Author: Anne

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Ravensworth Ann Pit

sculpture of miner
Ray Lonsdale, ‘Marra’, Horden Village, 2015. Photo credit: Angie Scott.

In my previous post, I wrote about the explosion of 1757 that killed 16 men at the Ravensworth Ann Pit, the mine on which The Angel of the North stands. Fifteen men were killed by the blast, and one died later. A partial list of the who died is on the Durham Mining Museum’s website, alongside the details of a further 64 men who died as a result of accidents while working at the mine. Before 1850 there was no legal requirement to record fatal colliery accidents; while the Durham Mining Museum commemorates 20,900 on-site deaths at collieries in County Durham and Northumberland, the number of men and boys who died will therefore be much greater. This figure also does not include those men who died from mining-related illnesses such as emphysema and pneumoconiosis, or those who died in the days or months after being injured.

In his history of Birtley, Robert Hull documents that in 1741 George Humble of Birtley had opened a pit known as Birtley Colliery. Prior to this, the Bishop of Durham, George Winship, had leased the Birtley land to a series of tenants for coal mining and routes had been put in place to transport coal to the River Tyne, probably leading to the staiths at Felling. In 1731, there had been a dispute over working conditions, described as a ‘mutinous revolt’, but very little is known about this incident. Hull records a description of the Birtley mine in 1750, just a few years before the explosion nearby:

There were two pits visible and one covered by Humble’s Waggonway besides the Stappel pit which Humble spoke to where there was a vacuum at about 5 fathoms. Winship had a pit at Stappel, waste heaps prove this. By the widths of the shafts opened there must have been house ginns for no Jack Roll (a wooden windlass turned by hand) could draw the water at so wide a pit and he has no doubt that the Waggonway pit will be found in the Winship’s working pit. (p. 23)

Below, I list some of the miners who died in the mine explosion of 1757, using the information that is available on the Mining Museum webpage for the colliery. Even though this event has long passed out of living memory, it is fitting on a blog that is dedicated to the Angel of the North site as a memorial to commemorate the names that have been passed down. Although no women are named, it is hard not to imagine the impact on their lives in reading the names of those killed by the explosion, which in some cases claimed two generations of the same family.

The names of those miners who died from individual accidents at the Ravensworth Ann Pit can be found on the Durham Mining Museum webpage listed in the references below.

In Memoriam:

John Brown, address: Penny Fine. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

John Brown, son of John Brown, address: Penny Fine. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Ralph Brown, son of John Brown, address: Penny Fine. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

John Carr, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

John Cole, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Paul Gardiner, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Paul Gardiner, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

William Gardiner, address: Ravensworth. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Thomas Garfott, son of William Garfott, address: Kibblesworth. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

William Garfott, address: Kibblesworth. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

William Hewson, address: Street Gate. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

William Hewson, son of William Hewson, address: Street Gate. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

Matthew Morrowley, address: Kibblesworth. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

James Richardson, address: Cox Close. Buried: St Andrew’s Churchyard, Lamesley, on 12 June 1757.

A series of serious explosions in the coal mines of the north east led the Rector of Bishopwearmouth to search for a safer way of lighting coalmines than the open candles that miners routinely carried underground. Almost sixty years after the explosion at the Ravensworth Ann Pit, Humphrey Davy was commissioned to work intensively on the problem. After two months in the laboratories of the Royal Institution, Davy made the first prototypes of the miners’ safety lamp in 1815. In January 1816, the lamp was successfully tested at Hebburn Colliery and it was immediately put into production. The lamp significantly reduced deaths by explosion in the mines, but it also enabled mining at greater depths, which meant that coal mining remained a very dangerous occupation.

References

Durham Mining Museum, ‘Ravensworth Ann Colliery’, https://www.dmm.org/colliery/-003.htm

Robert Hull, Birtley: The Growth of an Industrial Community in the Nineteenth Century, with a foreword by Antony Gormley (Tudhoe, County Durham: Durham County Local History Society, 2023).

Royal Institution, ‘Humphry Davy’s miners’ safety lamp’, https://www.rigb.org/explore-science/explore/collection/humphrey-davys-miners-safety-lamp

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Easington Colliery

Reconstructed pit cage at Easington Colliery
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

When I first spoke to David about the Sounding the Angel project, he told me about a recording he had recently made at Easington Colliery in County Durham. He had been recording the wildlife in the ponds with underwater microphones, and had walked up to the reconstructed pit cage nearby, which marks where the miners would have descended into the mine for their underground shift. Using his contact microphones, David tested to see what noise this large metal structure might make. The sound that he heard through his headphones is similar to the vibrations that reverberate through the hollow form of The Angel, and David integrated them into the larger sound piece that he was making. You can hear ‘There Is Power In These Titans Yet’, David’s recording of the pit cage memorial, here.

