Author: Anne

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April

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.

In my March post I noted the arrival of Spring, with the daffodils in flower under the trees that form the memorial garden at The Angel of the North. Although some of these daffodils are still blooming, I turn my attention for the month of April to the fern-like foliage of two other plants that grow on the Angel site, and that will come into flower in the summer months: yarrow (the feathery foliage of which is depicted above), and tansy (a serrated frond of which is shown below). Both of these plants thrive on disturbed ground, such as roadsides and waste land, so it is unsurprising that they are growing on the former pit site where The Angel stands. The more delicate yarrow, with its clusters of small white flowers from June to August, can be found in the field in front of The Angel. The compact golden buttons of the tansy can be seen there from July to October, and its flowers also line the path that leads up out of the trees towards The Angel.

In addition to thriving in the same kind of conditions, yarrow and tansy are also linked by having been used for medicinal purposes from the time of the ancient Greeks. This medicinal association is reflected in their names: yarrow’s Latin name, Achillea millefolium, connects it to the warrior Achilles, who was said to have applied the plant to the wounds of his bleeding soldiers; while tansy’s common name is derived from the ancient Greek word for immortality (Athanasia), because in Greek mythology Zeus gave the shepherd Ganymede a drink of tansy to make him immortal. Folk names for these plants also gesture to their healing properties. Yarrow is variously known as soldiers’ woundwort, staunch grass, blood wort, and herb militaris – names that reflect its historical (and military) use to stop bleeding. Tansy is also called bitter buttons, referring to its tartness when drunk as a tincture to ease digestive problems.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

In addition to staunching wounds, yarrow was also added to ointments, due to its soothing and anti-inflammatory properties. It was a popular infusion for colds, and it was known to lower blood pressure and to relieve indigestion. Tansy likewise had a range of uses, including the treatment of fevers and of sores. However, the plant can be toxic if too much is used, or if there is an existing allergy to it; BBC presenter Sue Perkins experienced tansy poisoning on the documentary Supersizers . . . Go Restoration, when she sampled an historical recipe in which the plant would have been used.

Because of its medicinal properties, yarrow became associated with good luck and protection, and it was pinned to cradles to guard newborn babies against harm. Tansy’s ability to repel insects meant that it was often placed in the coffin with the dead to help preserve and protect the corpse before burial. In Yorkshire, biscuits flavoured with tansy and caraway seeds were traditionally served at funerals.

The foliage of these plants is easily overlooked before they come into flower, but the distinctive fern-like fronds that are visible at this time of year act as reminders of these resilient plants, as well as having their own delicate beauty. The plants’ long association with healing, the dead, and protection gives them a particular resonance in the context of this project’s interest in the memorial garden that is located at the feet of The Angel, and it feels apt that they grow amid the grasses there, even if they largely pass unnoticed.

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Chimes

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

There are a few sounds that are particularly evocative for me of the memorial site at The Angel of the North: the rustling of the alder leaves overhead in the summer months, the steady background hum of traffic on the nearby A1 motorway, and the tinkling of wind chimes when they are caught by a gust of wind.

Over the several years that I have been visiting the memorial, I have photographed a number of different wind chimes that have been suspended from the branches of the trees. Some, as in the photograph above, have been comprised of several bells, while others are made up of a single bell. The placing of wind chimes at the memorial is unsurprising, given their traditional association with good luck and the summoning of benevolent spirits, as well as their conventional placing at the site of a shrine.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

When I visited The Angel last Friday, it was late afternoon and there was a high wind carrying occasional spatters of rain. There were only a few visitors and they did not venture down to the memorial site, which does not yet have its sheltering canopy of leaves. The strong winds had brought down even more branches since my last visit and the site felt raw and exposed with the late winter gale and darkening skies.

As I emerged from the memorial site up the little banked path that leads to The Angel, I caught the intermittent notes of a wind chime as it trembled in the wind. I headed along to one of the trees that edge the path leading west from The Angel to listen more closely to its strange music. As David wasn’t with me, I captured the sound by holding my mobile phone close to the chimes and pressing record.

