Sounding the Angel – Page 2

10 May 202413 May 2024

May

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

The new month has brought the flowering of the various springtime plants that grow on common land such as fields, parks, and roadside verges – the daisy, the dandelion, and the clover. Their familiar flowers spread across the field on which The Angel stands, reminding us of the everyday nature of this site as post-industrial brownfield land. In this post, I am interested in dwelling on the ordinariness of these flowers, not as an opening onto the history of the site, which I have explored in previous posts, but rather as a prompt for reflection on the grassroots memorial at The Angel as it relates to the ordinary.

If we turn to an influential essay on the grassroots memorial, we can see that the connection between this kind of site and the ordinary is a surprising one. Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero have marked the origin of the grassroots memorial in the 1980s, indicating that it has now become a ‘recurrent pattern’ in the wake of ‘a traumatic event or crisis’ (p. 1). Placing mementoes and tributes at the site of a traumatic event or death becomes a form of ‘social action’ that at once mourns an unexpected death and seeks to effect change, to ‘precipitate new actions in the social or political sphere’ (p. 2). Roadside memorials, for example, both mark the site of a fatality and seek to prevent future accidents by warning other drivers and agitating for the stretch of road to be made safer. The placing of objects removes the site from the everyday, elevating ‘ordinary, secular ground into the extraordinary’ (p. 21). Nevertheless, the authors point out, the primary function of the grassroots memorial is not ‘to create relations with the supernatural’, but rather ‘to manage emotions and to deal with grievances and contestation’ (p. 24).

I have pointed out in previous posts that, while the grassroots memorial at The Angel shares in common with other sites the placing of tributes in a public space in order to grieve, it is distinct in that The Angel is not the site of a traumatic event or death, but a place of comfort, and perhaps hope. The social action that Margry and Sanchez-Carretero see as central to the grassroots memorial is largely lacking at The Angel, though traceable perhaps in the possible origins of the site in a grassroots baby loss initiative. I have suggested that there may be something in the memorial at The Angel that enhances or magnifies the sculpture’s effect in transforming the ordinary ground of the field into an extraordinary place, imbued with the feeling of the sacred. But, for at least some of those who leave tributes there, the reasons are more prosaic. The Angel was particularly loved by the person who died. The ubiquity of The Angel in the media offers a sense of permanent contact with the person who has been commemorated there. There is no grave and The Angel offers a place to visit on birthdays and anniversaries. The constant presence of visitors and the memorial tributes left by others offers a sense of companionship for the dead. These are all important and understandable motivations for leaving mementoes at The Angel, but they are expressive less of grievance and social action than of the everyday practicalities of grief.

The ordinariness of the memorial at The Angel does not render it less important than those grassroots memorials that mark the site of a traumatic death, and the love expressed in the tributes is just as strongly felt. By commemorating their losses at the public site of The Angel, there may be, for some, a desire to make their grief visible to others. But this does not seem to be the primary motivation for many, and the evolution of the memorial into individual trees marked out as family ‘plots’ suggests that, with grief rituals in flux, The Angel represents an alternative to the traditional cemetery and increasingly echoes its conventions. The site offers somewhere to visit either if there is no grave – as many friends and relatives return to a place where ashes have been scattered – or if the grave of a loved one cannot easily be reached.

On my visits to The Angel, I have repeatedly witnessed visitors encountering the memorial that they had not expected to find there. Time and again, they stand quietly reading the messages that have been left and looking at the tributes. Some take photographs, but many simply observe. Often, they are visibly moved by an object or a token, or perhaps by the accumulation of tributes that they encounter. One or two have written notes and left them in the trees, recording their own responses to the site. These visitors are not responding to a social agitation that seeks to bring about change, but rather to the everyday, ordinary expression of love and grief.

References

Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Memorialisation: The Concept of Grassroots Memorials’, in Peter Jan Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero (eds.), Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 1-48.