Listening to David’s piece through headphones, the deep rumblings, surgings and flexings caused by the structure’s amplification of the wind are similar to the sounds that the contact microphones pick up at The Angel. David’s evocative title invites us to read the piece as a sonic statement of the energies and potential that still reside in former mining areas. As with his recordings of the aquatic life in ponds, David’s sounding of the pit cage shows us that community extends beyond the human, and his work gives us insights into a larger ecology that mostly goes unwitnessed. The recordings make visible that which lies below the surface, whether that is the unseen wildlife under the water, or sounds that travel through the earth. Each of these elements of David’s work resonate with the Sounding the Angel project, given the siting of Antony Gormley’s sculpture on the former pithead baths of Ravensworth Ann Colliery, also known as the Ann Pit.

Last weekend, I visited Easington Colliery to gain a better sense of the inter-relationship between the reconstructed pit cage and The Angel. To what extent can one be transposed onto another, and what distinguishes them apart? Approaching the pit cage from a pathway that leads from the road, way markers give visitors key facts about the history of the mine. Although the pit cage now stands in isolation, an extensive mine works had once surrounded it. The sculpture is only fully visible after climbing to the crest of the hill, framing a view of the sea beyond. From beneath the pit cage, I looked out over extensive views north to the Sunderland coastline, and south to Teesside. Although there were some other visitors, the sculpture did not have the same constant flow of people as The Angel.

Metal pit cage with backdrop of the sea
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

The most significant difference from The Angel became apparent when I followed a muddy track past a children’s playground to the Easington Colliery Disaster Memorial. Here, a horizontal pithead wheel is enclosed in a circular wooden cage, and the spaces between the spokes of the wheel have been filled with coal. The memorial commemorates a significant mining accident that took place on 29 May 1951, when an explosion in the mine resulted in the deaths of 83 men, two of whom were rescue workers. The death toll was so high because the explosion occurred at the change of shift, which renders the pit cage memorial even more poignant. The ornamental metalwork that surrounds the Disaster Memorial inscribes the year of the explosion and the total number of men that were lost.

Metal flowers with inscribed plaque
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

I have previously differentiated the grassroots memorial in the trees from roadside memorials, noting that the memorial at The Angel does not mark the site of a death. Comparison with the memorials at Easington Colliery offers a sharpened perspective on this statement. Paired with the Disaster Memorial nearby, the pit cage at Easington marks the site where the explosion occurred in 1951; the sculpture commemorates the 83 lives that were lost there. The form of the pit cage is also specific to the event of the explosion, commemorating the change of shift that had entangled so many men at a single site.

If I turn to the entry for the Ravensworth Ann Colliery on the website of the Durham Mining Museum, the single listing under ‘Disasters (5 or more killed)’ is an explosion that took 16 lives on 10th June 1757. This accident, although claiming over the 10 lives that qualify an event as a mining disaster, is on a smaller scale than at Easington and it is far outside of living memory. Under ‘Names of those killed at this colliery’, 80 men are listed, including the 16 men who died in the explosion. The remaining 64 men died as a result of individual accidents, most often killed by a fall of stone or being struck by a truck. These deaths have different causes and, while they lend weight and specificity to Antony Gormley’s intention to commemorate on the site those who died as a result of the mining industry, The Angel is not specific either to these men or to the Ravensworth Ann colliery. The form of The Angel does not explicitly reference the mine, and the sculpture’s title gestures to the broader demise of heavy industry across the region.

Reading the pit cage at Easington Colliery in relation to The Angel calls attention to the importance of history in understanding the resonance of the site as a memorial space. The pit cage memorial at Easington marks the site where the explosion occurred in 1951, and it commemorates the 83 lives that were lost. The Angel stands on a site that still carries the emotional weight of the 80 deaths listed by the Mining Museum as having occurred over the timeframe that the colliery was in operation. Nevertheless, Gormley’s sculpture does not commemorate either a single event or particular lives. The lack of specificity of The Angel lends itself to adoption as a grassroots memorial in a way that the Easington pit cage memorial does not – the sculpture marks the site out as a place of memorial significance, but it evokes a range of associations, meaning that visitors can more readily connect it to their own particular lives and losses.

References

‘Ravensworth Ann Colliery’, Durham Mining Museum, https://www.dmm.org/colliery/-003.htm

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Hands

Cupped hands holding rose petals
Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

Last week, Judith and I travelled through to Sunderland University at the invitation of Tom Fairfax to speak about the twin loss project to second-year medical students, as part of the fourth Humanities in Medicine Symposium. It was wonderful to see so many medical students there, and to participate in such a thoughtful exploration of the intersections between medicine and the humanities.

As I listened to the other speakers at the event, I found myself reflecting on hands. The first speaker, Jonathan Coates, is a general practitioner in the east end of Newcastle and a research fellow at the Durham Institute for Medical Humanities. Outlining how his medical practice had come to embrace the humanities, Jonathan explained to the students that he had taken an optional module in Medical Photography during his undergraduate degree in Medicine, which had given him a starting point to which he had later returned. Jonathan’s chosen topic for his photography project was bereavement, and on his powerpoint slide he showed a photograph he had taken of a woman’s hands for his portfolio, which comprised a quiet yet eloquent portrait of grief.