Audio credit: Anne Whitehead

When I listened back to the recording, I could hear the tinny tinkling of the chimes, the gusts of wind, and the ever-present background noise of the traffic.

David’s recordings of The Angel with his contact microphones enable us to hear both the wind and the traffic resonating through its hollow structure. I have written in a previous post about the ways in which listening to these vibrations through his headphones shifts our perception of the sculpture, so that it is transformed momentarily into a vast musical instrument. If The Angel resonates with the wind that buffets its wings and vibrates down through its body, then the wind chimes in the trees form a high percussive complement to its deep notes.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Attending to the various sounds of the memorial site enables us to register the invisible but powerful presence at The Angel of the wind. Its destructive effects can currently be seen in the fallen branches and scattered tributes. But the wind can also be heard as it sets into motion the chimes that hang from the trees. With the help of David’s microphones, we can also capture the wind’s eerie booming and droning within the interior space of The Angel itself, as it forms a mighty echo chamber. The influence of the trees on the memorial site is evident, because it is visible. But if we attend to the auditory aspects of the site, we can encounter the vital agency of the wind, in its creative as well as its destructive aspects.

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Honouring its Telling

Film still, Where We Will Go (2023) by Kate Sweeney

I am delighted that a special issue of the journal Literature and Medicine on the representation of pain has just been published. Edited by Sara Wasson, the focus of the volume lies not in the claim that pain is unspeakable, but rather in its varied cultural legibility – the ways in which existing cultural contexts and expectations influence what can be heard of pain’s particular stories.

My own essay in the volume looks at two poetry collections by mothers who have lost their babies – Rebecca Goss’s Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s An Aviary of Small Birds (2014). Their experiences of loss are different: Goss lost her daughter, Ella, from an incurable heart condition at sixteen months, while McCarthy Woolf lost her son Otto at birth. In their haunting collections, both poets nevertheless adapt the form of the lyric elegy to express the pain of maternal grief. This form invites its readers to inhabit and linger in the singular moments that the poems commemorate, rather than reading towards a recovery. Both poets also address the ways in which cultural expectations of pregnancy and motherhood exacerbate the pain of grieving for a baby, because they make it difficult for the experience to be heard.

I wrote this essay as I was preparing to work with the parents who had experienced baby loss from a multiple pregnancy. As we talked with the parents in the workshop sessions, I could glimpse threads of connection between the work Kate was developing with them in the film and the poems I had been reading. The poets attend carefully to the shaping of the words on the page, and this found its echo in the parents’ drawings, using the inks that Kate had made. Their careful tracing out on paper of the names of their lost babies gave weight and form to their loss, making it tangible and constituting its own kind of poetry. The question of how to move forward from the loss also resonated across the poems and the film. The parents’ articulation of what it means to live as a family beside the lost twin echoed the closing poems of Goss’s collection, which explore how she shares with her second daughter the ongoing presence of her older sister, who died before she was born. The poets emphasise that the pain of losing a baby is heightened by the cultural illegibility of baby loss; for the parents, the complex grief of losing one twin while another survived rendered their experience particularly challenging to tell and to be heard.

Thanks to Sara for her commitment to the special issue on pain, and for her meticulous care in bringing the essays to publication. It’s been wonderful to be a part of this project.

You can read a version of the essay here.

References

Sara Wasson, ‘Pain’s Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honouring its Telling’, Literature and Medicine 41.2 (2023). The article can be accessed here.

Anne Whitehead, ‘”Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn”: Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss’, Literature and Medicine 41.2 (2023), pp. 372-90.

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Facing the Future

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Last week, I spoke on the phone to Alison Shindler about the Facing the Future Support Groups for those who have been bereaved by suicide. These online peer-support groups are run by the Samaritans, and Alison is a Facing the Future Facilitator and the Samaritans London Region Partnership Officer. We talked about the free support service that is available through Facing the Future for anyone who has been affected by suicide loss.

Alison began by explaining the origins of Facing the Future. The scheme started in 2011 and was prompted by the recognition that there was little specialist support available for those who had been bereaved by suicide. To address this gap, the central London branch of the Samaritans joined up with the Kensington and Chelsea branch of Cruse Bereavement Care to combine their expertise in suicide and bereavement counselling respectively. Face-to-face groups were set up, originally in London, and provision was then expanded to selected areas in the UK. Participants found the groups made a real difference to them in navigating their loss and helping them to feel less isolated.

