes - prepared in advance of my a-n Re:View conversations with Glasgow-based environmental artists, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto. Our time together will include a visit to their current main field-based project at the Black Wood of Rannoch. Our continuing dialogues will be documented via an a-n Artists Talking blog.

A Myriorama of Oblique Strategies

View from the freshly shored up rail-line at Dawlish, en-route to Falmouth

The photo here was taken on a trip to a seminar/ 'melting pot' at the Environment and Sustainability Institute in Cornwall, where I recently presented some glimpses (or a myriorama) of a drifting creative journey through the realms of science and eco-art, towards some substantial research-based collaborations.

Dissolving Into Water(s)

A blog post emerging from the 'More Than Human Research' project (the water element…)

It is productive - even necessary perhaps? - to have a pressing deadline, pushing me to gather my thoughts on this process of water interactions and conversations. A reflection, looking-back - to compliment a looking-ahead penned earlier this year:

Recently, I was invited to a viewing of a documentary film about the artist Anselm Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, which contains some of his musings on water and life, including a kind of yearning for our origins in the salt-laden seas (Kiefer comments on the similarity between the composition of our blood and that of sea-water).

The Dark Side

Fields and the River Torridge, Torrington, November 1983: James Ravilious © Beaford Arts

On the subject of 'shadows', and delving into hidden landscape realms, there is - in an eco-symbolic sense - perhaps also a parallel in the human unconscious? Jung credited Gustav Carus (1789-1869) with pointing to the unconscious as the essential basis of the dark side of the psyche. A contemporary of Goethe, Carus was a physiologist, writer, geologist, naturalist…and a landscape painter. A true polymath, he urged artists to study the 'physiognomy' of landscape and 'learn to speak the language of nature.' There is a darkness (a crepuscularity?) to many of Carus' paintings...