Emmanuel Oladipo, Lecturer in Clinical Communication at Manchester University, talked to the students about his own spoken-word poetry in the context of medical training. As I watched him speak and perform his poetry, I reflected on the power of gesture to convey meaning. Performance poetry can amplify and elaborate on the interaction between word and gesture in everyday communication, emphasising that gesture sometimes reinforces what is spoken, and at other times contradicts it.

Artist Kate Stobbart has long had an interest in hand movement and gesture. Her work included video pieces in which only her hands were visible, performing gestures that have accompanied the words of others – televised speeches, for example. With the words taken away, these works ask us to think about the eloquence, if not the poetry, of hand gesture. As a practicing doctor, Kate engaged the students in conversation about how her artistic attention to non-verbal communication might also feed into the consulting room.

Watching our own film with the students, I found myself attending to the different hands that appear in the work. Hands are important to Kate Sweeney, the commissioned artist on the project, and part of the ritual that accompanied parents bringing materials into the workshops involved her photographing their hands holding what they had gathered. One of these photographs was integrated into the film, and depicts a parent holding rose petals. The photograph reminded me of Jonathan’s study of hands, in that both comprised intimate portrayals of grief. In Kate’s photograph, the tenderness and protective care with which the parent’s hands hold the fragile petals is evident. The petals had been gathered by the baby’s grandparents and when I look at this image, I also see their hands, carefully picking and sorting the petals so that they can be included in the project.

Child's hand holding an object found on the beach
Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

A child’s hands appear in the video sections of the film where the walks are depicted. These hands represent the involvement of the siblings in choosing and gathering the materials. The hands are exploratory – playful, even – as they test out the qualities of what they have found, and they give us a different orientation to loss. They remind us that the parental perspective sits alongside other frameworks of understanding and modes of communication.

Hand washing a crab claw in a sink
Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

The artist’s hands appear in those video sections of the film which document Kate’s making of the inks. These hands are active and doing – washing and sorting materials, grinding crab shell into powder, or pouring distilled liquid through paper filters. Juxtaposed with the hands of the parents and children collecting materials, we can see the co-creative process that is embedded at the heart of our project, as different hands perform the varied tasks and processes that are needed for the inks to be made.

Doodles in ink on paper
Film still, ‘Where We Will Go’ (2023) by Kate Sweeney

This principle of co-creation is also evident in the various drawings that we see in the film, which were made either on the walks or in the workshops. In the image that closes the film, Kate overlaid the parents’ experiments with their inks in the workshops; each of them have inscribed the name of their lost baby. The ink drawings in the film gesture towards the hands that have made them, and they mark the trace of where these hands have been.

I extend my thanks to Tom, and to the other speakers, for such a rich and cohesive symposium, inviting us to think with the students about what the arts, humanities and social sciences might bring to medical training and practice. Watching the film in this context gave me a fresh perspective on the rich and varied vocabulary of hands that threads through and across the work.

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Baby loss

Wooden bootee hanging in tree
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

When I first visited the memorial at The Angel, a wooden baby bootee hung from the branch of a tree that was situated in the centre of the copse. The bootee had been painted but the decoration had largely weathered away, except for a residue of pink remaining on the toe. In conversation, a colleague had remembered the memorial at The Angel some years ago as a grassroots site of remembrance for baby and child loss, and she recalled the trees being decorated with many more of these painted wooden tokens. When I saw the bootee again, I thought of my colleague’s story and considered this object to be a surviving remnant of the original memorial, which she had described so vividly to me. The wooden bootee has since disappeared, but I recall it whenever I pass the tree from which it hung.

Even though the wooden bootee has gone, baby loss is still commemorated at the memorial site. The symbolism of The Angel resonates with the imagery that surrounds baby loss: the term ‘angel babies’ is used to describe babies who have died at or before birth, or in their first year of life. A number of tokens at the memorial site refer specifically to ‘angel babies’, their wording resonating powerfully with the nearby figure of The Angel.

Wooden heart with inscription tied to branch
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

In her alphabetical dictionary of baby loss, Monica J. Caspers writes an entry for ‘angel babies’, writing of this popular term of remembrance:

Influenced by religious iconography, angel babies are believed to inhabit both heaven and earth. Their ‘presence’ brings peace and comfort to those left behind to mourn them, especially parents. Many baby lost parents, particularly mothers, report that when asked how many children they have, they list their living children and angel babies. Some bereaved women share stories of communicating with their angel babies through dreams and conversations. (p. 10)

Given the prevalence of angels in memorial tokens relating to baby loss, as well as in the bereavement support literature for grieving parents, The Angel becomes vibrant with meaning as a site of remembrance in this context. The copse of trees, situated between the motorway and The Angel, is itself expressive of a place between the worldly and the spiritual realms. The Angel both amplifies the angel symbolism, and represents a guardian presence for those babies and infants who are commemorated there.

Linda L. Layne has written of the ways in which it is still socially unclear how to mourn pregnancy and baby loss, which can be at once the loss of a baby and of parenthood. Layne observes that ‘baby things’ take on a particular significance as memorial objects; in the face of continuing social denial of the loss, these objects ‘make the claim that a “real” child existed and is worthy of memory’ (p. 324). Layne notes that parents often give gifts to the baby after death that the child would have received had it been living – clothing, toys, and balloons are especially popular. On my last visit to The Angel, a pair of cloth bootees had been tied to a tree branch in the copse, together with toys and a birthday balloon, representing at once a tender gift to a lost baby and a moving memorial.

