ecological – Anne Whitehead

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

In a previous post, I have written about the inclusion of Where We Will Go in the ‘Communities and Change’ exhibition, hosted by Newcastle Contemporary Art as part of the 2023 Memory Studies Association conference. The Memory Studies journal has recently published a special issue related to the conference and, in one of the articles, organisers Catherine Gilbert and Alison Atkinson-Phillips reflect on the various works that were displayed in the exhibition.

Catherine and Alison note that, in curating the exhibition, there was a strong desire to embed the conference in place and to connect with local communities. They observe that there was a particular poignancy to the inclusion of the Amber Collective in the exhibition, because the Side Gallery – their permanent exhibition space in Newcastle – had recently closed due to a lack of funds. Special screenings of two Amber films documented the long history of industrial loss on Tyneside and its impact on local communities. The short film from our project was connected to place through the activity of walking, and it was positioned in the gallery so that it was in conversation with Henna Asikainen’s ecological installation Delicate Shuttle. Asikainen had walked with people who had experienced migration and displacement, and they had gathered white poplar leaves which were dispersed across a large white wall of the gallery space. Similarly, Kate had invited the parents participating in our project to walk in a place that was meaningful to them, and gather materials that could be used as the basis for the inks. The act of gathering materials and transforming them into another form is a powerful one, and the white poplar leaves reminded me of the rose petals that the parents brought into the workshop, so carefully assembled and preserved. These materials are fragile, even when they have been preserved, and as Catherine and Alison note, they can speak as much of the dispersal of memory as of its conservation in the archive.

Leaves and petals connect human memories with the more-than-human, reminding us that acts of memory are as much expressions of ecological as cultural community. The question of community was at the heart of the exhibition and many of the installations considered different scales of community. Kate’s film was one of the most intimate communities represented in the exhibition, working as it did at the scale of the family. I have documented in previous posts our encounter, in the course of the project, with the ways in which the loss of a twin at birth resonates across multiple generations of a family as well as rippling out to affect friendship networks. This experience of complex grief is difficult to speak about, and, like the other artworks displayed, Kate’s short film demonstrated that words are not the only way to convey grief. The gathering of materials and making of the inks formed an important act of memorialisation in itself, and the drawings that the parents and the siblings made with the inks provided a further testament to their loss.

One of the key questions raised by the staging of the exhibition was the place of creative-critical works within a discipline such as memory studies, which has predominantly focused on the traditional academic outputs of the article and the monograph. Catherine and Alison open their article by reflecting on exactly this question:

The imaginative, and often speculative, approaches afforded by creative inquiry enable creative practitioners to interpret memory in material and embodied ways that are not always easily translated into traditional journal articles. As a community of scholars, it is important that Memory Studies takes this kind of creative-critical inquiry seriously as contributions to the field – not (only) as objects of study from which meanings are extracted and interpreted as a quest to produce knowledge, but as alternative forms of research ‘output’, producing and displaying knowledge on and in its own terms. (p. 354)

These are important questions for the field to address. How can memory studies become more inclusive of creative practice, when it is premised on particular forms and modes of publication and dissemination? What does it mean to value process as well as ‘output’? Which aspects of memory might most effectively be opened up through creative practice? It is becoming more common to see creative exhibitions or performances staged alongside academic conferences and this is a welcome development. At the same time, such creative responses are often not fully integrated into the conference programme, featuring instead as a venue for mingling over lunch or at a wine reception, and/or as a space to visit for reflection between sessions. A final question, then, might be: How could the conference format, as a key expression of the academic community of a field, evolve to become more inclusive of creative-critical practice contributions?

With many thanks to Catherine and Alison for curating the exhibition and writing an article that enabled creative-critical practice to feature in the special issue of Memory Studies.

References

Alison Atkinson-Phillips and Catherine Gilbert, ‘Creatively imagining communities: The Communities and Change exhibition’, Memory Studies 18.2 (2025), pp. 354-62. You can access the article here.

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

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

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

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

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

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