Alison outlined that the support groups were moved online during the Covid-19 pandemic. Although this was originally in response to lockdown, it became evident that there was a value in continuing to meet online after the restrictions were lifted. It meant that those attending did not have to travel to the group (with the related costs in terms of time and expense) and it also helped participants to be in their own familiar space after the meeting had ended. The move online also meant that the support groups were available to anyone with access to the internet. In my book Relating Suicide, I reflected that suicide support is often focused in cities in the UK, and that an ongoing challenge is to build and sustain networks of care in rural, coastal, and island locations. The online network of support offered through the Facing the Future scheme is a good example of bereavement care rippling out from London to other areas of the UK, and then reaching beyond this to include more remote and isolated locations.

The support groups meet every week over a 6-week period. Groups are closed, to offer a safe space for participants in which trust can develop between the members. Each group has a facilitator but there is no agenda to the conversations, which are directed by the participants themselves. Facilitators are there to ensure that everyone has a chance to speak and to support anyone who becomes upset or distressed. In this way, the emphasis of the groups is firmly on peer support. I wrote in my book of the importance of lived experience to the understanding of suicide. Facing the Future offers a positive model of foregrounding the value of lived experience, in its central commitment to enabling those who have lost a loved one to suicide to offer support to one another.  

I was interested to hear from Alison that no one bereaved by the same loss participates in the same group, so that group members can speak freely and feel they have their own space. Unlike some other suicide bereavement support organisations, Facing the Future does not organise groups according to the relationship of the bereaved with the person lost; support groups are not made up solely of parents or of siblings, for example. Equally, participants in groups might have been bereaved a few months earlier or decades before. Alison explained that this broke down the assumption that a similar type of bereavement or time period since the death might give a greater connection with someone, when connection with others’ experiences can come from many different aspects of the experience. Equally, the mixed constitution of the groups enables participants to hear experiences that are different from their own, which might increase their understanding of how suicide loss is affecting those around them. For example, a parent could learn from a sibling in the group how the suicide of their son or daughter might affect surviving brothers and sisters. Having lost my sister to suicide, I would certainly have found it helpful to hear not only from other siblings but also from parents and friends about how they experienced their loss.

Alison and I ended the conversation by reflecting that most people are related to suicide in some way, if not directly through the loss of a family member, then perhaps indirectly through the experiences of a friend or a colleague. I mentioned that whoever I have talked to about my own experience has had their own relation to suicide to tell. Yet it is still a topic that is hard to speak about. The supported safe spaces that schemes such as Facing the Future offer are vital in this context, enabling members of the group to share their experiences of loss and to learn from the perspectives of others.

You can learn more about Facing the Future, including how to register interest in joining a group, here.

Many thanks to Alison for speaking with me about Facing the Future and for sharing the important work that the Samaritans are doing to support those bereaved by suicide.                       

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Suicide Cultures Seminar

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

On 18 May 2023, I was delighted to contribute to a seminar series hosted by the Suicide Cultures team at Edinburgh University. The paper I gave was based on the third chapter of my recent book, Relating Suicide. I countered the understanding of suicide as a solitary act by tracing how it ripples out through a diverse range of bodies, institutions, and objects. Conceiving of suicide as inherently relational, I thought about the ways that its dispersion connects lives which are otherwise unrelated. I also thought about the ways in which the act of suicide relates human and non-human lives and agencies.

In my paper, I focused on Orlando von Einsiedel’s 2018 documentary Evelyn. This beautifully made film charts von Einsiedel and his family as they start to talk about his younger brother, Evelyn’s, death by suicide a number of years earlier. Evelyn’s family and close friends share their memories of him, and talk about the effect his death has had on them, as they walk in places that Evelyn had loved. In this way, place and landscape forms an important element of the film, as does the act of walking itself. The family speak to other people who have lost loved ones to suicide, meaning that their walks also map Evelyn’s death in relation to other deaths that they learn of along the route.