I have already considered the specific symbolism of The Angel in the context of baby loss. Layne also opens up the significance of the trees from which the tokens are suspended at the memorial site. Trees are, in Layne’s words, ‘alive and capable of growth’ (p. 337), and the adoption of a tree by parents is itself a form of living memorial. Trees can form the centre of commemorative rituals and be decorated with lights or objects to mark anniversaries and birthdays. A token left in a tree at The Angel is placed in the sculpture’s protective embrace, and the memorial site thereby continues to hold poignant and powerful significance in the context of pregnancy loss, and of baby and child bereavement.

References

Monica J. Caspers, Babylost: Racism, Survival, and the Quiet Politics of Infant Mortality, from A-Z (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022).

Linda L. Layne, ‘”He was a real baby with baby things”: A material culture analysis of personhood, parenthood and pregnancy loss’, Journal of Material Culture 5.3 (2000), pp. 251-367.

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January

seed heads on blue ground
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Over the last year, I have been been recording the Angel of the North site by making cyanotypes of the plants that grow there across the seasons. For each month of 2024, I will post photographs of the cyanotypes made in the same month of 2023. Over the course of the year, these images will comprise an archive of the flowers and trees that grow in the field on which The Angel stands, including at the memorial site itself.

Cyanotype is an early form of photography in which an object is placed on chemically treated paper, laid under glass, and placed in the sun. The sun reacts with the chemicals to expose the image, and the print is developed by rinsing the paper in water, which produces the distinctive deep blue ground. I have used the process of dry cyantoype, which means that the treated paper is dry when the object is placed on it.

Last week, I visited York Art Gallery to see the British Museum touring exhibition Drawing Attention: Emerging Artists in Dialogue. My eye was drawn to the work of Irish artist Miriam de Burca, who makes meticulous drawings of clods of earth dug up from the edges of cillini, burial grounds across Ireland that mark the resting places of those considered unworthy of an ‘official grave’: babies and children who died before they were baptised, women who died in childbirth, and those who ended their own lives. De Burca’s studies are an act of paying close attention to those whom society wished to forget, an assertion of remembrance that challenges a collective amnesia. In the exhibition, de Burca’s drawing was paired with Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi’s Design for a Catafalque (1621-58), which represented a memorial for someone that society wished to honour and esteem. The intricate detail of De Burca’s ink drawing encouraged close and sustained attention to it, and I found myself returning several times to the image as I went round the exhibition.

De Burca’s project is very different to documenting the memorial at The Angel. The burial sites in Ireland are obscure and often remote, situated on the edges of bogs, lakes and seashores, or just outside the walls of graveyards. Lacking any visual markers, the earth that de Burca digs up, draws in her studio, and then returns to the site, is a way of rendering the unseen burial ground visible, and each drawing is titled with the co-ordinates of the site’s location. The memorial at The Angel is not a burial ground, although the ashes of loved ones are sometimes scattered there. The objects that people leave behind give visibility to the memorial, and its location next to The Angel means that it is neither obscure nor hidden. The memorial objects are nevertheless sensitive and personal. Although the cyanotypes do not share the same political purpose of de Burca’s drawings, which deliberately set out to expose and challenge an institutional architecture of disappearance, they hold in common with them a mode of looking at a memorial site that is attentive yet oblique.

white seed heads on blue ground
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

January’s cyanotypes capture the sculptural seedheads of the previous summer’s flowers, and they appear as doubly spectral: the negative image of a form that itself represents the ghost of an earlier season. The weak winter sun is also documented in these images – despite long exposure times, they have a more faded blue ground than the cyanotypes that are developed in the summer months.

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Sunday

angel of the North with man looking up at it
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

I met Catherine Murray at The Angel on a wet and muddy November morning to record a segment for Radio 4’s Sunday programme. We walked from the base of The Angel down the hill to the memorial, and through the trees. As we stood at the feet of The Angel, sun broke through the clouds and visitors posed for photographs on the slope below us, arms outstretched.

Walking with Catherine, I was aware once again of the importance of sound on the site. The traffic noise was constant, and I registered how much it encapsulates the atmosphere of this place, representing more than ambient noise. I noted in my last post that the movement of the traffic counterpoints and calls attention to the stillness of The Angel standing in its midst. Due to the surrounding roads, this contrast of movement and stillness is present if you are approaching The Angel from the carpark, standing beneath its wings, or walking through the memorial site in the trees. Catherine recorded her feet plodging through the mud beneath the trees to capture the acoustic resonance of our walk, a record of our movement which struck me as a further point of contrast with the recordings that David and I have been making of the static form of The Angel.

I was delighted to hear the recording aired on today’s New Year’s Eve programme. It was paired with author Peter Stanford speaking about what angels mean today and observing that, even as organised religion is in decline, angels offer a framework through which we can imagine continuing our conversation with the dead. Angels, like Gormley’s sculpture, offer a contact with spirituality without the need for affiliation to a specific faith or religion.  

