Category: Sounding the Angel

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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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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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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.

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Clootie or rag trees

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

Following the article in The Guardian about the memorial objects at The Angel of the North, a number of people kindly emailed me about clootie or rag trees, wondering whether there might be a connection with the memorial activity at The Angel. Clootie means cloth in Scots and the trees, usually hawthorn or ash, are located close to sacred wells or springs. A rag or cloth would be dipped into the holy water and tied to the tree in order to cure a sickness or ailment. The cloth would often be from a garment associated with the body part affected by the illness, and it was believed that the sickness would fade even as the material disintegrated over time. Holy wells were visited by people from across the area on special days, such as Beltane, the May Day festival marking the beginning of summer.  

The Dictionary of English Folklore records that rag trees had become rare by the nineteenth century, although a few remained in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cornwall. In 2003, it records three active wells in England: two in Yorkshire (St. Helen’s Well at Walton and St. Helen’s Well at Eshton) as well as an unnamed well at Madron in Cornwall. As the name clootie suggests, a number of trees in Scotland are also associated with this ritual: the best known and still much visited are the Munlochy Clootie Well on the Black Isle peninsula, and St. Mary’s Well in the woods near the battlefield of Culloden. Scotland passed an Act of Parliament in 1581 banishing pilgrimages to holy wells and those which lasted became associated with Christian saints: the well at Munlochy is dedicated to Saint Boniface Curitan. The ritual of the clootie tree nevertheless remained popular in Scotland, and Alexander Crow has observed:

The Clootie Well is mentioned by several historical writers and collectors of folklore and tradition. Writing in his 1869 Book of Days, Robert Chambers mentioned a well to the east of the current Munlochy site, called Craigach Well, in Avoch. He describes the scene on the first Sunday of May as ‘like a fair’, with English, Scots and Gaelic all spoken as the pilgrims made their offerings, also noting that each person drank from the well. Thomas Pennant made two famous journeys around Scotland and in 1769 recorded that he saw many such places ‘tapestried with rags’.

Poignantly, Crow records that the well in Culloden Woods was decorated with coloured ribbons and rags when the 51st Highland Division was lost during the Dunkirk evacuations in 1940. He observes that this revival demonstrates ‘how an ancient practice still had meaning in recent times’. This example also suggests that the traditional association with hanging ribbons on the clootie tree has merged more recently with the memorialisation of the dead.

There are many holy wells scattered across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland: 187 are recorded by the Northern Ireland Sites and Monuments Record, while 2,996 have been officially recorded in the Republic of Ireland. Many more have not been documented because they are small, unnamed springs of local significance, and in 2021 a research project at Queens University Belfast, Hidden Heritage of Holy Wells, set out to map these sites county by county. Examples of rag trees in Ireland include St. Brigid’s Well in Kildare, the Well of St. Lasair in Roscommon, the Holy Well at Tobernalt, and St. Feichin’s Well in Westmeath.

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

The clootie tree at Munlochy has recently brought into focus some of the sensitivities around these sites. Traditionally, the cloths tied to the trees were scraps of cotton or woven wool that would disintegrate over time. With man-made and synthetic fibres now more commonly used in clothing, some of the cloths that are left do not deteriorate, meaning that the sites can become crowded. Forestry and Land Scotland, who manage the Munlochy well, have teamed up with local community groups to clean up the site periodically, leaving in place those items which are biodegradable and environmentally friendly, and removing only plastics, polyesters and other items that won’t disintegrate. A major clean-up in 2019 responded to the concerns of locals about the deteriorating condition of the area. In 2022, there was community concern when a visitor decided to clean the site without permission from Forestry and Land Scotland, following a build-up of offerings during the Covid-19 pandemic and tree damage by Storm Arwen.

