Ecological Spirals and Mineral Journeys

Ecological Spirals and Mineral Journeys - featuring parts of my contribution to a new book by António Monteiro.

'Not Circles, but Spirals: 4-D landscape flows and nature-culture entanglements in the Côa Valley, Portugal'

There is a slow, quiet unraveling at work across some interior landscapes of southern Europe...

How Wild Is My Valley

wanderings, wonderings and ponderings in two valleys

“All that is gold does not glitter
Not all those who wander are lost”
Bilbo Baggins, describing Strider, in Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkein

Last summer, I was back in the sanctuary - or retreat - of the ‘artist cottage’

A Culture of Transgression

The images (above and below) presents a collection of extracted details from a single old discarded ‘mosaic’ of aerial photographs of the China Clay mining area in Cornwall (UK). Whilst artist-in-residence at Wheal Martyn Museum in 2018, I discovered a large (6ft x 4 ft) glass-framed assemblage - technically termed an ‘uncontrolled mosaic’ - dating from about fifty years ago.

Lovely Weather

The Lovely Weather Donegal Residencies was a Leonardo/Olats art-and-climate project that took place in Donegal, Ireland, in 2009-10. As one of 5 commissioned artists, my artist-residency project - titled WeatherProof - was undertaken in the River Finn Valley. Recently I have written responses to researcher questions about the residencies. They are presented below.

Q: The level of community engagement and how this was organised

My understanding is that there was a high degree of community engagement extending through all stages of the project. I wasn’t involved with the inception, but I know that elected representatives were involved with the initial stages and selection of artists...

Conversations In Chaos

Third blog post in a series which revisits the Sensitive Chaos project conducted at the coastal site of Orford Ness (Suffolk, UK). Excerpts from 'conversation walks' with some of the main participants are copied here. These are transcribed from audio recordings which were originally presented on cassette tape as part of an exhibition and installation trail in Summer 2019.

 

Duncan K.: So now we come to our Zybolian ruined civilisation. What on earth were these forms? They resonate with things like burial mounds. As if they were just built as monuments. And that is what they look like you know, big longbarrows,

A cabinet of curiosities

Second installment of notes and reflections from the 2019 exhibition Sensitive Chaos, derived from an extended artist residency at Orford Ness, an ex-military zone on the Suffolk Coast (UK).

What follows is a selection of exhibition notes assembled to accompany a 'cabinet of curiosities' in one of the four exhibition rooms. The full exhibition has been described in a previous blog post.

NOTE 1: A CHINESE MISCELLANY

Synchronicity: no causal connection, yet possibly meaningfully related?
Since my first visit here, I have been struck by the accumulation of references to China.

Foraging on the shingle shore

Orford Ness artist residency. First of a series of blogs revisiting findings and reflections from the Sensitive Chaos project, 2019.

Prompted by some recent requests and discussions, I have assembled imagery and notes from parts of the Sensitive Chaos installation trail. Unlike the project's video-sonic works (NebulousNess and Blue Danube Redux) and the photographic series (Lethality & Vulnerability), the elements featured here have not been documented elsewhere. More broadly, I was asked by a cultural heritage researcher to reflect on the artist residency and the ways in which I interacted with the specifics of the site (a former military testing area), the controversial strategies of heritage management (by the National Trust and others) and the legacy of a long pattern of artist involvements with this unique place. Some of these general reflections are included here.

The image above was taken at one of the observation windows on the top floor of an all-timber, eight-sided building called the 'Black Beacon'.

Long Exposure

Some early writing from an artist residency with Elan Links, in the Elan Valley, Wales. This upland landscape is dominated by a cluster of reservoirs - some over 100 years old - built to supply water to the city of Birmingham, in the midlands of England.

The first opportunity to share work emerging from this residency has been provided by the 'Ten Acres of Sound' festival organised by the Artefact co-operative in Stirchley, Birmingham.

This is an entirely appropriate setting, as the purpose of the creation of the Elan Valley reservoir/dam/pipeline system in the early 1900s was to supply water to the rapidly growing city of Birmingham. Fittingly, my installation is hosted by the Birmingham Brewing Company, emphasising this watery connection and dependency. Under the title 'Also listening with my eyes', there is a programme of six short 'video-sonic poems' on-show. These are works-in-progress from the Elan artist residency. Below I have extracted text and images from the exhibition:

Landscapes In Limbo part 4

SENSITIVE CHAOS @ Orford Ness

a creative installation project by Antony Lyons

APRIL-OCT 2019 

Part of the ‘Limbo Landscapes Lab’ project 

supported by Arts Council England and the Heritage Futures research project (AHRC)

“Nothing is weaker than water,

But when it attacks something hard

Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,

And nothing will alter its way.”

Tao Teh Ching (via Bruce Lee)

Sensitive Chaos * - flow, change and futures on Orford Ness  From April to October 2019, the National trust site of Orford Ness (UK) will be hosting works by environmental artist, Antony Lyons. As a creative researcher attached to the Heritage Futures academic project, Lyons creates ‘geo-poetic’ responses to landscape situations that are ‘in-between’, and undergoing transformation. The presented works reflect his explorations with people and landscape, based on visits over the past two years. Working with invited participants, he will use image and sound installation to give exposure to human, non-human and biophysical aspects of this unique place.

Landscapes in Limbo part3

Poster for Limbo Landscape Lab (2018)

With special thanks to:

Nick and Ellen (Letterpress Collective, Bristol)

Adrian Utley (Musician-Composer)

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.

