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51º 13′ N 4º 24′ E (The Island at Noon)
This work uses drawing as a device to collapse distance and time. Working
with images from Google Earth I use repeated hatch marks to explore the landscape of elsewhere - places once familiar that
are not longer visited - or watercolours to depict holiday destinations that reveal the digital traces of a lost presence.
Sitting beside the drawing is a plant grown from seeds gathered at the location depicted - a tropical plant struggling
to survive through the English winter. This work is part of TOPOPHOBIA - an exhibition and publication funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
TOPOPHOBIA is currently showing at the Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London (13 January - 19 February 2012), and tours to
the Bluecoat, Liverpool, and Spacex, Exeter, during the spring and summer 2012. See www.TOPOPHOBIA.co.uk for full details
or exhibiting artists, gallery dates, opening times and locations, and information about the publication. TOPOPHOBIA is an Eggebert-and-Gould curatorial project.
www.TOPOPHOBIA.co.uk
At a Distance: Dawn Chorus - in collaboration with Fae Logie
Bert Flinn
Forest, Canada 49° 17' N 122° 52' looking East
Epping
Forest, England 51° 38' N 0° 1' E looking West
Blackbird Turdus merula American Robin Turdus migratorius Canada
Goose Branta Canadensis Swainson’s Thrush Catharus ustulatus Robin Erithacus
rubecula Spotted Towhee Pipilo maculates Tree Creeper Certhia familiaris Black-capped
Chickadee Poecile atricapilla Tawny Owl Strix aluco Black-headed Grosbeak Pheucticus
melanocephalus Great Spotted Woodpecker Dendrocopos major Western Tanager Piranga
ludoviciana Carrion Crow Corvus corone White-crowned Sparrow Zonotrichia leucophrys
Jay Garrulus glandarius Western Wood-Pewee Contopus sordidulus Great Tit Parus
major Woodpigeon Columba palumbus
At
a Distance – Dawn Chorus inkjet print and audio
This work, one of the ongoing series At a Distance, sets out to test the computer screen as a device through which to engage with distant and local
landscapes; how we might turn away from the screen and take that ‘superfluous body’ back into the real environment,
the immense geographic landscape. Eggebert and Logie brought the dawn chorus from one distant landscape to another -
playing the forest birds of Porty Moody and Chingford to each other. Hearing ‘elsewhere’ in the local
environment (the wrong song in the wrong forest) renders the familiar strange while playing with the absurd idea that birds
are designated a national identity. At a Distance - Dawn Chorus is showing in the Bird Room at Valentines Mansion
until February 2010.
Folly # 4 (grotto) digital print Sarah Cole and Anne Eggebert were
commissioned to make new works in response to Valentines Mansion, Ilford,
Essex, at the early stages of its Heritage Lottery funded restoration. The starting
point
for their work was the discovery of remnants of vintage wallpaper (circa 1950)
depicting Venetian landscape vignettes on the walls of the former servants
quarters on the upper floors of the house.
Cole and Eggebert's interest lies
in the peopling of these images and how their representation provides décor for
the house while promoting a being elsewhere at the beginnings of the travel
leisure industry in Europe. They made
a video work that seeks out the locations in Venice of the wallpaper’s drawn
motifs and a series of photographs capturing a 21st century leisure pursuit,
freerunning, over the mansion’s follies. Freerunner athletes test the historic landscape not as a view
but as a multiplicity of surfaces to be physically encountered - the folly of a
playful and foolhardy action that finds a use for the ‘useless extravagant
structures’ of the historic landscape. A play on local historic space
that finds an alternative trajectory through it as all elements encountered
within the landscape become surface. A gondolier navigates the tight acoustic waterways off the Grand Canal, a freerunner
flows with ease across the multiple surfaces of the Mansion's follies, and a market stall parasol unfurls obstinately across
the view of the wallpaper's Rialto. Research into and arising from
this artwork was presented at the Living
Landscapes conference in Aberystwyth in June 2009. The exhibition Folly
- a series of drawings (including Around 400 Bridges in
collaboration with local people), videos, and photographs - was shown in the
Gallery and Dovecote at Valentine's Mansion during September and October 2009. Folly works © Sarah Cole
and Anne Eggebert 2009.