The Angel of the North appears in the dictionary of angels in Stanford’s Angels: A History, listed under ‘G’ for ‘Gormley’. Stanford highlights the importance of angels ‘in troubling, even hopeless, times’ (p. 74). Gormley has likewise indicated that his angel figure was intended as a guardian for the north-east of England at a time of ‘painful transition’, as traditional heavy industries gave way to the information age. On his website, Gormley speaks of The Angel as a ‘focus of hope’, and as a memorial that ‘bears witness to the hundreds and thousands of colliery workers who had spent the last three hundred years mining coal beneath the surface’. Although the specific historical resonance of the site may not be as present for visitors now as when the work was first installed, the sculpture still represents a place of hope, to which people turn at times of grief and personal crisis.

Many thanks to Catherine for editing our conversation so beautifully for the programme. Our conversation begins at 18:11, at this link.

References

Antony Gormley, ‘Making the Angel of the North’, https://www.antonygormley.com/works/making/angel-of-the-north

Peter Stanford, Angels: A History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2019).

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Form

Black and white image of The Angel of the North from below
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

If you walk into Leeds City Art Gallery, a life-size brick sculpture of a man stands directly in front of you. This is the maquette for The Brick Man, a monumental sculpture by Antony Gormley that was never realised but that is now widely seen as an important precursor for The Angel of the North. Gormley proposed the sculpture in 1988 for the Holbeck area of Leeds, where it would have stood over 30 metres high on land surrounded by railway lines, and greeted travellers arriving at Leeds station. (The Angel now stands 20 metres high, surrounded by roads and welcoming drivers into Gateshead.) The brick construction of the proposed sculpture referenced the brickworks that had formerly occupied the Holbeck site, which was derelict wasteland by 1988. The Brick Man would thereby have materialised the industrial heritage of the area of Leeds for which it was designed, a full decade before The Angel commemorated the colliery that occupied the Gateshead site on which it now stands.

If you walk round the maquette of The Brick Man to look at the back, a small doorway is visible in one of its heels. Here, visitors would have entered to gaze up at the hollow interior of the sculpture and take in its height and scale. Once inside the structure, visitors would have had the opportunity to climb a staircase, which led up to windows in the man’s ears; from here, visitors could take in the view of the city that the high vantage point afforded. Gormley abandoned this access to the sculpture’s interior for his design of The Angel a decade later; it is nevertheless a helpful reminder of how important the hollow interior of his sculptures was for Gormley at this time.

Gormley’s extensive study of Buddhism and meditation had given him a long-standing interest in the human body as it is experienced from the inside. His sculptural figures are typically moulds of the human form, which often use his own body as the model. The sculptures as moulds or ‘body cases’ have an empty space within, which Gormley has linked to the meditation that he practices while the mould is being made. He describes the experience of being encased in plaster in this way:

In the moulding process I have to be very still and to be breathing regularly. I have to try not to think about the outside and to be completely concentrated on the space that exists behind appearance. At first this experience is very claustrophobic.  . . . As the plaster goes on and I am enclosed ever more deeply in a damp, dark, soft enclosure, there is a descent into the darkness of the body. This is the space that we all spend our lives escaping from, but it is also the place of imagination: a place that starts with feelings of claustrophobia but opens into an extension as wide as a sky at night. (‘Feeling into Form’, p. 1518)

Gormley’s sculptures arise out of meditation and invite their viewers to use the work as a means for their own reflection. In The Brick Man, the proposed encounter with the interior ‘darkness of the body’ was literal, with the visitor entering the sculpture’s internal space. Although The Angel can only be viewed externally, it works on the same principles as Gormley’s other work of this period, its stance and hollow interior asking the viewer to participate in the meditative state that is, for the artist, the origin of all his work.

The location of the sculpture also contributes to the meditative feeling that Gormley seeks to evoke. The Brick Man and The Angel were both designed to represent still centres in environments where people routinely rush past, whether by rail or by car. Gormley has written of the placing of his works:

I guess we then have to ask how these works fit into the world and how they can evoke or identify a feeling in space, how in a time of extreme visual cacophony in the built environment do we use the space of sculpture to reinforce the self in this confused and commercialized world? As we walk down the street, our attention is constantly bombarded with bright new goods in the shop windows, a man trying to evangelize with a microphone in the centre of the street, brief glimpses of the weather, a cloudless sky, an impending storm, large advertisements, the ringing and talking in mobile phones. In this distracting and distracted world, so lacking in cohesion, how do we insert sculpture as both a point of symbolized self in the world and a place for self in the world, a place that is silent, still, removed? (‘Feeling into Form’, pp. 1513-14)

Gormley thinks of sculpture as something that is not only itself still and unmoving, but that can be deliberately placed in a hectic urban environment to create a space of stillness and reflection for its visitors. Although his example is a high street, it readily transfers to the busy roads that surround The Angel. Those who are driving past on the A1 can pause their journey to find a place that feels ‘still’ and ‘removed’. It is instructive, too, to think about the language that Gormley uses here – even as he thinks about the visual, he turns to the auditory to make his point, speaking about ‘cacophony’, the man with the microphone, and the constant background chatter of the mobile phone. The feeling that sculpture evokes not only stills movement; it also quietens noise.

