ordinary – Anne Whitehead

6 June 20246 June 2024

June

Grass against blue ground — Image 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.

The month of June has brought into flower the different grasses that grow in the field on which The Angel of the North stands. Attending to these plants requires a different scale of vision from looking at The Angel, as well as adjusting the gaze downward. Cyanotypes of the grasses bring out the sculptural beauty of their forms, which are easily overlooked.

I wrote in my post on the month of May about the significance for the memorial site of dwelling with the ordinariness of things, and this month’s homage to the grasses that grow there continues in this vein. These plants are not exceptional or extraordinary, but looking at them closely reveals their distinctive beauty. I have often used the term grassroots memorial to describe the memorial in the trees at The Angel. This phrase, which registers that the memorial site is rooted in the spontaneous, collective activities of ordinary people, has its origin in the roots of grasses as a fundamental layer from which growth takes place.

The Sounding the Angel project documents the memorial site through sound. I have written in this blog of the rustling of the leaves in the trees as one of the defining sounds of the memorial site in the summer months. Although less audible, the whispering of the grasses can also be heard alongside them, as they variously bend or shake in the wind.

The images of the grasses above have all been made using the dry cyanotype method, which involves placing the plant onto paper when the chemicals that develop the image have dried. The grace and elegance of these cyanotypes prompted me also to develop images of the grasses using the wet cyanotype method, which I have described in a previous post.

This technique enables a greater range of effects, even if it is less predictable in outcome.

This image captures the feel of the grasses swaying in the wind, and turmeric sprinkled onto the wet paper enhances its sense of life and movement.

Here, the textured background has been created by placing a layer of cling film onto the glass during the exposure of the image.

Here’s another variation, which combines the two techniques. The pooling of vinegar spray on the cling film has caused a rich variety of blues to emerge.

The cyanotype methods differ in their effects, but they both capture the structural beauty of the grasses. These plants define the site of The Angel in June, and this post both captures and celebrates the range of different species that grow there.

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 September 202326 September 2023

Sketchbook

In the first session of the Losing a Twin at Birth project, artist Kate Sweeney handed out sketchbooks to the parents, so that they could use the inks made in the sessions to draw images. I was also offered a sketchbook and I used it to record my thoughts on the sessions with the parents. I found that this way of notetaking enabled me to reflect on the language we had been working with, as well as on the process of ink making itself.

In our introductory sessions with the parents, we shared conversation over a cup of tea. As a way of demonstrating that inks can be made from the most everyday materials, Kate used the teabags to create an ‘ink’ that was brought into the second session and used to experiment with different kinds of mark making. We thought together about how the ink itself constituted an archive of the first session, preserving the tea that each person had chosen, and distilling an essence of our conversation.

sketchbook page with notes and pictures — Image credit: Anne Whitehead

In my sketchbook entry following the first session, I reflected on the language of infusion to represent both the ink-making process and the methodology of the project. Looking up infusion, I found the following definitions listed.

(1) to steep in liquid (such as water) so as to extract the soluble constituents or principles. This was resonant both with the immersion of the teabag in water to make the tea that we drank together in the session, and Kate’s further steeping of the used teabags to make the inks. The ritual of making the tea framed our conversation, acting as a model for how making the inks from the materials collected by the parents would facilitate our conversations about their experiences of loss.

(2) to cause to be permeated with something that alters, usually for the better. This sense of infusion develops the first meaning to suggest that the act of steeping can also be transformative, producing a change. This represented our shared hope that by making the inks and the film, we would be able to make a positive change.

(3) to inspire or animate. Kate’s film-making process involves the animation of drawings, and this meaning of infusion seemed to anticipate the ways in which she would imbue the parents’ ink drawings with something new, infusing them with a different life and energy.

In the second sessions with the parents, Kate gave them the inks she had made from the teabags. The liquid had darkened to a peaty colour, due to the effect of the materials used to preserve it. Kate explained that this was known in dye making as the ‘saddening’ process. As we explored the materials that the parents had brought in from their memory walks, we talked in greater depth about their experiences of grief, and the sessions felt that they too were infused with a deeper sorrow than our first conversations. My sketchbook page following these sessions reflects on the meanings of ‘to sadden’: (1) ‘to deepen colours by the addition of additives’; (2) ‘to cause to feel sorrow; to become sad’.

In the third session of the project, Kate gave the parents the inks she had made from the materials collected on their memory walks. We then used the inks to draw and write with. Kate drew a butterfly with water and dabbed in the inks, which diffused across the paper to suggest the shape of wings. Our conversations focused on the parents’ hopes for the film. They wanted the film to give comfort to other parents who had experienced the same loss by showing that, although the grief does not go away, it is possible to live beside it as a family.

Sketchbook page with notes and images — Image credit: Anne Whitehead

My sketchbook notes following this session reflect on the meanings of diffusion. In science, diffusion refers to the spreading of one substance into another as a result of the random motion of molecules. This was what we had witnessed together, as the ink dispersed through the water on Kate’s drawing to form butterfly wings. By extension, diffusion also refers to the dissemination of knowledge, and this picked up the parents’ desire to circulate their experience to others through the film. As we watched the ink pull through the water, it felt to me that there was something there too of the lost twin’s delicate trace in the lives of the remaining family.

My sketchbook enabled me to think with, rather than about, the creative process that Kate was using to make the inks and film. My notes documented the ways in which aspects of the creative process infused our conversations, meaning that the language of ink making became expressive of the phases of the project itself.