Next week sees the installation of our sound piece in the Arches that mark the entrance to the main quadrangle of Newcastle University. Built in 1911 from a donation by north-east mining magnate John Bell Simpson, the brick structure now houses the Arches Sound Project, which projects four-track audio pieces through the microphones that have been installed in each of its corners. Passers-by can sit on the benches under the Arches to listen to the sound works in full, or they might encounter fragments of them as they walk through, whether to visit the campus or to cut through it to the Royal Victoria Infirmary beyond.
In the area just in front of the Arches, Antony Gormley’s Clasp has been installed, a semi- abstract sculpture that depicts two people embracing. The sculpture was installed on this site to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of The Angel in Gateshead, and our project both recognises and reinforces the line of connection between the two. Those listening to Sounding the Angel can also see the Clasp sculpture, so that the two works are brought into a new conversation with each other.
Turning to look in the opposite direction, one of the trees that has been planted immediately behind the Arches is a handkerchief or ghost tree, named after its beautiful, white flower-like bracts that flutter in the breeze, resembling innumerable pocket handkerchiefs. The bracts have now mostly fallen from the tree and been dispersed by the wind, which resonates with how the memorial tributes are described by participants in the sound work.
The installation, which lasts 30 minutes, is played on the hour every hour from 6am – 10pm, from 1-7 July. It comprises four parts, organized according to the seasons, and you can hear two counterpointed conversations with participants who have left memorial tributes at The Angel. These are combined with field recordings from the site across the seasons, documenting the sounds of nature and the vibrations resonating through The Angel itself. The piece is punctuated by a loud boom that was made by the metal of the Angel contracting after the heat of a summer’s day.
I spent this morning in the recording studio with David, editing the draft version of the sound piece. It was wonderful to hear the different layers of sound that David had built into the work, and the creative ways in which he was using the recordings we had made on site.
The photograph of David’s computer screen below gives a visual score for the layering of sound in the piece. The top layers represent the three voices in the project – mine and the two participants – ; the layers beneath represent the resonances of the Angel, which run throughout the piece, and the sounds of the traffic and the wind; and the lower levels are the sounds of birdsong, leaves in the trees, and grass whispering in the wind.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The addition of the field recordings to the recorded voices gives the words of the participants additional resonance, as David marked the moments in the conversations when they had made reference to weather or particular sounds, and enhanced them through recorded sound. The work is divided into four sections, corresponding to the seasons, and David used the contact microphone recording of the interior of The Angel for the relevant season. Listening to them in sequence, it was remarkable how much the vibrations from The Angel differed in tone across the year, with the winter recordings shaped by the violent wind and rain of the storms, and the summer recordings more vibrant and lively, capturing the muffled sounds of children playing and visitors chatting nearby.
The sound piece also captures a few memorable moments of the field recordings. From our summer visit to The Angel, David built in the song of the blackbird that I recorded singing from the top of a tree in the copse, as well as my recording of my own footsteps. The geophone captured the boom of The Angel contracting, and David used the sound to punctuate the sections of the work, like the regular tolling of a bell. David’s visit to The Angel to record during Storm Babet produced the echoing of the raindrops from the surface of the sculpture that can be heard in the Winter section of the piece.
The continual drone of The Angel (shown in pink above) reminded me of David’s recordings of the pithead at Easington Colliery, in its haunting evocation of the former mining communities. In our sound piece, it accompanies (and expands) the participants’ associations of The Angel sculpture with the mineworkers who had toiled beneath.
The sound piece will be installed in The Arches on the main campus at Newcastle University on Monday 1 July and will play from 1-7 July.
Unsurprisingly, angels represent a common motif connecting many of the tributes left at the memorial site. The host of miniature angels hanging from the trees are scaled-down versions of Antony Gormley’s sculpture, and some are even direct representations of The Angel of the North.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The angels come in a range of different materials. Some have been knitted or crocheted.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Some are made from wood.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Others are made from plastic.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Many of these angel tributes are repurposed Christmas decorations, which have been chosen as memorial tributes because of their significance to the site.