When I was standing at the feet of The Angel this morning, there was a loud thump above me, followed by a reverberation down the body of The Angel that passed through the ground to me, rising through my feet and up my body. My first thought was that a bird had flown into one of The Angel’s wings and that the sound was caused by the impact, but I could see no sign of any collision. I concluded that the warm sun heating the metal after the recent freezing temperatures had caused it to expand, producing the booming noise that I both heard and felt. This encounter with The Angel’s sound acted as a forceful reminder of its hollow interior, which shaped the deep reverberation that resonated through my own body.  

The incident caused me to reflect on what it means to sound The Angel in our project. It reminded me to be wary of any claim that David and I are uniquely able to reveal The Angel’s sound through technology, when a combination of atmospheric conditions and sculptural form had produced such a deeply resonant noise. It also cautioned me against using language such as ‘the voice’ of The Angel, because we are neither making The Angel speak, nor adding its noise to the nearby cacophony of traffic. What we are capturing instead is the echo of The Angel’s surroundings as they reverberate through its hollow structure – whether that is the sound of the traffic, of wind, or of rain. This takes us closer to Gormley’s own interest in the interior of his sculptures as a space of encounter and imagination. I am reminded of the visitors who recently listened through David’s headphones to The Angel’s resonances and observed that the noise sounded like something you could either meditate to, or compose with. The sounds that David is recording retain the sense of stillness that Gormley associates with sculptural form, giving us an entry point into imagining the interior of The Angel, the hollow space that was so central to Gormley’s artwork of this period.  Instead of walking into the structure and peering up into its shadowy interior, sound can evoke its elusive inner form for us through echo and vibration.

In the placing of The Brick Man and The Angel, the historical resonance of the site was key, informing both the form and the material of the sculpture. Situated on abandoned post-industrial wasteland, sculpture aimed to reclaim it as a place – an artistic practice that was tied to policies of urban regeneration, but also extended beyond this to create a site of pause and reflection. Speaking about the relation between art and spirituality at Durham Cathedral in 1996, Gormley reflected on the spiritual role of sculpture in a secular society, observing:

I am interested in reviving [the] idea of presence. Can we have presence without the God? Can we resurrect the monument without bringing the shadow of bad history? The idea of an image that is open enough to be interpreted widely, that has multiple and generative potential for meaning but is strong enough to be a focus. How can we construct such an image? In being someone’s can it be everyone’s? (‘Art and Spirituality’, p. 156)

The Angel manifests as one potential solution to Gormley’s questions: a symbol that is open to interpretation, and a powerful focal point; an image that references religion, but holds a broad spiritual resonance. The grassroots memorial that has emerged at the site suggests that The Angel has taken on the kind of ‘presence’ that Gormley was interested in, becoming a place of spiritual significance in a predominantly secular time.

Gormley’s statement about the Angel that has been placed on site refers to the mound on which the sculpture stands as a significant factor in its effect. He says: ‘The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound’. In addition to the historical resonance of the mine beneath, the positioning of the sculpture on the raised ground evokes a sense of neolithic monuments. Driving past The Angel and viewing it from the A1 has something of the effect of seeing Stonehenge rising in the distance across Salisbury Plain. The approach to The Angel on foot entails walking up the mound towards it, and then standing beneath its towering form. Visitors often reach out to touch The Angel as they would the stone of a megalith. I have written in previous posts about the trees of the memorial feeling like an ancient grove, and the tying of ribbons to the trees resembling Celtic traditions and beliefs. There is, then, a discernible continuity between the ancient spiritual resonances that Gormley evoked in his design of The Angel and the grassroots memorial practices that have more recently emerged at the site.

References

Antony Gormley, ‘Art and Spirituality’, Address at a conference in Durham Cathedral, October 1996. Reproduced in John Hutchinson, E. H. Gombrich, Lela B. Njatin and W. J. T. Mitchell, Antony Gormley (London and New York: Phaidon, 2000), pp. 154-56.

Antony Gormley, ‘Feeling into form’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362.2132 (2007), pp. 1513-18.    

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Writing

Angel of the North from the side and looking up
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Yesterday I received an email from Liz Shaw, who had heard the Radio 4 broadcast about our project on the Today programme. Elizabeth is a member of the Watford Writers’ Group and had been set the task to write a piece that was inspired by an artwork. Based on my interview, Liz wrote a beautiful piece which constitutes its own eloquent and moving response to The Angel.

Liz has kindly given me permission to include her writing on the blog, and you can read it below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Angel of the North

My arms are not raised up high in anger or in defiance. They do not bend and curve to cherish and protect. Nor do they hang in despair or in defeat. They stretch out wide, wider than I am tall, parallel to the earth. My arms are winged and spread to catch the wind. I am genderless and ageless. My face is emotionless and featureless.  I was created blind to your existence, deaf to your voices. I watch unheeding as your traffic and trains stream below me.

Born in a blast furnace, forged in steel, I am municipal, magnificent, agnostic, secular, classless.

