The speed and scale of change is now a matter of scientific fact that in turn generates matters of shared concern for how to imagine and organise a common future. (Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, Thinking with the Harrisons)
Chris finds me in my garden, where I have just moved a beech sapling that had taken root too close to my house, and re-planted it in the hollowed stump of a great ash that had to be felled when I first moved here. I will be delighted if this works and I tell Chris to check back in a few years. Since I first met Chris around fifteen years ago, there have been long periods when we have not been in touch, but our paths sometimes cross in the overlapping space between art and academia, and it is always a pleasure to reconnect. When he heard about this project, Chris got in touch to tell me he had recently moved up to Glasgow from Ayr, and as he was now nearby, he offered to walk with me.
After walking with so many artists recently (Kyriaki, Deirdre, Ellie), this is a great opportunity to talk with someone who researches, teaches and produces EcoArt – an art of connections and relationships with place and environment, which often suggests new ways of being in and engaging with the world around us. Chris convenes ecoartscotland – an online resource on art and ecology – and is a Lecturer in Art at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen (part of Robert Gordon University). We met in Ayr during my first academic job at the University of the West of Scotland, when we were involved in a partnership project with South Ayrshire Council and some of the main arts organisations in the region. At the time, Chris wrote favourably about a performance I directed at the Robert Burns Birthplace museum in Alloway. We have been following each other’s work since then, and I am currently enjoying his recently published book about ‘thinking with’ the environmental artists known as the Harrisons.
It is raining heavily as we start our walk and I photograph the concentric circles created in the woodland pools – an appropriate image for the 100 circles that I am making here. That this place seems to invite artistic representation and interpretation perhaps partly explains why my project has attracted so many artists to walk with me. I have certainly found it harder to connect with scientists and others who take a more empirical approach to understanding ecosystems.
Chris offers a different take on this: he suggests that the way that science is funded, taught and carried out in the modern university is conditioned by ‘technocratic’ structures that demand measurable outputs and quantifiable impact (in service of a technological elite). This means that it can be difficult for some to justify spending time outside their typical work processes to go on adventures without clearly defined endpoints. I feel this tension, too. Both Chris and I are in the midst of marking and moderation and endless meetings in the final weeks of the year. To carve out over an hour for a walk around a peatbog with little sense of what this might reveal or lead to, is a leap of faith. Chris suggests that artists might be more able to meet opportunities like this with a willing spirit and open mind. I think there may be some truth in this, but I am also sure that I will find some hard scientists who have a similar curiosity and disregard of institutional expectations.
The Harrisons paid careful attention to the complexities of the environments that they worked within. Their work, which often involved large scale plans and interventions in landscapes and across entire regions, was developed through deep immersion in places and the careful building of relationships with the people who lived and worked there. Chris’s book tells us that the Harrisons ‘position themselves as generalists in conversation with whoever can support their learning of the issues of a place’. I am also seeking a ‘growing ecological awareness’ of this place that I have chosen to live beside. And it is this practice of walking and talking that is making this happen. My conversations with artists over the last few weeks and months have helped me to realise that this slow meandering process is itself the work, and that measurable outputs and impact are not the point of doing this.
We reach the place that I previously visited with Ruairidh, Jill and James and see the latest move in an ongoing war of attrition. The land between the path and the trees, where my children often play on the swing, was originally becoming damaged with an exposed peat layer that became very muddy after wet weather. When I walked with Jill, we found that a section of fencing had been placed over the ground as a makeshift boardwalk. During my more recent walk with James, we saw a pond being created in the middle of this area, which I surmised at the time was to prevent access as much as it was to diversify habitats. Today, I notice that the fencing has been replaced in a curve around the pond. I am fairly sure that it is the original section, but it looks like another part of the exclosure by the boardwalk has also been removed. I wonder what the next move will be in this battle, which only seems to subject the bog to futile one-upmanship. My growing awareness of the ecology of this place is also a deeper understanding of the human politics and social dynamics of the site.
We stand and look out over the bog as the rain gives way to a gentle glow. Chris wonders how we can get people to value a place like this and invest in its future. We talk about community ownership and how much easier it is to bring people into a relationship with woodland sites. The Moss is complex and may be harder to understand and appreciate.
Lenzie Moss is subject to the scale and speed of change that defines the current ecological crisis. Scientists can measure this and evidence it, and when I eventually manage to persuade some to walk with me, I hope I will learn something about how sites like this are impacted by wider environmental forces. But the Harrisons understood that a scientific knowledge of a place like this only becomes meaningful when the state of things brings us together, and leads us to imagine what the future might be. Chris has helped me understand how powerful art can be in that project. And if that doesn’t justify an hour trudging round a bog in the rain, then I don’t know what does.