Looking more closely at what is written on or about angels on the tributes can bring us closer to what they might mean for those who have commemorated loved ones here. Many notes left in the trees refer to The Angel as a guardian presence, watching over loved ones. The idea of a guardian angel watching over the dead can also be seen on some of the tributes.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
In the photograph below, the Angels referred to as watching over the dead are both heavenly and material in form, given that The Angel of the North stands directly above the tree from which the tribute has been hung.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The figure of the angel baby is often used in baby loss memorials, and the angel here represents or stands in for the deceased.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
This idea is echoed in other tributes. Angels might be inscribed with the name of the person who is being commemorated.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Or the person might be described as an ongoing guardian presence for the living.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
In the photograph above, wings stand as a shorthand for the angel figure. Feathers also serve this function, and both images are prevalent in the tributes left at the site.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Angels clearly represent a source of comfort for those who leave tributes in the memorial garden, and we can presume that the solace offered by The Angel of the North initially drew them to commemorate their loved ones there. Looking closer at the tributes, we can find some variation in the ways in which angels offer meaning in the face of death. For some mourners, it is the idea – made concrete in The Angel – that their loved ones are not alone and have a guardian presence nearby. For others, angels are expressive of a continued bond with a friend or relative, who is seen as a guardian angel watching over the living. The angel figure has a particular cultural resonance in the context of baby loss, offering grieving families a recognizable way to express their grief.
This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.
The month of June has brought into flower the different grasses that grow in the field on which The Angel of the North stands. Attending to these plants requires a different scale of vision from looking at The Angel, as well as adjusting the gaze downward. Cyanotypes of the grasses bring out the sculptural beauty of their forms, which are easily overlooked.
Image Credit: Anne Whitehead
I wrote in my post on the month of May about the significance for the memorial site of dwelling with the ordinariness of things, and this month’s homage to the grasses that grow there continues in this vein. These plants are not exceptional or extraordinary, but looking at them closely reveals their distinctive beauty. I have often used the term grassroots memorial to describe the memorial in the trees at The Angel. This phrase, which registers that the memorial site is rooted in the spontaneous, collective activities of ordinary people, has its origin in the roots of grasses as a fundamental layer from which growth takes place.
Image Credit: Anne Whitehead
The Sounding the Angel project documents the memorial site through sound. I have written in this blog of the rustling of the leaves in the trees as one of the defining sounds of the memorial site in the summer months. Although less audible, the whispering of the grasses can also be heard alongside them, as they variously bend or shake in the wind.
The images of the grasses above have all been made using the dry cyanotype method, which involves placing the plant onto paper when the chemicals that develop the image have dried. The grace and elegance of these cyanotypes prompted me also to develop images of the grasses using the wet cyanotype method, which I have described in a previous post.
This technique enables a greater range of effects, even if it is less predictable in outcome.
Image credit: Anne Whitehead
This image captures the feel of the grasses swaying in the wind, and turmeric sprinkled onto the wet paper enhances its sense of life and movement.
Image credit: Anne Whitehead
Here, the textured background has been created by placing a layer of cling film onto the glass during the exposure of the image.
Image credit: Anne Whitehead
Here’s another variation, which combines the two techniques. The pooling of vinegar spray on the cling film has caused a rich variety of blues to emerge.
The cyanotype methods differ in their effects, but they both capture the structural beauty of the grasses. These plants define the site of The Angel in June, and this post both captures and celebrates the range of different species that grow there.
Marie Brett, ‘Anamnesis’, Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2013.
Last week the Newcastle University Medical Humanities Network hosted Helen Knowles to speak about the Birth Rites Collection. An artist and curator, Knowles built up the Collection, which is the only collection of contemporary artwork dedicated to the subject of childbirth. Founded in 2009 and currently housed at the University of Kent, the Collection was formerly held at King’s College, London.
