July 2024 – Anne Whitehead

6 July 20246 July 2024

Summer

Sounding the Angel can now be accessed in full here. In a series of four blog posts, I introduce each of the four sections of the sound work. Today’s post discusses the final part of the work, ‘Summer’. You can listen to this section here. This section of the sound work invites the participants to reflect on the memorial site and the act of leaving memorial tributes there. It is more expansive in tone than previous sections, as the participants describe their changing responses.

Our first participant asks what constitutes litter. In one sense, he suggests, what is at the memorial in the trees can be seen as litter – it is material that has been left behind – but at the same time it is clearly meaningful and precious to those who have placed it there. He sees an irresolvable contradiction between his work as a volunteer litter picker and his scattering of his wife’s ashes at The Angel – although one that is mitigated to some degree by the rapid dispersal of the tribute in the wind. Nevertheless, a tension remains for him between a memorial act that he can now ‘understand’ but of which he does not fully ‘approve’, commenting: ‘That’s the difficult part. I see it from all sides now. But I still don’t have a nice, neat answer from either side.’

For our second participant, too, there was a troubling aspect to leaving memorial tributes in the trees, and she turns to the ecological debates that have arisen around the clootie tree sites as her reference point. For a time, she explains, she was ‘a bit grumpy’ about the plastics and other non-biodegradable materials that people were leaving at the site. However, she reflected that it was not her place to judge others’ acts of commemoration, saying: ‘It’s so personal and whatever that little thing is, a little card or a plastic angel, or whatever they want to have there, it’s theirs to hang or leave. I used to mind terribly but now I don’t mind at all’. For both participants, leaving their own memorial tributes brings greater understanding of, and empathy for, what it means to others to do so.

The sound piece closes with the participants evoking the memorial site in sensory terms. Speaking of the positive effect of The Angel on the perception of public art, our first participant described a memorial that had been put up in his village to commemorate the mining industry. Designed in the shape of a miner’s lamp and illuminated by solar panels, the memorial signified that out of darkness came light. The theme of light is echoed by our second participant’s description of those trees that have lights strung around them, to shine out through the dark. She also evokes the sounds of the memorial – the wind chimes, the rustling of the cellophane that wraps the flowers. Her final description is of what she hears when she sits in the grass at The Angel, a combination of the noise of the traffic and the sounds of nature: ‘if you zone out a little bit you can hear the trees and then you hear the cars and it almost becomes one noise. So, it doesn’t become the mechanical noise from the car and then the natural noise from the trees, it’s just sort of a white noise in the end.’

Our conversations with the participants were reflective about the ecological questions that are posed by the site, while understanding the emotional weight that it holds for those who leave memorial tributes there, Feelings about the memorial were fluid and fluctuating. Both participants were attentive to the sensory qualities of the site, and there was an association for them both with a light shining out of the darkness as a beacon of hope.

This section of the sound work integrates the recordings from our last field recording session at The Angel. You can hear the rustling of leaves and grasses, a bird calling from the treetops in the memorial site, and the airier tone of the vibrations moving through The Angel that was recorded by the geophone.

5 July 20245 July 2024

Spring

Sounding the Angel can now be accessed in full here. In a series of four blog posts, I introduce each of the four sections of the sound work. Today’s post discusses the third part of the work, ‘Spring’. You can listen to this section here. In this instalment, I focus on the participants’ experience of returning to The Angel after they had placed the memorial tribute there. I ask: What is the ongoing relation to the place?

Our first participant returned to The Angel one or two weeks later, to see what – if anything – remained of the tribute. On this occasion, the weather was fine and the site was busy, with bus trips and a group of people in the memorial garden. He had chosen the same time of the week to go back, and the man who had been there on the first occasion was out walking his dog again. As our participant expected, there was no trace left of his memorial tribute, and he took a photograph of the place where it had been. He found comfort in the knowledge that his wife would have approved, as well as in the idea of The Angel becoming her guardian.

