Month: September 2023

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Stethoscope

David de la Haye recording at the Angel of the North
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

My first visit to The Angel of the North with David took place on a sunny day when the site was busy with families and coach trips. David had brought his audio equipment to test out possibilities for the sound piece and he carried a small recorder, a microphone, and headphones.

Once we reached The Angel, David knocked on each of the welded panels that make up the feet. As we moved round the sculpture, knocking and listening, each panel sounded with a different pitch. We spent some time comparing one panel to another, learning how the sounds varied depending on whether we were at the side of The Angel or were knocking on the heels or toes of the sculpture.

David then put his headphones on and placed the microphone on one of the panels. As he listened to the sounds the microphone picked up, he looked like a doctor with a stethoscope, attending to the internal sounds of the body. He explained that his audio equipment worked in the same way as a stethoscope: the microphone acted as the disc-shaped resonator that is held against the skin and the headphones formed its earpieces.

David invited me to put the headphones on as he held the microphone in place. Putting the headphones over my ears, I heard a low droning hum and was astonished to be able to listen to the ‘voice’ of The Angel as I stood beneath its immense wings. Working slowly round The Angel with the microphone, we heard the same variation in the pitch of the hum that we had picked up with the knocking.

A stethoscope can be used to pick up the sounds made by the heart or the lungs. What noise was David’s microphone enabling us to hear?  We could identify vibrations caused by children nearby, who were using The Angel’s toes as a slide. But we weren’t sure if the low drone was the effect of the wind causing The Angel to vibrate or the steady rumble of the motorway traffic as it resonated through the structure. Whatever its source, the sound of The Angel was filled with energy, and it felt like I was listening to the sculpture breathing beside me.

As David made his test recordings, people approached to speak to us, curious about what we were doing. A woman with her children asked what we could hear. David gave the headphones to her daughter, who said that the sound was relaxing, like something you could meditate to. Her son then told us that he would use the sound to compose a piece of music, which he would call ‘The Angel of the North’.

I have always been aware of sound on my visits to The Angel, and in a previous post I described my association of the memorial in the trees with the mingled noise of wind chimes and traffic. Looking back at The Angel from the memorial site, I could hear its lingering hum in my ears, and I knew that, whenever I was there, I would always now listen for that faint echo of The Angel’s breath.  

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Exhibition

hand in water with grasses
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney

The Losing a Twin at Birth project film was recently exhibited at the Newcastle Contemporary Art Gallery.

Kate’s film, Where We Will Go, was included in the exhibition Communities and Change, which ran from 3-7 July 2023. Curated by the organising committee of the Memory Studies Association seventh international conference, the exhibition brought together installations by local and international artists exploring the role of memory in communities navigating change.

Other participating artists included the Amber Collective, Henna Askainen, I-Wei Wu, Pablo Martinez Capdevila and Tara Hipwood.

Thanks are extended to Catherine Gilbert and Alison Atkinson-Phillips for their kind invitation to participate.

You can read more about the exhibition here.

        

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Book launch

Book and tide clock
Photo credit: Angie Scott.

In February 2023, a book launch for Relating Suicide: A Personal and Critical Perspective was hosted by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. It took place in the Birley Room at Hatfield College, and I was both moved and delighted to see the venue filled with so many dear friends and colleagues.

The evening was launched by Professor Angela Woods, Director of the Institute.

Newcastle University Emeritus Professor Linda Anderson then reflected on the book’s combining of creative and critical writing.

My conversation with Durham University Emeritus Professor Patricia Waugh deepened the discussion of creative and critical approaches in the book. We ranged across other topics, including the integration of the personal into academic writing, the value of reticence, the question of form, and the influence of Virginia Woolf.

I closed the launch by reading a short extract from the third chapter of the book, in which I reflect on the tide clock that hangs on the wall of my kitchen.

Thank you to the Durham Institute for organising and hosting the event.   

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Engagement and Place Award

Newcastle University Engagement and Place award 2023, glasswork by Robyn Hare
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead.

The project team for Losing a Twin at Birth were delighted to be the recipients of a 2023 Newcastle University Engagement and Place Award.