Knowles spoke about the history of the Collection, which seeks to encourage debate and increase awareness of practices of childbirth. She addressed questions of curation, and of the display of artworks that represent sensitive subject matter. She then presented a virtual tour of the Collection, highlighting and discussing a number of its key works.
The first artwork on the tour concerned the subject of baby loss. Bella Milroy’s Sharing the Gift From Elanor addressed the artist’s relationship with her older sister, who died shortly after birth. The work comprises a photograph taken on the hospital ward just after Elanor’s birth. Beneath this photograph is a reproduction of the same image, made by Milroy nearly thirty years later. The two images ask us to register the differences between them. The photograph captures those who were present to witness Elanor’s brief life, and provokes remembrance for those who were there. The reproduction emphasizes that Milroy’s access to the scene is secondary, and that she can only imagine rather than remember her sister.
Helen Knowles and Francesca Granato, ‘Conception’, 2008. Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Other pieces in the Collection that address baby loss acted as key reference points for our own project. Knowles’ work is represented in the Collection through the printed wallpaper, Conception. From a distance, the pattern looks like an art-nouveau design, but close up it becomes apparent that it depicts scientific details of the reproductive organs. The wallpaper was on display at the Whitworth Art Gallery’s exhibition Still Parents: Life After Baby Loss, which was showing when we worked on the project, and which both Kate and I visited. Every aspect of the exhibition, from curation to interpretation, had been informed by the project participants; namely, parents who had experienced the loss of a baby during pregnancy or just after birth.
Working with professional artists, the Still Parents project encouraged participants to explore their experiences through creativity. Memory boxes displayed around the walls contained intimate objects that were associated with the loss.
Photo Credit: Anne Whitehead
It was moving to see how these objects were transformed across different media. This pair of shoes was worked into clay and fired as decoration on a pot.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The shoes were etched onto paper.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
They were embroidered onto cloth.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
And they became part of a wallpaper pattern, combined with a little woolly hat from a different memory box.
Photo Credit: Anne Whitehead
Although our project worked with materials that were more indirectly associated with the loss, the transformation of those materials into ink, drawings, and the digital medium of film was based in the same process of enabling parents to explore their grief through creativity.
Marie Brett’s Anamnesis: The Amulet also forms part of the Birth Rites Collection. Developed in partnership with three Irish maternity hospitals, Brett’s project explored the amulet as an object that holds particular resonance in the context of pregnancy and infant loss. The exhibition displayed ten photographs of mementoes connected to lost infants, which were matched with audio clips of the parents speaking. The Collection holds the tables on which the photographs were displayed, the framed prints, and the CDs and headphone sets.
The words of the parents were very personal (see the pages from the exhibition catalogue, at the head of this post), yet Brett’s decision to place them in conversation with one another was suggestive of the power of objects in the context of grief. Many of the mementoes were kept in a safe space at home and brought out for private rituals of remembrance. In the Irish context, the public display of images of these objects challenged long-standing cultural taboos about infant death. I have written in previous posts about the cillini, clandestine burial sites across Ireland where babies’ bodies were buried in secrecy, often at night. The project’s sharing of stories offers parents the opportunities to talk about their children, and opens up a public conversation around their denied memories.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
As I type these words, I have on the desk in front of me the publicity flyer and catalogue for Brett’s exhibition, which were given to me by Judith Rankin when we first discussed collaborating on our project. Although we were not working in the cultural context of Ireland, the experience of losing a twin at birth still remains largely silent in the broader conversation around pregnancy and infant loss.
It was wonderful to learn from Helen about the Birth Rites Collection, as well as to encounter both new and familiar artworks that chimed with our project on baby loss.
Many thanks to Olivia Turner for organizing the workshop, and to the Newcastle University Institutes of Humanities and Arts Practice for supporting the event.