There are undoubtedly correspondences between the clootie or rag trees and the memorial at The Angel, most obviously the tying of ribbons and pieces of cloth around the branches of trees, or hanging items of clothing from the branches. Some of the emails I received speculated about whether The Angel served a similar function to the holy wells, prompting a feeling that the nearby copse of trees was a place of spiritual significance or power. Unlike at the holy wells, however, the ribbons and cloths tied to the trees seem to be items of remembrance rather than placed there in the hope of healing. This prompts the question of whether the rag tree tradition is adapting and merging with grassroots memorialisation, as the example of the tree in Culloden Woods would suggest. It also raises the question of whether cloth tied to a tree as a memorial would be more likely to be made of fibres that will last, so that the memory is preserved. Or would the disintegration of the cloth over time be experienced as the lost person gradually merging into the surrounding landscape? To what extent, too, does the healing function of the rag tree carry over to the memorial at The Angel, so that tying a cloth or ribbon to the branches not only commemorates a person who has died but also represents a healing ritual for those who have been left behind?

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

The mapping of the holy wells in Ireland and Northern Ireland raises a further question about the delicate balance to be observed between recording and preserving a site and interfering with it. The same sensitivities about removing objects are felt at The Angel and the holy wells, and when I visit the memorial I am careful to disturb the site as little as possible. Like the memorial at The Angel, the holy wells are important to local communities, and the offerings are private and personal to those who leave them. At the same time, it is precisely this grassroots and localised memorial activity that is often overlooked and undocumented; it represents what Professor Keith Lilley from the Hidden Heritage of Holy Wells research team has called ‘small heritage’. By recording the site through sound, our hope is that this project can document the memorial at The Angel of the North, and capture what it means to those who leave objects and tokens there, whilst also respecting the site and the sensitivity of what is being remembered. 

Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

  

References

Alexander Crow, ‘Why Do Celts Hang Rags on Trees?’, Culture Trip, 23 February 2017, Why do Celts Hang Rags on Trees | Culture Trip (theculturetrip.com)

‘Eerie tradition or eyesore? The Clootie Well Clean-Up Row’, 25 January 2002, Eerie tradition or eyesore? The Clootie Well clean-up row – BBC News

Forestry and Land Scotland, ‘Cleaning up the Clootie Well at Munlochy’, Monday 28 October 2019, https://forestryandland.gov.scot/blog/clootie-well-cleanup/

‘Holy wells: mapping Ireland’s hidden heritage’, 7 March 2021, Holy wells: Mapping Ireland’s hidden heritage – BBC News

Jacqueline Simpson and Steven Roud (eds.), A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)

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Media

The Angel of the North and a microphone
Photo credit: David de la Haye

It’s been a busy week as we have focused on trying to reach as many people as we can who have left objects, messages or tokens at the memorial site near The Angel.

David and I went to out to The Angel on a blustery day to meet the university photographer for a press release. You can read the piece here.

I spoke to local journalist Tony Henderson, who could help us reach out to people who live nearby, and who either visit the memorial or might know more about its origins and history. This interview was covered by the Newcastle Journal as well as by The Chronicle. I also had the pleasure of being in conversation at the Angel with Gilly Hope for Radio Newcastle, and Gilly hopes to follow the progress of the project as we develop the sound piece.

We were delighted that there was interest in this story beyond the region, that might help us reach a wider audience. I spoke about the project in the last few minutes of Radio 4’s Today programme as well as on Radio 5 Live. The Guardian covered the story today.

We’d love you to get in touch if you have left memorial objects, messages or tokens at The Angel of the North, at any time. We’d like to record a short conversation with you, the content of which would be defined by you, and we are particularly interested to know what The Angel means to you and the significance to you of what you have placed at the site. All contributions can be anonymous.

We are seeking to create a record of the memorial through a sound work, which will combine extracts from recorded conversations with the sounds of the site, including the resonance of The Angel itself. The piece will be played as part of the Sound Project in the Arches of Newcastle University, and Antony Gormley’s sculpture ‘Clasp’ – which represents two people embracing – is nearby, so anyone listening to the work will be able to see it. Everyone who is recorded for the project will be invited to a launch event in July 2024.  

We’d also love to hear from anyone who knows more about the origin and history of the memorial site, so that we can understand it more fully.

