Tag: water

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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/

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Sketchbook

Sketchbook on a desk
Photograph credit: Anne Whitehead

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.        

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Sea Cyanotype

Cyanotype of the sea
Image credit: © Anne Whitehead, Sea Cyanotype, Redcar, 2022.

The image I have chosen for the page that introduces the Relating Suicide project is of a cyanotype. One of the earliest forms of photography, the cyanotype process does not need a camera. Instead, the object that is ‘photographed’ is placed directly onto a surface that has been coated with chemicals. Glass is laid over the object to flatten it onto the surface and it is then placed in direct sunlight. The coating on the paper gradually changes colour, the speed at which this happens being dependent on the strength of the sun. This represents the exposure of the image. To develop the image, the glass and object are removed from the surface, and the object appears in negative. Once immersed in water, the chemicals deepen to the dark cyan blue that characterises the cyanotype, and the object appears in white against this ground. The surface that is treated is usually paper, although fabric and other materials can also form the basis of a cyanotype.

I started to experiment with cyanotypes at the beginning of lockdown. Even though it was early in the year, the start of lockdown was marked by sunny days. I made my first cyanotype on fabric in my garden, using one of the plants that was growing there, and I was immediately hooked. Through successive lockdowns, I cyanotyped the different plants that grew in my garden or that I encountered on my walks. Developed onto fabric, the images enabled me to stitch in added detail. Gathering these cyanotypes together, I realised that I had created an archive of my lockdown experience. I stitched the cyanotypes into two albums, bound between fabric covers recycled from tops I no longer wore. I wrote about my lockdown cyanotypes for my good friend Kate Davies’ blog, and you can read the post here.

More recently, I have experimented with cyanotypes of plants and objects gathered on the beach at Redcar where my sister died. I like to walk there, and I often pick up small treasures along the way – a pebble, a feather, a strand of seaweed. The lockdown cyanotypes were created using the process described above, which is known as dry cyanotype because the chemicals have been allowed to dry on the treated surface before the object is placed on them. For the beach cyanotypes, I have mostly used the technique of wet cyanotype, so called because the object is placed on the surface when the chemicals are still wet. This allows the addition of other materials into the chemical mix, including dilute vinegar, sea salt or turmeric powder. The result is more unpredictable than with the dry method but it can be beautiful. I have written about the beach cyanotypes in a blog post for Bloomsbury Press, which you can read here.

The cyanotype pictured on this page takes the sea as its object. Unlike many of the beach cyanotypes, it uses pre-treated paper because it was impractical to coat the paper when I was at the beach. But as a dry cyanotype, it collapses the distinction between the exposure and the developing stages. With the sea as its object, the cyanotype is exposed by dipping the paper into the edge of the tide and letting the receding pull of the water create the negative image. This already merges into the submersion of the paper into water for the developing stage, meaning that the image captures a part of the cyanotype process – the washing away of the chemicals – that is normally invisible.

This experimental cyanotype of the sea’s edge feels resonant to me with the subject of relating suicide.  It is made in the place where my sister died and, on the anniversary of her death, it records a unique moment in time as the tide washes over the paper. I have written in my book about grief’s disturbance of time, and I used the tide clock that hangs in my kitchen to represent the rhythmic ebb and flow of time that commonly characterises grief. This image records both a washing away and a staining, which also speaks to me of what it means to visit this beach to remember my sister’s death.