And yet. And yet. You leave your hopes, fears and prayers at my feet. Slips of paper sealed and curled within my iron ribs. Nearby trees hang heavy with your memorials, charms, ribbons and fairy lights. I have become a road-side shrine, an altar, a minaret, a bridge of sighs, a wailing wall.

You conceived me, you built me, you know this. So why do you believe that I have power over your fate? Do you hope to see me spark to life and stride the fields like a modern-day Prometheus, take flight to intercede with the Gods on your behalf?

My feet are planted in a landscape once blighted by industry. I feel the souls of the colliers who mined the seams beneath me. I feel their heaving lungs and their black coal-ingrained scars. Your messages seep into me with their raw emotions of hope, grief, love and hate.

And now the sounds of my structure will be added to your voices. Your memories and stories will be forever entwined with the rush of the wind as it wails around me. The eerie groans of my metal body expanding and contracting with the summer heat and the winter ice will be added to birdsong and the sound of children playing at my feet. The gentle rustle of the leaves will blend with the tinkle of your votive offerings.  A soundscape will be created of what I have come to mean to you.

Are you hoping to wear away at my cold rusting heart? If your wishes came true, if you were wealthy, loved, cured, avenged, then what? The deep scars of your life will fade in time as will your life itself. I cannot bring them back, the people who you mourn and grieve. They will not return from death.

Better to stand tall and strong with arms wide open to accept your future, to feel your feet firmly planted in history, to gaze ahead to the distant twinkling northern city lights.

Liz Shaw

November 2023

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Bottled Up

Rose petals in water in three jam jars
Photo credit: Kate Sweeney, 2022.

Making inks was at the core of the film that we co-created with parents who had experienced the loss of one twin from a multiple pregnancy. Workshop sessions were structured around the three stages of the ink-making process, as outlined by Jason Logan in Make Ink: (1) find ink (gathering the materials); (2) make ink (creating and bottling the inks); and (3) test ink (drawing and writing with the inks). The natural materials collected either on the walks or in other meaningful places – bilberries, buttercups, rose petals, an empty crab shell – were distilled into inks, which were in turn transformed into drawings and film animations. The memories of the lost babies permeated these activities, and ink making became its own ritual of commemoration.

The parents spoke often during the making of the film about the bottling up or repression of a grief that could not easily be articulated, because it is not well understood. Outside the family, the loss often went unspoken and even within the family it was hard to share, particularly across the generations. The inks gave a new and different resonance to what it meant to bottle up feelings associated with the loss. One parent observed: ‘having those gorgeous little bottles – bottled up feelings and emotions and places – it’s a really nice thing to have at the end of the project. The bottles are sitting on the shelf so we know that any time we want to we can go back and use those again and we know that if we see other things that we like we can make more inks. Even for anniversaries or things like that we know we can do that.’ The ‘bottling up’ of the feelings and places associated with the walks as inks created new memories, and grief was experienced not as internal, but as an object on the shelf that could be picked up and put down, used and remade.

The parents talked about the beneficial process of gathering materials on the walks, which gave dedicated time as a family to remember, and provided them with an activity on which to focus: ‘I think as an actual process, it’s a wonderful therapy tool – I’m not sure if that’s the right phrase – just to be able to spend some time somewhere that you like thinking about the loss and then having something practical to do. We are going somewhere that we enjoy being and we want to collect these materials and we are going to turn them into something completely different. It might have started out as buttercups or crab shells, but it ends up being this beautiful film.’ The transformation of the materials into something different – and something beautiful – is key to the project’s meaning for the parents.

Kate made inks in her studio from the materials gathered on the walks, and she also gave kits and instructions to the parents so that they could make their own inks, either between sessions or once the sessions had ended. One parent commented of this aspect of the project: ‘It was easy to make the inks and we did our own from the instructions and equipment that Kate gave us. I think this was something that could be given to all sorts of families and not just families that have lost a child but anybody who has lost anyone.’ While the families appreciated the creativity of what could be done with the inks – the drawing and writing that they enabled – the ink making itself seemed to be particularly helpful for navigating grief as a family, and the bottled ink was treasured in and of itself.

Babs Behan, founder of Botanical Inks, has written of ink making from natural materials:

There is something simple and beautiful about walking out onto the land and picking up fallen leaves, harvesting flowers and berries, and digging up muddy roots and then soaking them in water to extract their colour. I have seen people falling in love over and over again with these old-new ways of creating something – they love the fact that bringing more beauty into the world needn’t be harmful to the environment or to their own personal health. (p. 10)

In the context of our project, making inks transformed the bottling up of feelings about a difficult form of grief into a positive meaning and activity, and provided beautiful objects that the parents could keep once the project had finished. Like Behan, we also watched the parents fall in love with the techniques and processes of ink making that Kate introduced to them in the workshop sessions.

References

Babs Behan, Botanical Inks: Plant-to-Print Dyes, Techniques and Projects (London: Quadrille, 2018).

Jason Logan, Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (New York: Abrams, 2018).  