The awards were established to recognise and celebrate great examples of collaboration beyond the university. They showcase teaching and research that brings value to the social, cultural, or economic wellbeing of a place, whether that is the city of Newcastle, the broader region, or across the globe.

Our project was the winner under the category of ‘Engaging for Health, Wellbeing and Societal Benefit.’

We received the award at a ceremony hosted in the Common Room at the Mining Institute in Newcastle. Newcastle University head glassblower Robyn Hare created a beautiful artwork that was presented to us at the ceremony.

We felt honoured to be in the company of such inspiring colleagues, and we are grateful to the parents who participated in the project for their commitment and generosity.   

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Dolphin

child's drawing of dolphin in sea
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney

We conceived of Losing a Twin at Birth as a project that worked with parents to capture their experience of this complex form of grief. Yet the activity of gathering the materials for the inks enabled other family members to be involved.

In my last blog post, I described how the grandparents of one family participated in the project by gathering rose petals from their garden and sending them through the post, so that they could be used to make the inks. In another family, the grandparents took part in the memory walk, which became an occasion to remember and talk about the lost twin. Both families included their children in the memory walks, and they helped to choose which materials were collected.

The sketchbooks Kate provided were used by the parents to record images and thoughts relating to the project. Each of the parents also gave a sketchbook to their children. As the project progressed, we received drawings from them, giving us a glimpse into the sibling perspective on this form of grief. On the memory walk, one co-twin sketched the surrounding hills using ‘ink’ from bilberries collected on the way, and Kate used this drawing for the title image of the film. Another co-twin declared at the end of the memory walk that she had seen a dolphin in the sea, and she drew this in her sketchbook. Kate animated the drawing to end the film.

For the parents, it was important to talk to their children about their lost siblings so that they remained a constant presence in the family. The memory walks extended the ways in which they were already creating memories with their children. One of the parents observed, ‘The memories are so few, and the focus is around the funeral. The project is giving us the prompts to create new memories.’

At the beginning of the project, the parents expressed a wish to help other parents by making the film. During the course of the project, they came to see the film as a document that they could also share with their children, either now or when they are older and want to know more about their siblings who have died. One parent described the film as a way of ‘safeguarding for the future’.

While the parents remained the central focus of the project, it became clear that their grief could not be separated from the effects of the loss on other family members. The parents chose to involve their children and their own parents in the project activities, and the film likewise sought to capture the contribution of different generations to its making.    

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Rose

making inks and drawings with inks
Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney

For one family who participated in the Losing a Twin at Birth project, roses had taken on a particular significance. They explained, ‘When a new baby is born in our family, we find a rose with a similar name and plant it for them. We give a lot of roses, to everyone.’  

These parents wanted to collect rose petals for their inks. Our conversations often returned to the progress of the roses in their garden: ‘Our roses are slow this year, but the garden is full of buttercups.’

In the second session, Kate gathered the materials from the memory walks. The parents brought a sealed zip lock envelope filled with rose petals. These had been collected by the twins’ grandparents, from the rose bushes in their garden. They had carefully rinsed and sorted the petals before posting them to the parents. The parents noted how hard it can be for an older generation to talk about the loss of a baby, observing, ‘My parents were pleased they could do something to contribute.’

When we opened the envelope and spread the petals on the table in front of us, their fragrance filled the air. Kate photographed the parents’ hands, holding the delicate petals cupped in their palms.

In the following session, Kate gave three bottles of rose inks to the parents. She had sorted the petals by colour and the inks ranged in shade, each one paler and more muted than the petals from which it had been made. The parents commented, ‘I like how they have changed, that they are so faint.’ We had already talked about ‘silent inks’, in which the material infuses the water without colouring it. These inks were not silent; they felt like a quiet presence in the room.

At the next session, the parents brought in their sketchbook. On one of the pages, there was a pencil drawing of a rose on the left-hand side and a heart on the right. Petals from the rose were blowing across to the heart. One of the parents explained, ‘I like the idea of somebody smelling the roses and the fragrance going up their noses and into their hearts.’ Kate animated the drawing for the film, assembling the petals from the rose into the shape of a heart.