The care that the family shows for each other ripples out to other people in an expansive gesture that is also evident in the screenings of the film at cinemas around the UK. Each of the screenings, which are timed as afternoon matinees, has a family member present for the post-show discussion and audience members can also choose to go on a local walk with others who have been affected by suicide. When I first saw the film screened at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, I was struck by the distance from which families had travelled to see the film and by the shared desire to share their experiences in the post-screening discussion. Borrowing the idea of ‘promiscuous care’ (The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 2020), I thought in the paper about the ways in which the film generates community and solidarity around suicide by harnessing the potential of the local, as well as pointing to the important role that networks of peer support can play in supporting those who have been affected by suicide loss.

Many thanks to Amy Chandler and the Suicide Cultures team for including me in their seminar series. The discussion after the talk raised important questions about the unsettling quality of the place where a loved one has died by suicide; how we define places as rural, urban, coastal, etc., in identifying them as sites of suicide; and the potential of creative responses to suicide for navigating the ongoing relation to the place where a loved one has died.

You can watch Evelyn on Netflix.

You can access a video of my talk here.

You can listen to the related podcast here.

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March

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.

In my posts for January and February, I observed that the plants growing at The Angel site were largely the sculptural grasses and seed heads from last year’s flowers. The site is exposed to the high winds of the winter storms and these plants have bent and bowed as successive storms have passed through. Low to the ground, they are less vulnerable to damage than the trees of the copse that forms the main memorial site. Some of the branches of the outer trees of the copse have blown down, and the memorial tributes hanging from them have been scattered by the winds across the ground nearby.

In the field surrounding The Angel, catkins are forming on the trees: an unmistakable sign that the season is turning. This Spring is warm but wet and the ground is muddy underfoot, especially on the path that runs through the trees. Visitors to The Angel linger to look at the tributes at the entrance to the copse, but do not often venture further in.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Those visitors who do walk through the copse are rewarded by the sight of clumps of daffodils growing under the trees. These are a cultivated variety of miniature daffodils and their location beneath the trees amid the memorial tributes suggests that they have been planted in a memorial capacity. Their yellow blooms glow against the muddy paths and represent a sign of hope in the aftermath of recent storms.

Visitors regularly leave floral tributes in the trees, tying them to the trunks with the florists’ wrapping still around them or placing them on the ground next to other memorial objects. Flowers will also sometimes be left at the feet of The Angel. This form of tribute echoes the act of leaving flowers at a grave, or the tying of flowers to benches or railings at other grassroots memorial sites. Sometimes the flowers at The Angel are accompanied by messages, while other tributes are left anonymously.

The daffodils planted in the trees at The Angel represent a different kind of gesture. Their annual flowering suggests that The Angel is seen as a more lasting or permanent memorial site that could be visited over a number of years. The flowers, interspersed in clumps throughout the trees and clustered at the centre of the copse, do not belong to any one person but speak, instead, of an anonymity-amid-the-collective that characterises many of the tributes left at the site.

The flowering of the daffodils speaks to the ephemerality of many of the tributes left at The Angel. Every time I visit the memorial it is different: objects have been laid down or removed, or sometimes they have changed position within the site. As this monthly series of cyanotype blog posts documents, the site also changes with the seasons. In March, the daffodils are briefly visible in the trees and become a prominent feature of the memorial site, although they would pass unnoticed at any other time of the year. In asking what The Angel represents for those who leave memorial tributes there, it is therefore also important to consider when it is being visited. The area in the trees feels very different according to the season, and even to the time of day. Documenting such a site accordingly necessitates a slow methodology that consists of repeated visits over an extended period of time. Only then is it possible to capture the ephemeral and fleeting aspects of the site, alongside its more stable and permanent features.

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Stones

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

I have written in previous posts about finding a pile of stones at the entrance to the trees at The Angel of the North and being unsure about whether they constituted a memorial tribute or not. I have also written about my own act of weaving thread around a stone picked up from the beach on Holy Island in Northumberland, and questioned whether I will return the stone to the beach. In this post, I reflect further on the tributes that are left in the trees at The Angel that take the form of stones.