Traces drawing on
tracing paper
Nothing now remains
of the vintage wallpaper except for a photograph and this drawing. In the 1950s
someone must have chosen
this paper during the period of post-war optimism. Home décor began to reflect (or promote) the start of the
leisure travel industry – an anticipation of our own image in those
scenes. As Urry proposes, the tourist gaze is directed to features of landscape
and townscape which separate
them off from everyday experience.
The wallpaper vignette is in this way separated off from the everyday
yet surrounds it – the view is at once ‘in some sense out of the ordinary’ and
everyday.
Flow #1
(Inscribing the arc)
video projection still, duration 27 minutes
Absorbed in performing the role of a gondolier, the
protagonist in his stripy shirt takes the viewer on a journey through the
narrow waterways of Venice and the open panoramas of the Grand Canal. The gondolier’s
rhythmic, gentle
movement carves out an arc upon the wall of the dovecote, and the watery
soundscape echoes within the cavernous surrounds.
I’ve seen it all before
video projection still - duration 25 minutes
One of the wallpaper vignettes showed a scene of a church -
the San Giacomo di Rialto church beside the steps to the Rialto Bridge. This
video shows a time-lapse view of
the market stall which blocks then reveals the view of the church. The stallholders
perform the daily
rituals of erecting and dismantling their stall to sell curiously shaped pasta
to tourists – each bite another little scene of Venice.
The Google Earth image in this pencil drawing is Lombardenvest in Antwerp where the first florilegium
was printed - Adriaen Collaert's engravings for this include Dianthus (I looked at copy in the British Library - a
small and fragile little book) and so that is the accompanying plant. I liked the play between 'flower of the gods'
(Dianthus) and the 'god's eye view' of Google. The development of 'florilegium', in 1590, rather than 'herbal'
indicates the shift between the plant as product for medicinal or other application and pleasure (i.e. plant collection for
aesthetic purposes) - the trade associated with the importation of exotic flowers also necessarily coincided with extensive
mapping of the globe and a shift from vertical to horizontal perspectives on the world. Close scrutiny of the plant
(introduced to Europe shortly before Collaert drew it; bought locally at Homebase) tests the idea of collapsing time and distance
- 419 years and 196 miles.
51º 13′ N 4º 24′ E was made specifically for 'Altered Sequence' at E:vent Gallery September - October 2009 (see also eggebert-and-gould work Darwin for the same exhibition).
Altered Sequence presented 'works that, in different ways, rearrange natural orders and sequences'. Exhibition
image below courtesy Colm Lally, E:vent curator.
Not really landscape; not quite a view series
Not really landscape, not quite a view no. 5 C-type print
This onging series
of medium format photographs tests encounters with the local landscape, a landscape that doesn't quite reveal the promised
vista; that refuses a view. I have been thinking about the problem of imaging the landscape, and why, as Lyotard writes
in 'Scapeland', we are always necessarily estranged from it. The surface of the image holds us in check - it alludes
to the promise of the vista provided throughout Western history, from Poussin to Capability Brown to Constable and on
through the imagery of the travel leisure industry. But these real spaces reveal fecundity, a too-muchness, without
a space for the human form; local wild green spaces butting up against the edge of tarmac or (horti)culture, against the surface
of the image. Their wildness overwhelms and a sense of the superfluousness of the human body comes into play. Unable to
imagine ourselves in these spaces - spaces outside of time in a continuous present - lush, gentle and terrible, nature
holds us at bay; but the eye seeks the illusion or trace of human agency. Two
of the Not Really Landscape series were shown in Transition Gallery's 'Sehnsucht’ part of the JTP09 at James Taylor Gallery during October - November 2009.