For this family, roses were used to celebrate births and had also become an important way of remembering the lost twin. They formed a link across the generations and the act of collecting the petals enabled the grandparents to participate in the project. The concentrated fragrance of the petals in the inks evoked a parental wish that those who had not had a chance to know their daughter might still take her into their hearts.                 

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Sketchbook

Sketchbook on a desk
Photograph credit: Anne Whitehead

In the first session of the Losing a Twin at Birth project, artist Kate Sweeney handed out sketchbooks to the parents, so that they could use the inks made in the sessions to draw images. I was also offered a sketchbook and I used it to record my thoughts on the sessions with the parents. I found that this way of notetaking enabled me to reflect on the language we had been working with, as well as on the process of ink making itself.  

In our introductory sessions with the parents, we shared conversation over a cup of tea. As a way of demonstrating that inks can be made from the most everyday materials, Kate used the teabags to create an ‘ink’ that was brought into the second session and used to experiment with different kinds of mark making. We thought together about how the ink itself constituted an archive of the first session, preserving the tea that each person had chosen, and distilling an essence of our conversation.

sketchbook page with notes and pictures
Image credit: Anne Whitehead

In my sketchbook entry following the first session, I reflected on the language of infusion to represent both the ink-making process and the methodology of the project. Looking up infusion, I found the following definitions listed.

(1) to steep in liquid (such as water) so as to extract the soluble constituents or principles. This was resonant both with the immersion of the teabag in water to make the tea that we drank together in the session, and Kate’s further steeping of the used teabags to make the inks. The ritual of making the tea framed our conversation, acting as a model for how making the inks from the materials collected by the parents would facilitate our conversations about their experiences of loss.  

(2) to cause to be permeated with something that alters, usually for the better. This sense of infusion develops the first meaning to suggest that the act of steeping can also be transformative, producing a change. This represented our shared hope that by making the inks and the film, we would be able to make a positive change.

(3) to inspire or animate. Kate’s film-making process involves the animation of drawings, and this meaning of infusion seemed to anticipate the ways in which she would imbue the parents’ ink drawings with something new, infusing them with a different life and energy.

In the second sessions with the parents, Kate gave them the inks she had made from the teabags. The liquid had darkened to a peaty colour, due to the effect of the materials used to preserve it. Kate explained that this was known in dye making as the ‘saddening’ process. As we explored the materials that the parents had brought in from their memory walks, we talked in greater depth about their experiences of grief, and the sessions felt that they too were infused with a deeper sorrow than our first conversations. My sketchbook page following these sessions reflects on the meanings of ‘to sadden’: (1) ‘to deepen colours by the addition of additives’; (2) ‘to cause to feel sorrow; to become sad’.

In the third session of the project, Kate gave the parents the inks she had made from the materials collected on their memory walks. We then used the inks to draw and write with. Kate drew a butterfly with water and dabbed in the inks, which diffused across the paper to suggest the shape of wings. Our conversations focused on the parents’ hopes for the film. They wanted the film to give comfort to other parents who had experienced the same loss by showing that, although the grief does not go away, it is possible to live beside it as a family.

Sketchbook page with notes and images
Image credit: Anne Whitehead

My sketchbook notes following this session reflect on the meanings of diffusion. In science, diffusion refers to the spreading of one substance into another as a result of the random motion of molecules. This was what we had witnessed together, as the ink dispersed through the water on Kate’s drawing to form butterfly wings. By extension, diffusion also refers to the dissemination of knowledge, and this picked up the parents’ desire to circulate their experience to others through the film. As we watched the ink pull through the water, it felt to me that there was something there too of the lost twin’s delicate trace in the lives of the remaining family.

My sketchbook enabled me to think with, rather than about, the creative process that Kate was using to make the inks and film. My notes documented the ways in which aspects of the creative process infused our conversations, meaning that the language of ink making became expressive of the phases of the project itself.        

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Sea Cyanotype

Cyanotype of the sea
Image credit: © Anne Whitehead, Sea Cyanotype, Redcar, 2022.

