stone

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.

21 November 20232 June 2024

Bottles

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.

13 October 202314 October 2023

In her poignant and powerful collection of poems, A Fine Yellow Dust, written in the year following her daughter’s suicide, Laura Apol includes the poem ‘Patient Stone’. The poem is based in an Iranian tradition that when your pain is overwhelming, you go in search of your ‘patient stone’. Once you have found it, you sit alone with it and tell it your story. As you unburden yourself, your pain will lessen and once you reach the end of your story, the stone will break into pieces.

Apol’s poem records an afternoon of searching for her own ‘patient stone’, so that it can hold something of her overwhelming grief. She accords agency to the stone, believing not that she will find it but that ‘it will find me’. But what stone would be the right one for the task? She asks, ‘How large is a stone / that can manage this work?’ Should she carry it home with her when she has found it? Once it has broken into pieces, should she visit it? She concludes by reflecting that she will need to find ‘the right stone’, because, whole or broken, ‘it will be mine for life’.

A few days before the last anniversary of my sister’s death, I was on Lindisfarne, a tidal island just off the Northumberland coast. I had wanted to find a stone on the beach here that would mark this anniversary, and I wandered along the strand looking at the pebbles. I was drawn to the smooth, oval-shaped stones, coloured like the sand, that were piled there. Picking them up, they sat well in my hand, and they had a pleasing weight and heft to them. Turning over one of the stones, I saw that it had been inscribed in pen with a name and date, and I liked the idea that this stone had already been picked up and held by someone else. I put the stone in my bag and continued my walk around the perimeter of the island to the causeway, accompanied by the sound of seals singing on a sandbar just offshore.

It was only when I examined the stone more closely at home that I realised the date that had been marked in pen on its surface was 28 August 2021. Not only had this stone already been picked out by someone else, but it had been inscribed on the anniversary of my sister’s death. It felt that this was the ‘right stone’, and that, even as I had been looking for it, it had found me.

I had recently attended an online weaving course run by Sarah Ward of Lark and Bower. Sarah teaches off-loom weaving, which uses left over yarn to stitch basic weave structures, such as twill and herringbone, around everyday found objects. Instead of writing or drawing on the stone, I decided to make a weaving around it, a practice reminiscent of the Japanese art of wrapping stones. Choosing a plain, natural thread that toned with the sand-hued pebble, I wrapped the warp threads carefully around the stone, working from left to right. I then stitched the weft threads through the warp in a two-twill pattern, working across the width of the pebble from bottom to top. The weaving was a slow and meditative process, taking several days to complete.

I sat with this stone, not to tell it the story of my grief, but to weave around it a thread that, as I was winding and stitching, held memories of my sister. The process of weaving was slow and patient work. The yarn covered over, without erasing, the pen inscription that had already been made on the stone, so that the finished work took on a palimpsestic quality. The stone currently sits on a bookshelf in my study, and I often pick it up and hold it for a minute or so, feeling its weight and texture in my hand.

In her workshops, Sarah encourages participants to place their woven objects back where they found them. For her, it is a cathartic process to return these objects to their original surroundings, enhanced by the weaving. The thread used is a natural yarn, which will degrade naturally over time. I wonder what this stone would look like back on the beach at Lindisfarne, taking its place amongst the other oval pebbles. Would the weaving gradually disappear, eroded by the action of weather and the tides, to uncover the writing once more? Would another person encounter this stone and imbue it with their own meaning and significance, adding another layer to the palimpsest? Would it feel cathartic to return it to the beach on Holy Island, or would it feel as if I am leaving something precious behind?

I have long intended to walk across the causeway to Holy Island, as many pilgrims do each year. Perhaps I could carry the stone with me as I do so, and end the walk by returning it to the strand. This gesture would honour the spirit of Sarah’s workshop by giving the stone back to the island and to the sea.

Lindisfarne Castle with boat in foreground — Picture Credit: Anne Whitehead

References

Laura Apol, A Fine Yellow Dust (East Lancing, Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2021).