Placing stones or pebbles as tributes is a common contemporary memorial practice. It is an act that is democratic and open to all, and it is not bound to any specific faith. At the same time, it has a long tradition in a variety of faith contexts, for example the placing of a stone when visiting a grave in the Jewish religion, or the accumulation of stones into a cairn in acts of Christian pilgrimage. In both examples, leaving stones represents an act of witness. In contemporary tributes, stones can be ritually brought from a particular place or they can be more spontaneously picked up and left as a token of remembrance, sometimes in response to visiting a memorial site. Stones might be unmarked, representing the memory of someone known only to the visitor, or they can be inscribed with messages and images in a memorial practice that is readily accessible to everyone, including children.

The act of leaving stones at The Angel is one memorial practice amongst others and, whilst these tributes form part of a collective vernacular practice at the site, they are left as individual acts of remembrance rather than being placed together to form a memorial pile or cairn. The stones will often be inscribed or painted and are placed at the foot of a tree beside other commemorative tributes, either to the same person or to different individuals. The stone will typically be painted or inscribed with pictures or the name of the person who is being remembered, and/or significant dates. In the photograph above, the visitor has inscribed a name and dates, but these have faded so that they are no longer legible, while the four painted butterflies that flutter across the stone remain visible and express a more personal meaning and significance.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

More recent tributes left at the site have taken the form of paintings on slate plaques that are suspended from the branches of the trees. The slate is cut into the shape of a heart or other memorial tribute, and is personalised by painting images or words on its surface. The slate tributes that have been left at The Angel take the form of messages addressed to the deceased, and speak of the visitor’s continuing bond with them. Memorial slate plaques often appear in cemeteries and at graves as well as in more spontaneous or grassroots memorial sites such as The Angel. They can be left in remembrance of parents, children, siblings, grandparents, partners, friends or pets.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Some of the tributes at The Angel have been carved or incised with a message that speaks of the person’s relationship with the deceased and expresses their feelings about them. These memorials are planned rather than spontaneous offerings, and the messages have more permanence than the painted pictures and words. Again, these tributes are also left at more traditional memorial sites as well as at grassroots or spontaneous memorials.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

 Some of the stones left at The Angel are unmarked and represent a private act of witness and remembrance. Their placing in the trees and beside other tributes identifies them as commemorative objects. These might be individual stones or pebbles, or they might be placed as a group, either to commemorate different members of a family or as tributes to a single person from a few visitors. One poignant tribute at The Angel took the form of a heart-shaped stone broken into two, with other pebbles arranged around and between the halves, expressive that grief has the power to shatter even such a durable material as stone.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Stones can form part of a commemorative ensemble, significant not only in themselves but also in their relation to other objects. An area of stones can demarcate the boundaries of a commemorative ‘plot’ beneath a tree onto which tributes are placed, echoing the spatial arrangements of a cemetery. This formalisation of the memorial site at The Angel has been increasingly visible as it has evolved over time. Stones can also be used as a prop or support for other objects, such as the tiny figure of an angel that has been placed on a painted stone amongst other tributes at the base of an alder tree in the copse.

In an article on the stones placed at the Witness Cairn on the Isle of Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, Avril Maddrell has described these tributes as ‘individualised micro-memorials’ (p. 675). Maddrell is interested in the ways in which such acts of commemoration blur the boundaries between bereavement practices and expressions of belief manifest in particular places, suggesting a continuum of belief-unbelief in contemporary Britain. This complex intersection of grief and belief has relevance to The Angel site, and I have indicated that some of the stone tributes are continuous with more conventional and faith-based sites and practices of grief.

 I also find Maddrell’s term of’ individualised micro memorial’ suggestive in the context of The Angel site for its registration of questions of scale. Gormley designed The Angel of the North as what we might term a collective macro memorial, both in the sense of its size and dominance in the landscape, and in its response to the experience of deindustrialisation and the end of the mining industry in the northeast. The memorial site that has grown up in its shadow speaks of the sculpture’s power to inspire individual acts of micro memorialisation, which in turn build on the site’s creation as a place of memory and of transformation.