The image I have chosen for the page that introduces the Relating Suicide project is of a cyanotype. One of the earliest forms of photography, the cyanotype process does not need a camera. Instead, the object that is ‘photographed’ is placed directly onto a surface that has been coated with chemicals. Glass is laid over the object to flatten it onto the surface and it is then placed in direct sunlight. The coating on the paper gradually changes colour, the speed at which this happens being dependent on the strength of the sun. This represents the exposure of the image. To develop the image, the glass and object are removed from the surface, and the object appears in negative. Once immersed in water, the chemicals deepen to the dark cyan blue that characterises the cyanotype, and the object appears in white against this ground. The surface that is treated is usually paper, although fabric and other materials can also form the basis of a cyanotype.

I started to experiment with cyanotypes at the beginning of lockdown. Even though it was early in the year, the start of lockdown was marked by sunny days. I made my first cyanotype on fabric in my garden, using one of the plants that was growing there, and I was immediately hooked. Through successive lockdowns, I cyanotyped the different plants that grew in my garden or that I encountered on my walks. Developed onto fabric, the images enabled me to stitch in added detail. Gathering these cyanotypes together, I realised that I had created an archive of my lockdown experience. I stitched the cyanotypes into two albums, bound between fabric covers recycled from tops I no longer wore. I wrote about my lockdown cyanotypes for my good friend Kate Davies’ blog, and you can read the post here.

More recently, I have experimented with cyanotypes of plants and objects gathered on the beach at Redcar where my sister died. I like to walk there, and I often pick up small treasures along the way – a pebble, a feather, a strand of seaweed. The lockdown cyanotypes were created using the process described above, which is known as dry cyanotype because the chemicals have been allowed to dry on the treated surface before the object is placed on them. For the beach cyanotypes, I have mostly used the technique of wet cyanotype, so called because the object is placed on the surface when the chemicals are still wet. This allows the addition of other materials into the chemical mix, including dilute vinegar, sea salt or turmeric powder. The result is more unpredictable than with the dry method but it can be beautiful. I have written about the beach cyanotypes in a blog post for Bloomsbury Press, which you can read here.

The cyanotype pictured on this page takes the sea as its object. Unlike many of the beach cyanotypes, it uses pre-treated paper because it was impractical to coat the paper when I was at the beach. But as a dry cyanotype, it collapses the distinction between the exposure and the developing stages. With the sea as its object, the cyanotype is exposed by dipping the paper into the edge of the tide and letting the receding pull of the water create the negative image. This already merges into the submersion of the paper into water for the developing stage, meaning that the image captures a part of the cyanotype process – the washing away of the chemicals – that is normally invisible.

This experimental cyanotype of the sea’s edge feels resonant to me with the subject of relating suicide.  It is made in the place where my sister died and, on the anniversary of her death, it records a unique moment in time as the tide washes over the paper. I have written in my book about grief’s disturbance of time, and I used the tide clock that hangs in my kitchen to represent the rhythmic ebb and flow of time that commonly characterises grief. This image records both a washing away and a staining, which also speaks to me of what it means to visit this beach to remember my sister’s death.          

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Introducing the ‘Sounding the Angel’ Project

Microphone next to The Angel of the North
Photo Credit: David de la Haye

I am a resident of Gateshead, and I have long thought of The Angel of the North as a sign of home. I was a frequent visitor to The Angel during lockdown, when it became one of my regular walks. It was then that I became more aware of the memorial in the trees near The Angel. Over time, I saw that new messages and objects were hung on the branches of the trees or laid beneath them or would occasionally be placed on The Angel itself. These were left in memory of lost loved ones.

I found the memorial site very moving, and I hoped to create a record that might capture what it means to the people who leave objects there. The sound of the memorial was an important part of the experience of being there – the rustle of the leaves overhead in the summer, the constant rumble of traffic on the nearby A1, and the gentle tinkling of wind chimes in the breeze. I therefore approached sound artist David de la Haye, and we felt that creating a sound work would capture the voices and stories of those who contribute to the memorial, as well as the sounds of the site across the seasons.

Sounding the Angel seeks to document a unique conversation between the people who leave memorials at The Angel, the sounds of the memorial site, and the resonances of The Angel of the North itself. David and I believe that by bringing together these very different voices and sounds, we will create a beautiful record of a place that holds deep meaning for those who visit and leave tokens of their loved ones behind.