If you are interested in participating in the project, please get in touch with me at: anne.whitehead@newcastle.ac.uk

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Teesmouth

'Temenos' sculpture in Middlesbrough
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead

In a recent visit to Middlesbrough’s Institute of Modern Art, I encountered sound artist Nell Catchpole’s ‘Teesmouth’, a video installation included in the exhibition People Powered: Stories of the River Tees. The original sound piece was commissioned by BBC Radio 3, and it responds to the ecological crisis currently affecting the marine waters around Teesside. The mass die-off of species, including crab and lobster, has been attributed to various causes, including the effects of an algae and the deep dredging of the river Tees.

The landscape that Catchpole explores is the Tees estuary, a place of shifting tides and mudflats that is an important feeding ground for wading birds as well as for the resident colony of harbour seals.  The constant ebb and flow of the sea, as well as the site’s proximity to the heavy shipping of an industrial port, makes Teesmouth, in Catchpole’s description, a place of ‘constant change and flux and exchange’.

Catchpole’s work begins with the sound of the tide washing on the shore, and her reflections on what it means to listen. Listening ‘intimately’, she observes, gives her a sense of ‘connection and solidarity’ with the place. Structured as a walk, the piece brings Catchpole’s own soundmaking and reflections into conversation with others she meets on the way, interlocutors who have a long intimacy with this landscape, and who have witnessed recent changes there. Field recording is described as a way of listening differently, of ‘breaking the habits of filtered listening’ that attend our everyday lives, and of being more ‘expansive’. For Catchpole, this brings into focus a sense of ‘entanglement’ with our surroundings, a feeling of ‘being with’. To enhance this sense of intimacy with the estuary that she documents, Catchpole engages in a playful practice of making sounds with what she finds there – sticks, stones, shells, sand, and grasses. This fosters a process of imaginative engagement, that helps to disrupt her habitual patterns of listening.

Like David, Catchpole uses hydrophones – underwater microphones – to capture the hidden sounds of the tiny creatures that live beneath the mud, revealing the mudflats themselves to be vibrant and noisy environments. These ‘quiet species’ are important to listen to, because they form a vital presence in this landscape, their sounds the noise of creatures that work to repair the damage that has been caused by the toxic waste from former industries. David uses the same microphones in his work to record the species that live in ponds and harbours, and the noisier the recording, the healthier the water is. For our project, contact microphones will capture the resonances of The Angel, and the same principle is at work. In the words of Catchpole, ‘It is important to listen to the quiet, often ignored, hidden sounds of a place.’

The sound of the water is replaced by noises made by Catchpole with sticks, sand and shells, and, like her, we attune ourselves to listening differently. We also hear the noises of the tiny creatures working slowly and minutely in the mud, which counterpoint the human voices that speak of more visible change. Conversations with local residents open up different perspectives on the estuary. A fisherman reports on the death of crabs since the previous September. A walker mimics the singing of the seals which can be heard there on a calm day, but not on that day because it was too windy. A birdwatcher lists the migrants that can be seen out on the mudflats – wheatears, waxwings – and speaks of seeing the thousands of dead crabs that had washed ashore at Teesmouth, reminding us of the intimate entanglement of species. A chorus of human voices are recorded from a protest march, chanting the refrain, ‘Save Our Seas’. The piece closes by returning to the natural sounds of the estuary: the call of a wading bird flying overhead, the wind in the grasses.

Catchpole’s practice of sound making with the materials that are at hand reminds me of David knocking on the panels of The Angel on our first visit. David is also keen to record The Angel in heavy rain, testing with his microphones how the sound of the rainfall would resonate through the sculpture. I am intrigued to find out how these possibilities for producing sound at the site change our imaginative engagement with it. Catchpole’s mingling of human voices with sounds from her field recordings chimes with our hope to combine recordings from our conversations about the memorial with field recordings from, and of, The Angel.

References

Nell Catchpole, Teesmouth (2023). Broadcast on Radio 3, Sounding Change, 14 January 2023. https://www.nellcatchpole.com/projects/teesmouth/