Our second participant returned to the site with her mother and brother, and they hung tributes in the tree together. Whenever she speaks to her mother of visiting the tree, her mother always asks what is left from when they visited last. After her friend died of cancer, our participant commemorated her alongside her brother, as they had shared the same birthday. Her more recent tributes were not ribbons but flowers, in the colours of football teams where appropriate, because they ‘just . . . go back into the earth’. She has also left a five-pointed willow star, and five little brass bells, because five is a number with particular familial significance. The participant’s ritual at The Angel has changed over time, so that she now takes a little picnic and the playlist that she compiled for her friend when she was sick. On each visit, she takes photographs of the tree and shares them with her family and friends, reflecting that it is particularly important to her that those who live so far away know that her loved ones are still important to her. She has pinned the tree in her maps, and she describes it as having many lines of connection that radiate out across the world.

While our first participant saw the tribute as a singular event and our second participant described it as an evolving ritual, for both of them the act of returning to – and photographing – the site was both important and meaningful. The act was seen to be significant in terms of the approval of others – whether of the deceased, or of family members far away. The timing of the return to the memorial was also carefully considered, whether this was in terms of the time of the week or for the commemoration of a birthday.

This section of the sound piece incorporates birdsong from the trees at the memorial site. The field recordings are more lively and vibrant than in the winter months, with the chatter of visitors and the sounds of children playing audible alongside the traffic and the vibrations resonating through The Angel.

4 July 20244 July 2024

Winter

Sounding the Angel can now be accessed in full here. In a series of four blog posts, I introduce each of the four sections of the sound work. Today’s post discusses the second part of the work, ‘Winter’. You can listen to this section here.

This is the second of four posts that share the sound work, ‘Sounding the Angel’. My last post, ‘Autumn‘, focused on the participants’ relation to the Angel of the North, asking why they had come to leave a memorial tribute at the site. This post reflects on the second part of the sound piece, ‘Winter’, which focuses on the act of leaving the memorial tribute.

Our first participant explained that he was scattering ash in memory of his wife at different locations that had been of significance to her. One of the intended sites had been Sycamore Gap, on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, but the famous sycamore tree that was growing there had recently been chopped down. He was on his way to the National Arboretum of Scotland, to commemorate her amid the giant redwoods that she loved, when a rainstorm came on, so he stopped at The Angel instead. Even in the pouring rain, there was a man out walking his dog , and our participant reflected on the companionship offered by The Angel site – not only from the sculpture itself, but also from the visitors who are always there, and other memorial tributes that have been left in the trees. No other people were involved in the ritual, which was described as ‘a strictly intimate affair’ .

Our second participant also spoke of going to The Angel alone, to leave the tribute to her brother. Having come across clootie wells in Scotland, and the pieces of coloured cloth tied to the trees, she took the Christmas present ribbons and tied them to a tree in the copse, with the intention of adding to them on every visit, so that the tree would eventually look as if it was blossoming with new flowers. When she returned to the site, she found that some of the ribbons had gone, and also that the site was more crowded with tributes from other people. She found a different tree, on the perimeter of the memorial site, so that she could leave her tributes there, but this too was soon also in the middle of the expanding memorial. Where our first participant found comfort in the presence of the other tributes, our second participant preferred to be a little bit away from the main memorial garden. This inclination can also be seen in others when walking around the site, with some memorial tributes placed in trees that are a little distance away from the copse.

A resonance emerged between the two conversations as our participants reflected on what they had left. Speaking of the ash that formed the memorial tribute to his wife, our first participant reflected that ‘it would easily be blown away, or swept away, to be with the ghosts of the mineworkers that toiled below’. Likewise, our second participant found an unexpected comfort in her ribbons blowing away, observing: ‘wherever those ribbons are, [my brother] is there as well, and the love that we have for him and how we miss him and everything, those new places now know about [him]. I like the way mine has worked out, with the ribbons flying all over the country’. Both participants found solace in the wind’s dispersal of their tributes, seeing this as offering a connection to something larger – whether the mining community of the past, or different, unknown places, that had now become points of connection to the loss.

The impetus that led both participants to leave a tribute at The Angel was practical in nature. The first participant addressed the question of where to scatter his wife’s ashes, while the second participant faced the problem of how to grieve for her brother when there was no obvious place for her to go. The memorial site at The Angel is thereby connected to contemporary shifts in memorial practice, with a move away from the traditional cemetery plot, and with many mourners now located far away from the places that are associated with their dead. Following the coverage of this project in The Guardian, a number of people contacted me to suggest a connection between the memorial site and the tradition of rag or clootie trees. Here, one of our participants speaks of being inspired by Scottish clootie wells, and of consciously trying to recreate them at The Angel site. In my previous post, I reflected on whether the adaptation of the clootie tradition to the act of mourning might tend towards the use of more lasting or permanent fibres in the ribbon or cloth, but our participant finds comfort in the ephemerality of her tribute, as well as in the act of tying the ribbons itself.