In a recent conversation, David and I were talking about Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’, a sculptural installation of one hundred cast-iron men on the sands at Crosby near Liverpool. We were thinking in particular about the micro organisms such as barnacles that have attached themselves to the sculptures, which are continuously covered by the tides, and that have become an important part of the fabric of the sculpture. David suggested that the tributes which are left as micro-memorials at The Angel could be seen in an analogous way, as practices and objects that have arisen around and in response to the Angel sculpture, and that now form a vibrant and integral part of its fabric and meaning.  

References

Avril Maddrell, ‘A place for grief and belief: the Witness Cairn, Isle of Whithorn, Galloway, Scotland’, Social and Cultural Geography 10.6 (2009), pp. 675-93.     

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Speak Their Name

Yesterday, I went to see the North East Speak Their Name Suicide Memorial Quilt, which is currently being exhibited at Newcastle Cathedral. The Speak Their Name movement originated in Manchester and the first memorial quilt was made during the pandemic. The North East project was led by Tracey Beadle of the charity Quinn’s Retreat and Suzanne Howes, both of whom have lost children to suicide.

The quilt is made up of three panels with 120 squares in total. Working with suicide bereavement groups across Tyne and Wear, Teesside and County Durham, the project provided a supportive community for those bereaved by suicide to remember their loved ones by making their own square. Looking at the panels, it was evident how much care had gone into the design and making of each square, and they spoke powerfully to the lasting impact of suicide loss.

Some of the squares used photographs of loved ones to make portraits of them as they are remembered now. Kelly’s aunt used a photograph of her niece to create a cyanotype on the fabric, capturing the lovely young woman that she was.

Dyllon’s mother used a photograph of her son that was on his laptop and that he himself had drawn. Tracing over the image, she sewed in details to celebrate her son’s artistic nature and love of Goth.

Other squares focused on the person’s passions. Paul was remembered by his aunt through a nurse’s uniform and stethoscope, representing his ambition to be a nurse and his commitment to his studies through a life-threatening illness. The square also celebrates the qualities of compassion and care that drew Paul to nursing as a profession, and that characterised him as a person.

Samuel’s brother shared his passion for football and they often went to see Crystal Palace together. He used the shirt that his brother wore to the games to make his square, and sewed onto it his name and the age he was when he died. Samuel had worn the shirt to the FA Cup Final in 2018.

A number of the squares had quotations embroidered onto them. Graham’s son wrote onto his square the words of a song that his Dad used to sing to him every evening when he went to bed.

Mark’s son remembered the Moomins book that his Dad had given him, and which became a firm favourite. He embroidered onto his square an image and a quote from the book.

Naomi’s best friend turned to the poetry she has read as a source of comfort and connection since her death, and her chosen quotation from Emily Dickinson was a poem that she felt Naomi would have loved.

Graham’s daughter-in-law also looked to where she had found comfort and solace since his death. Her square represents Lochranza Castle on the Isle of Arran, where she and her husband had felt a strong connection with Graham through the beauty of nature. Sand gathered from Lochranza beach has been attached to the square to form the shape of Arran, together with a magpie to represent Graham’s love of Newcastle United.

These are only a few of the squares sewn into the panels; each of them gives a vivid and intimate portrait of a person who is loved and who was lost to suicide. The inscribing of the names speaks a loss that is socially difficult to communicate and often silenced. The squares also speak eloquently of creativity and community, balancing grief with hope.

The quilt will be on display in Newcastle Cathedral until 27 March 2024.

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February

cyanotype of seedhead
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.

On a visit to Dundee, I discovered the work of cyanotype artist Alexander Hamilton. After studying the process at Edinburgh College of Art, Hamilton chose cyanotype as an art form that enabled him to explore and interpret nature. I came across his work in the form of a piece of public art, ‘Seed Chamber‘, which stands tall outside the Dundee Science Centre. Although the installation has faded in colour, it is still possible to appreciate the design of delicate seedheads that float up the panels, as if blown skyward by the wind. The tall glass sculpture was originally illuminated from within, to symbolise the importance of light in the life cycle of plants, and it also references the process of making the cyanotype, with the image exposed by placing the chemically treated paper in sunlight. I found a book dedicated to Hamilton’s work in the bookshop of the nearby Victoria and Albert Museum, and I bought it in order to learn more about this important practitioner of cyanotype.