25 April 202428 May 2024

Geophone

Last night, David and I met for a recording session at The Angel of the North. It was a beautiful evening and there were a lot of visitors on the site. We are making field recordings across the seasons of the year, and this was our recording for the sounds of Spring. For each season, we have recorded the sounds of nature on the site – from the autumn dawn chorus, through the high winds of winter’s Storm Babet, to the springtime ambience of early evening. We have also recorded the interior resonances of The Angel at the different times and seasons, taking ‘readings’ from the north, east, south, and west faces of the sculpture.

We usually use the contact microphone to record the resonances of The Angel, but David brought to this recording session a new recording device – the geophone.

Usually used to pick up underground vibrations, David placed the geophone at the four points around The Angel, which, as usual, varied in their pitch and tone. The geophone had a magnet embedded within it so it attached more securely to The Angel than the contact microphone. David used both recording devices, and it was possible to switch from one to the other through the headphones, attending to the differences between them. The photograph at the top of this post shows me listening to the geophone on the north side of The Angel (the front of the sculpture). The sound was more airy and ethereal than in the other recordings we have done. There was little wind and heavy traffic so the resonances would have been formed by sound travelling through the ground from the motorway, rather than wind echoing down from the wings.

As we stood behind The Angel recording the resonances from its south side, the structure contracted, producing the booming noise that I had heard on a previous visit. As before, the sound resonated through my body and it travelled up through The Angel and along its wings. Even though both the contact microphone and the geophone were recording at the time, David felt that the unexpected volume was most likely to be picked up as distortion by them, although it may have been captured by the field microphone that was recording beneath the west wing of The Angel.

The trees on The Angel’s west side, including the memorial site, were filled with birdsong and we set up a field microphone facing in the direction of the trees to capture these sounds. Before I arrived, David had recorded the rustle of the leaves that are now on the trees, and I walked down to the memorial with the field microphone to try to record the blackbird that was singing from their highest branches.

As we recorded, the sun gradually lowered in the sky and the shadows lengthened across the field. I took the photograph above to document the long shadow cast by The Angel, and it speaks more broadly to the project. I have described the memorial in the trees as standing in the shadow of The Angel, and this photograph gives a sense of the sculpture reaching out across the site, its wings embracing everything that lies in their radius.

18 April 202418 April 2024

Objects left on The Angel

Most of the posts in this blog focus on the memorial tributes that are left in the trees, which stand immediately below The Angel of the North. A variety of notes and trinkets are regularly either suspended from the branches of the trees or placed beneath them. Less often, memorial objects are also left on, or at, the sculpture itself, and it is these tributes that form the subject of today’s post.

The construction of The Angel means that a series of enclosed ‘shelves’ is created where the ribbing between sections meets, and these alcoves are readily accessible at the height of The Angel’s calves. That these ‘shelves’ can be easily reached is attested to by the layers of grafitti that are inscribed there – another way in which visitors to the site leave traces of their presence behind. When I visit, I often walk round The Angel first to check whether any objects have been left there, before proceeding down to the stand of trees.

I have written in a previous post about the difficulty of being able to tell whether an object is a memorial tribute, or if it is something discarded, or perhaps something found that has been placed there in the hope that it will be reunited with its owner. I observed that this problem of identification increases on the perimeter of the memorial site in the trees, and the same issue arises when faced with those objects that have been left at or on The Angel. It can be impossible to determine sometimes why a particular object might have been left there. In this post, I therefore focus on four tributes that I believe have been left with memorial intent, even if I do not know who or what is being commemorated by them.

The first tribute is a cap and a single red rose, which were left on adjacent ‘shelves’ on The Angel (pictured above). The rose had a card attached, but I could not see if any message was written on it and I followed my usual practice of leaving the objects undisturbed. It was tempting to read the grafitti behind the objects – the ‘Jacob was here’ behind the rose and the series of three kisses inscribed above the cap – as accompaniments to the objects, but it is more likely that their placing was either accidental, or that the person, or people, who left the objects there felt that they formed appropriate backdrops for their tributes – although the accompanying image behind the rose seemed to discount that theory.

The rose was more ephemeral than the cap, and it had disappeared by the time of my next visit. The cap had been moved to the memorial site in the trees and it was hanging on a branch of the oak tree near the entrance to the copse. Over my next few visits, the cap changed position in the memorial site a number of times. I was unsure whether it was being moved by the person who had originally left it there, or if other visitors were positioning and repositioning it across the site. I found that this degree of mobility often characterised objects that were left on or at The Angel; much more so than with the objects that were left in the trees, which tended to be moved by the wind but not by other visitors.