In this section of the sound piece, you can hear recordings that David made with his contact microphones during Storm Babet. The heavy rain dropping onto the metal resonates through the structure, accompanying our first participant’s story of leaving the tribute for his wife at The Angel in the pouring rain, and suggestive both of the season and of tears.

3 July 20244 July 2024

Autumn

Sounding the Angel can now be accessed in full here. In a series of four blog posts, I introduce each of the four sections of the sound work. Today’s post discusses the first part of the work, ‘Autumn’. You can listen to this section here.

Today’s post introduces the first section of our sound piece, ‘Sounding the Angel’. The work has been divided into four sections, reflecting the project’s movement through the year from autumn 2023 through to summer 2024. For each of the seasons, you can hear samples from the field recordings that David made on site at that time of the year. In this section, you can hear passing traffic, recordings of the vibrations passing through The Angel, and samples from an autumn dawn chorus from the trees. ‘Autumn’ captures the participants’ previous associations with the site, and what The Angel means to them.

The two participants have very different relationships with The Angel of the North. Our first participant, who commemorated his wife by scattering some of her ashes at The Angel, described how the sculpture had threaded through their lives together. He describes his wife as ‘a Gateshead lass born and bred’, and speaks of her as an ardent defender of the sculpture when it was first proposed. The couple met and courted when they worked at a factory in the Team Valley – a site which now lies in the shadow of The Angel. After their marriage, he and his wife were both active in supporting the mineworkers during the strikes in the 1980s, he as a trade union organiser and she as a treasurer. At his wife’s funeral, the colliery band made a special recorded performance of her favourite tune, and her extensive collection of signature scarves was given away to people attending the funeral, with two of them then being tied to the top of local banner at the next Miners’ Gala Day procession.

Our second participant is South African, and she recalls vividly her first sight of The Angel, travelling north with her husband from Reading, where they were then living, to visit his family. Looking up from the road map, it seemed to her that The Angel filled the whole front screen of the car, and she describes the event as a ‘special moment’. Such was the impact of The Angel on her that our participant took her parents to see it when they visited from South Africa, and the sculpture had the same effect on them – especially her father, who was energised as he went up the hill towards it. It was on a separate occasion that the participant first registered the memorial site in the trees. Her friend was visiting and she spotted the memorials in the trees. When the participant’s brother died later that same year, she had no grave to visit and no places nearby that they had visited together. Her thoughts then returned to the memorial site. Her friend was later diagnosed with cancer, and The Angel became associated with her, too, because they had visited together. The memorial site helped the participant to feel connected to her friend and her brother after their deaths.

Even though the stories are very different in terms of the participants’ connection to The Angel, notable similarities emerged. For both participants, The Angel is comforting because it is constantly visible – on the news, on postcards, on stickers, and even on the inside pages of a passport. The second participant remarks that, even in South Africa, her parents see The Angel sometimes on TV or on a picture. The participants both also speak of their fondness for The Angel, which is associated with particular parts of the sculpture. The first participant remembers his wife always commenting on the shapeliness of The Angel’s bum and calves whenever she passed. The second participant speaks of the family nickname for The Angel – the ‘rusty bird’ – and of her love for The Angel’s wings.

The most striking resonance across the stories lies in the participants ‘ connection with the mining history of the site. I have already outlined the deep personal history that links the first participant, and his wife, to mineworking in the local area. Accounting for why her father was so energised by the site, the second participant explains that he used to work in the gold mines in South Africa. The sculpture was meaningful to him because it was built over a mine, and he spoke about the foundations of the sculpture extending deep underground. He observed to his daughter that ‘there must be people who died in the mines’, and that ‘The Angel is a memorial over them too’.

It is clear from our two conversations that The Angel has multiple layers of personal significance for both project participants, and that its associations also extend to the people memorialised. The iconic nature of The Angel means that there are constant reminders of the site in everyday life. The Angel’s presence as a memorial to mining and mineworkers is significant for both participants, both of whom have family connections to the mining industry.