In Search of the Blue Flower is named after one of Hamilton’s own projects, the title of which references the Celtic folk tradition of an elusive blue flower, symbol of the endless pursuit of something that lies always just beyond reach. In her ‘Introduction’ to the volume, Sara Stevenson highlights Hamilton’s making of the cyanotype not merely as a means of documenting a specimen, but as a complex interaction with the plant and its environment:

The plant is laid on the paper which will capture an image of its delicate complexity; at the same time, sap and colouring may leach into the paper and interact with the chemistry. The erratic sun in Scotland defines the image – a silhouette combining shadow with transparency, drifting round the edges, and even showing us inside the plant. The chemical reaction follows the light, and the atmosphere – dry or damp. This is not simply what we might see of the plant but a response to its nature. (p. 7)

Hamilton’s cyanotypes further emphasise the plant’s unique ecology by using fresh water drawn from a nearby natural source to develop the image. (The paper is immersed in water to wash away the chemicals, and the contact causes a chemical reaction which turns the paper deep blue.)

Hamilton contributes an essay to the book, recollecting his first extensive experimentation with cyanotype on the Scottish island of Stroma in 1973. This island in the Pentland Firth had been uninhabited since 1962, and Hamilton offered to conduct a survey of the plants on Stroma for the Edinburgh Botanic Garden. He stayed on the island for a year, and making cyanotypes was combined with the daily tasks of obtaining food, firewood, and fresh water. Hamilton writes of his survey of the plants on the island:

We divided a map of Stroma into quadrants and explored the island systematically, documenting plants and mosses. The island was small and flat, but it was extraordinarily varied and visually stunning. The plants on the island would vary from vast areas of blue flowers, with other patches showing swathes of red flowers. (p. 17)

The experience of being fully immersed in the landscape gave Hamilton a deep engagement with, and knowledge of, the plants’ environment and this laid the basis for all his subsequent work.

In 2007, Hamilton completed a residency at Brantwood, the former home of John Ruskin in the Lake District. He lived in Ruskin’s house, and the library and gardens were available to him every day. Hamilton focused on Ruskin’s eleven-year study Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers (1875-1886); here, Ruskin shares Hamilton’s commitment to an understanding of the humble wayside plant. Ruskin was also profoundly drawn to the colour blue; like Hamilton, he saw an intense blue, such as that of the cyanotype, as a sign of the spirituality that can be generated by a close relationship to nature.

cyanotype of grasses
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

My own practice of developing cyanotypes at The Angel of the North also extends over the course of a year, capturing the plants that grow on the site across the different seasons. The uneven blue of my February cyanotypes witnesses the fluctuating light of the winter months, and the grasses leave their own residues of moisture and seeds on the paper, the traces of which are visible in the developed print. I used rainwater collected in my own garden to develop the image.

Unlike Hamilton, I did not approach the task of recording the plants at The Angel by systematically dividing the site into segments. My intention was not to produce a scientific survey, but rather to create an aesthetic record of the plants that grow on the memorial site. The creation of the cyanotypes represented a commitment to attend carefully to the flora and fauna of The Angel. As in January, the plants that I encountered in February were predominantly grasses and dried seedheads. The cyanotype celebrates the elegance and sculptural beauty of these commonplace and humble plants .

Hamilton’s tribute to the unattainable blue flower resonates with the broader context of this project. By leaving everyday ritual objects in the trees at The Angel of the North, visitors invest the site with spiritual significance. The process of making the cyanotype likewise transforms the ordinary into the intangible, and signals the quest for a connection with that which lies just beyond our senses.

References

Alexander Hamilton, ‘Stroma’, In Search of the Blue Flower: Alexander Hamilton and the Art of Cyanotype (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 17-19.

Sara Stevenson, ‘Introduction’, In Search of the Blue Flower: Alexander Hamilton and the Art of Cyanotype (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), p. 7.

