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 third part of the work, ‘Spring’. You can listen to this section here.In this instalment, I focus on the participants’ experience of returning to The Angel after they had placed the memorial tribute there. I ask: What is the ongoing relation to the place?
Our first participant returned to The Angel one or two weeks later, to see what – if anything – remained of the tribute. On this occasion, the weather was fine and the site was busy, with bus trips and a group of people in the memorial garden. He had chosen the same time of the week to go back, and the man who had been there on the first occasion was out walking his dog again. As our participant expected, there was no trace left of his memorial tribute, and he took a photograph of the place where it had been. He found comfort in the knowledge that his wife would have approved, as well as in the idea of The Angel becoming her guardian.
Our second participant returned to the site with her mother and brother, and they hung tributes in the tree together. Whenever she speaks to her mother of visiting the tree, her mother always asks what is left from when they visited last. After her friend died of cancer, our participant commemorated her alongside her brother, as they had shared the same birthday. Her more recent tributes were not ribbons but flowers, in the colours of football teams where appropriate, because they ‘just . . . go back into the earth’. She has also left a five-pointed willow star, and five little brass bells, because five is a number with particular familial significance. The participant’s ritual at The Angel has changed over time, so that she now takes a little picnic and the playlist that she compiled for her friend when she was sick. On each visit, she takes photographs of the tree and shares them with her family and friends, reflecting that it is particularly important to her that those who live so far away know that her loved ones are still important to her. She has pinned the tree in her maps, and she describes it as having many lines of connection that radiate out across the world.
While our first participant saw the tribute as a singular event and our second participant described it as an evolving ritual, for both of them the act of returning to – and photographing – the site was both important and meaningful. The act was seen to be significant in terms of the approval of others – whether of the deceased, or of family members far away. The timing of the return to the memorial was also carefully considered, whether this was in terms of the time of the week or for the commemoration of a birthday.
This section of the sound piece incorporates birdsong from the trees at the memorial site. The field recordings are more lively and vibrant than in the winter months, with the chatter of visitors and the sounds of children playing audible alongside the traffic and the vibrations resonating through 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.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
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.
Photo credit: Anne WhiteheadPhoto credit: Anne Whitehead
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.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
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.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
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.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
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.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
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.
This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.
In my posts for January and February, I observed that the plants growing at The Angel site were largely the sculptural grasses and seed heads from last year’s flowers. The site is exposed to the high winds of the winter storms and these plants have bent and bowed as successive storms have passed through. Low to the ground, they are less vulnerable to damage than the trees of the copse that forms the main memorial site. Some of the branches of the outer trees of the copse have blown down, and the memorial tributes hanging from them have been scattered by the winds across the ground nearby.
In the field surrounding The Angel, catkins are forming on the trees: an unmistakable sign that the season is turning. This Spring is warm but wet and the ground is muddy underfoot, especially on the path that runs through the trees. Visitors to The Angel linger to look at the tributes at the entrance to the copse, but do not often venture further in.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Those visitors who do walk through the copse are rewarded by the sight of clumps of daffodils growing under the trees. These are a cultivated variety of miniature daffodils and their location beneath the trees amid the memorial tributes suggests that they have been planted in a memorial capacity. Their yellow blooms glow against the muddy paths and represent a sign of hope in the aftermath of recent storms.
Visitors regularly leave floral tributes in the trees, tying them to the trunks with the florists’ wrapping still around them or placing them on the ground next to other memorial objects. Flowers will also sometimes be left at the feet of The Angel. This form of tribute echoes the act of leaving flowers at a grave, or the tying of flowers to benches or railings at other grassroots memorial sites. Sometimes the flowers at The Angel are accompanied by messages, while other tributes are left anonymously.
The daffodils planted in the trees at The Angel represent a different kind of gesture. Their annual flowering suggests that The Angel is seen as a more lasting or permanent memorial site that could be visited over a number of years. The flowers, interspersed in clumps throughout the trees and clustered at the centre of the copse, do not belong to any one person but speak, instead, of an anonymity-amid-the-collective that characterises many of the tributes left at the site.
The flowering of the daffodils speaks to the ephemerality of many of the tributes left at The Angel. Every time I visit the memorial it is different: objects have been laid down or removed, or sometimes they have changed position within the site. As this monthly series of cyanotype blog posts documents, the site also changes with the seasons. In March, the daffodils are briefly visible in the trees and become a prominent feature of the memorial site, although they would pass unnoticed at any other time of the year. In asking what The Angel represents for those who leave memorial tributes there, it is therefore also important to consider when it is being visited. The area in the trees feels very different according to the season, and even to the time of day. Documenting such a site accordingly necessitates a slow methodology that consists of repeated visits over an extended period of time. Only then is it possible to capture the ephemeral and fleeting aspects of the site, alongside its more stable and permanent features.