The second tribute also makes use of adjacent ‘shelves’ on The Angel, this time to place two bouquets of flowers, which were seemingly purchased on the way to the site and with the shop label partially removed. One of the bouquets is accompanied by one of the wild flowers that grows on the edge of the field on which The Angel stands. The next time I visited, there was no sign of these flowers; these seemingly quite spontaneous tributes are often ephemeral in nature. These two bouquets were left on The Angel, but it is more common to find them leaning against The Angel’s feet, at the front or side of the sculpture.

The third tribute that was left on the ‘shelves’ of the ribbing was a pair of plaster-cast wings. I spotted them as soon as I arrived, because they had been placed on the eastern side of The Angel, visible from the path that leads from the car park. Occupying a single ‘shelf’, the wings had been carefully positioned to echo but not to touch each other, and other visitors, like me, were looking at them but leaving them undisturbed.

When I returned the following week, I could see that the wings were no longer on their original ‘shelf’. Walking round to the west side of The Angel, however, I found both of the wings positioned on adjacent shelves, and arranged vertically to form a different kind of pairing.

Once again, I had no way of knowing whether the wings had been moved by those who had originally left them on The Angel, or whether subsequent visitors had altered their positioning and their placement. The movement from east to west had shifted the wings from sunrise to sunset, and I was tempted to find some meaning in this, even as I was aware that it was most likely coincidental. On my following visit, the wings had disappeared, and, even though I looked for them in the trees over succeeding visits, there was no further sign of them. This disappearance of the object was unusual, unless it was itself of a more ephemeral nature: it was more common that a tribute left on The Angel would turn up in the trees, if it was no longer visible at the sculpture itself.

The fourth tribute left on The Angel was a small, artificial candle. Smaller than the other objects, it had been positioned on The Angel’s north side, where the ribbing is narrower and the ‘shelves’ correspondingly smaller. There was no accompanying note or message, although its memorial purpose seemed clear. There was something touching in the contrast of scale between The Angel and the diminutive candle; something too, perhaps, in the way in which The Angel seemed to shelter the candle’s tiny flame and to offer it protection. I thought of The Angel, unlit at night, forming a vast shadowy presence, and I wondered if this solar candle would then illuminate a tiny scrap of the surrounding dark. There was something of the altar about this tribute; the positioning of the candle transforming the domestic ‘shelf’ into something with a more sacred resonance.

The placing of objects at or on The Angel is facilitated by the design of the sculpture itself, which, as I have noted, forms ‘shelves’ of varying depths onto which the tributes can be placed. It is nevertheless striking that the memorial tributes are more commonly left in the nearby trees rather than at The Angel itself. This might be due to practical considerations – objects left here are more exposed, both to the weather and to other visitors, and so are often moved or disappear. Objects left at The Angel accordingly tend to be ephemeral and disposable in nature – tributes such as flowers, or a candle. The exceptions to this – the cap and the plaster wings – were subsequently repositioned, whether by the same visitor/s or others, with as much apparent thought and care as when they had originally been placed there.

Why, then, do the trees rather than The Angel seem to have a gravitational pull, such that even objects placed on The Angel seem to end up there? One factor certainly seems to be the shelter that they afford from the elements, especially the force of the wind. But the trees also offer shelter from other visitors, who venture less frequently into the copse, and are less likely to disturb what they find there. Leaving a memorial tribute on or at The Angel is a more public act, even if it is conducted when nobody else is there. The memorials in the trees constitute tributes that are public and private, and that speak not only to The Angel, but also to the community of other memorial objects that they join, and by which they are surrounded.

11 April 202412 April 2024

April

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.

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.

25 March 202426 March 2024

Chimes

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.

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.

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.

14 March 202414 March 2024

March

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.

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.

3 March 202412 March 2024

Stones

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1 February 20241 February 2024

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.

30 January 202431 January 2024

Lamesley

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.

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

24 January 202430 January 2024

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.

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