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Lamesley

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

I wrote in my last post about the mining explosion of 1757 that killed 16 men at the Ravensworth Ann Pit, which formerly occupied the site where The Angel of the North now stands. All 16 of the men were buried in the churchyard of St Andrews’ Church in Lamesley on 12 June 1757, and this weekend I walked to the village to see if there was any surviving trace of the burials.

The Angel of the North is in the parish of Lamesley and its silhouette was clearly visible behind the church, as I looked across from Lamesley Pastures. The Pastures are an area of farmland that has remained undisturbed by mining and that is now being managed by the Durham Wildlife Trust as a winter water meadow, using medieval methods of flooding the fields in winter to provide a habitat for wading birds such as curlew, lapwing, redshank, and snipe. Exmoor ponies grazed in the surrounding fields, which helps wildflowers to thrive.

The village also houses the ruins of Ravensworth Castle, former seat of the Liddell family. Barons of Newcastle, the Liddells occupied the estate for over 300 years, much of their fortune coming from coal mining on the land. Walking round the churchyard, I found tombs and gravestones dedicated to various members of the Liddell family. Although not buried in Lamesley, Alice Liddell, the model for Alice in Wonderland, was a relative of the Liddells of Ravensworth and the village pub, The Ravensworth Arms, is where Lewis Carroll is reputed to have written parts of the book.

Although I searched carefully among the graves, I could find no memorial to the mining accident of 1757, and neither did I see any individual graves for the men listed on the Durham Mining Museum website. It could be that, unlike the Liddells, the miners’ families could not afford to mark the burial site, or the stones might either have disappeared over the years or weathered to make the writing illegible. There was one communal grave in the cemetery, now planted with wildflowers, which marked an outbreak of cholera in 1848-9 that claimed the lives of 120 people in the neighbouring village of Wrekenton. In his paper, ‘On the Mode of Communication of Cholera’ (1855), Dr John Snow reported that the disease was particularly virulent among the mining communities. He wrote as follows:

The mining population of Great Britain have suffered more from cholera than persons in any other occupation; a circumstance which I believe can only be explained by the mode of communication of the malady. Pitmen are differently situated from every other class of workmen in many important particulars. There are no privies in the coal pits, or as I believe in other mines, the workmen stay so long in the mines that they are obliged to take a supply of food with them, which they eat invariably with unwashed hands and without a knife and fork.

Snow also reported that, once contracted, cholera spread among the mining community faster than in any other occupation, due to the working conditions underground.

Even though I could find no trace of the miners killed in the explosion, other headstones in the churchyard commemorated individual miners whose lives were lost in the surrounding collieries. William and Mary Richards of Ravensworth lost one son, William, aged 28, in 1841, when he was working at the Stoddart Pit of Marley Hill Colliery. A second son, George, died in 1845 after an accident in the same colliery that broke his back when he was coming up the shaft. Although George survived the initial impact, he died six weeks after the injury.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

A second headstone also commemorates two lives lost from the same family, although the exact relation between the men is not clear. George Steel died at Newbottle Colliery in 1821, aged 28, and Charles Steel died at Springwell Colliery in 1840, aged 55.

Walking through the graveyard in Lamesley gave me a different perspective on The Angel. Not only was I seeing the sculpture itself from an unaccustomed viewpoint, but reading it in relation to the gravestones in the cemetery offered a new sense of it as a memorial to the coal industry. Coal mining employed many men across the region, and it also generated substantial profits. The Liddells as landowners had mined coal on their estate since the early seventeenth century, and their profits enabled them to demolish the original castle in 1808 and to commission the foremost architect of the day, John Nash, to build a grand house for them in the Gothic Revival style. How do the ruins of Ravensworth Castle relate to The Angel that now rises on the hill above them? How, too, do we position The Angel in relation to the largely agricultural landscape of Lamesley? Lamesley Pastures reminded me that farming also takes place in the shadow of The Angel, and that it is important to consider the diversity of employment in the surrounding area, both historically and in the present. Does The Angel risk projecting a monolithic history of the North, based in the decline of heavy industry, and occluding alternative stories and identities?

References

Northumberland Archives, ‘The 1848-9 Cholera Visitation’, 16 May 2017, https://www.northumberlandarchives.com/2017/05/16/the-1848-9-cholera-visitation