Landscapes In Limbo - part1

Section of Google-Earth track of first joint field trip by Antony Lyons and Caitlin DeSilvey in Cornwall in 2014

Landscapes in Limbo

JULY 2017
part 1 - juxtapositions and speculations


Two years into a four-year creative research involvement with the boundary-pushing academic project, Heritage Futures, I’m taking stock of what’s slowly emerging within my field of view; attending to the germinating seeds of some site-inspired video-sonic creative responses - or activations - in three 'landscapes in limbo'.

Autumn Leaves

A long overdue addition to the blogosphere - so this one will be a time-spanning assemblage. Working back from the recent past:

I'm on a train travelling through the birch forests of Sweden. My thoughts are drawn to some filmic memories and resonances. Strongest is the echo of Elem Klimov's powerful and troubling Come and See, which does not have a Scandinavian setting - but the atmosphere of the landscape feel somehow similar. Another of Klimov's films is Farewell, set amongst a Soviet community whose island-homes and lands are soon to be submerged by a huge reservoir project. There is a powerful theme of (loss of) deep place-attachment running through the film - a work that is inhabited by the spectral trace a different loss - the death of Larisa Shepitko (Klimov's wife) who was part-way through making this film when she and her film-crew were killed in a car-crash.

Return of The Aliveness Machines

Posters produced for exhibition at RGS conference in London next week. A platform for a new development phase of The Aliveness Machines - first seen in Devon in 2012. A NOVA research project.

A Long View

With Glastonbury Festival now kicking off, it seems appropriate to give an brief update on the creative research project - Submerged (Drowned Lands). Recently, I presented some early findings at a workshop on an island in the Wadden Sea (Netherlands). These relate to a collaborative exploration of the dynamic and contested landscape of the Somerset Levels, its waters and 'lost islands'. Glastonbury Tor (pictured above) is an ever-present landmark throughout this area...

Sao Macário Mountain Dreaming

                                                                                                                                                           an intimate space for water and women, in Sul

Sacred Waters - territories of timeless whispers and serenity

"But I know of places where there are stones
That speak to me" 
A. M. Pires Cabral, December, from Arado (2009), Portugal.

I recently completed a short rural artist residency in the remote mountains of northern Portugal, supported by the unique and inspiring Binaural organisation, and commissioned by the Tramontana Festival. Whilst situated within the realm of sound-art/intermedia, the exploration was, for me, primarily landscape-based; fossicking, turning over stones in search of some enduring essences, and intimate relationships between people and place. The Tramontana theme for 2013 revolved around 'divine/religious/sacred' connections. Responding to this, the quest was to uncover, and respond to, people's sensuous and deeply-felt connections to this land, especially those relating to pathways, pilgrimage, journeys and water. 

Submerged (Drowned Lands)

Chew Valley Lake, July 2013

Submerged (Drowned and Dammed Lands)

[aka The Almanac of the Submerged]

Environmental artist Antony Lyons is working with others, including Professor Steve Poole (UWE-Bristol/Regional History Centre, Bristol) on an Arts Council England funded initiative, involving creative fieldwork, community conversations/voices and research at a number of locations. The first phase of the project runs from Spring 2013 to late 2014.

The approach involves a creative and poetic response to a variety of landscape and cultural settings that are affected by changing water-levels. The unifying theme is that the waters come, the waters inexorably rise. Then everything is changed (and the waters recede...)

Data Ecologies, Geopoetics and Augmented Spaces

What follows is the transcript of a presentation I gave at the Data Ecologies Lab, hosted by i-DAT, on November 10, 2012. This was the final happening of the 18-month 'Confluence Project', situated within the North Devon Biosphere Reserve.


DATA ECOLOGIES - INTRO

The Confluence Project
It would be fair to say that - for all involved, this project was a challenge - as its aims were, and are, numerous and diverse:
 - for the creative process to engage with a place - an entire watershed, 
 - to engage with the Biosphere Reserve's stewards and environmental issues, 
 - to engage with innovative technologies and eco data-logging,
 - to engage with communities and schools, 
and in our case, 
 - to engage in a creative collaboration. 

All of this in very limited time and resources allocation. By necessity then, it was a probing exercise, an experimental process, allowing space for serendipity and chance. 

'Shadows and Undercurrents'; this is the title given to the strand of the Confluence Project undertaken by sonic artist, Jon Pigott and myself. We were interested in teasing out some vital, yet somewhat 'obscured' ecological threads within this special protected landscape setting. Making the invisible, visible. 

Post-dOCUMENTA ramblings

Ramblings (via Herzog, Heisenberg, Beuys and Joyce)

Notes written in the immediate aftermath of a visit to dOCUMENTA 13.
"dOCUMENTA (13) is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory. These are terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary." (C. Christov-Bakargiev, Documenta Curator)

One of the benefits of undertaking a pilgrimage to such an 'event', is that it serves as a fresh lens through which to view one's own work - adding of course to the many existing lenses. 'Artistic research' and 'location' were some of the thematic platforms of this Documenta, which, for me, raises the topic of a discourse between scientific and creative research. A significant difference between the two fields is perhaps the attitude, or degree of openness, to accident. Whereas a scientific investigator may dismiss an event as a meaningless or disruptive accident, a creative researcher may embrace the same 'accident' as meaningful, thus positioning the whole process as much more porous and 'messier'. (This despite the fact that many major scientific leaps are known to have been prompted by accidental events, dreams and 'intuitions'). Also relevant are the related issues of detachment, bias and relationships. Whilst mulling over all of this, I was handed a copy of Doing Ethnographies (thanks Iain !), which explores - especially in relation to fieldwork -  some of the same ground, located at the overlap between the humanities and the sciences:

Pictures From An Exhibition

'Shadows and Undercurrents'
at the Appledore Arts Festival, June 2012

part of the 'Confluence' project; a collaboration with Jon Pigott

www.UNmapping.net

Some images