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Bottles

Two pink bottles with autumn leaves
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Sarah Gensburger’s Memory On My Doorstep (2019) chronicles the spontaneous memorial that commemorated those who lost their lives either in the terrorist attack on the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in January 2015, or in the shooting at the Bataclan Café, 50 Boulevard Voltaire, in November 2015. Both incidents took place in the same neighbourhood of Paris, which is where Gensburger lives. She documented the memorial and its visitors over the course of a year, from 2015 to 2016, drawing on her position as a resident to consider the ordinary dynamics that characterise living beside events such as the shootings on an everyday level. The places which families, including her own, inhabited daily became ‘the stage for memorialization, for tributes and homages to the victims’ (p. 17), and Gensburger decides ‘to pay attention to the social relationships people build with their environment, and to the role that environment plays in memory dynamics’ (p. 17).

The spontaneous memorial with which Gensburger is concerned is different from the memorial at The Angel, in that it has emerged at the site of one terrorist event and in proximity to another. There are nevertheless correspondences between my own project and Gensburger’s. We are both interested in chronicling a public space of remembrance, as a means of enabling ‘the expression of multiple narratives’ (19).  Both projects record a local memorial, which is regularly observed and that forms a backdrop to our daily lives and activities. We are also both concerned with how spontaneous memorial activity adds new meanings to the environment in which it takes place – in the case of The Angel, I am interested in the ways in which the objects and tokens left at the site re-create Gormley’s sculpture as a place of collective remembrance.

Gensburger’s perspective as a resident who passes the memorial daily means that she has a heightened awareness of the objects that are placed there. The objects are subject to theft as well as to the elements, so that many ‘ultimately become invisible for history’ (p. 180). Gensburger distinguishes between those visitors who leave laminated messages, and thereby ‘plan for posterity’, and those who leave more fragile tokens (p. 180). In my last post, I thought about the ribbons and fabric items that are placed in the trees at The Angel, and the ways in which synthetic materials do not disintegrate like traditional cloth. Other objects at The Angel demonstrate the same divide that Gensburger points out, some of which are protected while others are exposed to the elements. Gensburger notes that, as she observes the memorial, it develops ‘a kind of autonomous existence’, so that new messages respond to those that are already there (p. 98). At The Angel, too, objects and messages respond both to The Angel and to each other, so that they form a kind of loose collective, as well as representing individual memories and tributes.

I am particularly struck by a passage in Gensburger’s book in which she discusses a key challenge of observing a memorial closely over time. On November 25, 2015, Gensburger took a photograph of a bright pink child’s wand taped to a pole, together with a branch which she took to be an olive. She interpreted the object as ‘one of optimism’, and the branch as a symbol of peace (p. 42). Returning to the photograph on January 4, 2016, Gensburger is no longer sure what she is looking at. She reflects:

Today, with hindsight, I cannot ignore the possibility that this magic wand was simply lost by a child in the street and stuck to the pole by a well-meaning passerby. Just like the lost gloves or scarves we often see draped over the railings of the park in winter, in the hope their former owners retrace their steps to find them. (p. 43)

To what extent, Gensburger asks, is she seeing all objects in the neighbourhood as memorials, when they might have other significances? ‘When this photograph was taken’, she writes, ‘I was so accustomed to encountering homages and tributes in the neighbourhood, that this encouraged me to interpret every unexpected object through this analytic frame’ (p. 43)

On recent visits to The Angel, I have experienced the same doubt as to whether some of the objects I see are deliberately placed as memorials, or if they do not hold such commemorative significance. A pile of stones recently appeared near the entrance to the group of trees at The Angel; these were still in place on my visit today, although I felt less confident than I first was about whether they are tokens of remembrance. Other stones have been placed under trees, or are painted or inscribed, but these rocks are unmarked and are ambiguously positioned on the perimeter of the site. Am I, too, seeing everything at The Angel through a single lens because I am so accustomed to encountering memorial objects in, or near, the group of trees?

At the other side of the copse, where a fence separates the trees from the nearby A1, two bottles have been placed as objects of remembrance. The decorative nature of the bottles and their location beside other memorial tokens make their significance clear. Less evident, though, is the meaning of a nearby empty bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale, which today lies in the leaves on the far side of the fence, having blown down from the fence rail where it stood when I last visited. The bottle has been here for some time, always in the same area but occupying different positions; I cannot ignore the possibility that, even though it has appeared in the memorial site, it may not hold the same significance as the twinned bottles nearby. Several objects that have been placed near the fence have local reference points, so I had originally thought that the bottle of Newcastle Brown might have been left alongside them as part of a commemorative ensemble, but I am increasingly doubtful of my own interpretation.

I might never know whether the bottle of Newcastle Brown, or the pile of stones, represent memorial tributes or have different stories to tell. Both objects are located on the edge of the trees, where it is difficult to read their significance. In the absence of other information, all I  – like Gensburger – can do is ‘consider the limits of my initial interpretation’ (p. 43). The meaning of objects and traces left at The Angel is not self-evident; if  we are not able to recover their stories from the people who left them, their significance lies largely in the way they are perceived and interpreted.     

References:

Sarah Gensburger, Memory On My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighbourhood, Paris: 2016-2016, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019.