Not really landscape, not quite a view no. 4
C-type print
Not really landscape, not quite a view no. 2
C-type print
.
Fragile paradise series
Fragile paradise no. 2 C-type print
Slowness, scrutiny and a lingering presence sit at odds with the panic
of contemporary commodity culture. East London allotments - Vic's
allotment - with their recycled CD bird scarers, plastic bottle cloches and
cane tops, and skip-wood structures reveal an alternative way of being in the
world. The allotment landscape might function too as an exemplar of
Massey's idea of the 'throwntogetherness' of place - landscape as a
spacio/temporal event. The troublesome 'real environment' that demands an
embodied engagement with it and those we encounter in it - the sharing of
knowledge, a tenderness of tending and labour render these fragile spaces
earthly paradises.
.
96cm x 52cm, pencil on paper
The source material for this drawing combines satellite photography and
a botanical specimen gathered from a location defined by a navigational system as 51˚44’ N 0˚28’E. This location is also the place from which
Britain’s first live radio entertainment broadcast was transmitted, where Dame Nellie Melba sang into the ether (after
first misunderstanding the purpose of the huge transmitter antenna and refusing to sing from the top of it). The satellite image reveals an unexpected visual reference to an outmoded audio technology; the cassette
tape.
The digital, analogue and autographic – a drawing about place and
attempting to engage with it and how it might be represented as contemporary landscape; a drawing, a specific frequency of
marks, made at a distance (while listening to the shipping forecast and something that is ‘losing its identity’
over North Utsire, South Utsire). The local - close scrutiny of the minutiae
of vegetable matter growing just within my reach behind a chain link fence watched by CCTV - sits beside the global –
distant aerospace teletechnology returns its view by radio signal to earth, flipping the landscape from the vertical to the
horizontal. I poke my hand through the fence and cut a plant that grows
at the edge of a rectangular pool (industrial rather than ornamental) full of thick green water, mindful that the cameras
may mistake my secateurs for wire cutters.
51˚44’
N 0˚28’E detail
Chigwell Row Wood
Eggebert's video commission for
homelife, a public arts event
in Chigwell Row Wood Local Nature Reserve, reveals what the woodland means to local people. Using the languages of documentary and an anthropological gaze Chigwell Row Wood is an exploration of ‘Englishness’
and landscape. Members of the local community – those who use and shape
the forest – speak of the woodland, revealing what it means to them through their memories and anecdotes as they attempt to describe their landscape. Most struggle to describe the forest, the topographical features, the aesthetic and material nature of
the woodland, and turn back to their narratives revealing how they and others activate the space. We are taken on journeys through lives, histories and into
underground dens; land is lost and gained, shaped and cared for, lakes and roadways are dug by prisoners and the unemployed,
boys poach and fight; but, paradoxically all speak of the peace and quiet of the forest.
A Gypsy child is born in a snowstorm; ownership and land rights are thrown into
question as the government removes people from the forest land. A boy shoves
poached pheasant down a rabbit hole while teenagers terrorise each other in their forest landscape replete with weapons. A place of doubtful natural formations emerges; ponds are made by German bombs while
prisoners of war build roads around the forest. The landscape is both threatened
and threatening when mysterious lights glow amongst the dawn trees. Contradictions
and fictions emerge both through the contributors’ narratives and the framing of them in the forest landscape.
This is one of a series of works that
explore and critique notions of national identity articulated through landscape and how we describe landscape in the 21st
century. Chigwell Row Wood explores the idea of the betweenness
of place; that we
find ourselves caught between an objective and a subjective reality that impacts upon our idea of place and our sense of identity;
and how our understanding of place can both be disrupted and enhanced through narrative and subjective histories; that place is always understood from
a particular point of view and that our sense of place is anecdotal.
For homelife Chigwell Row Wood was installed on a TV monitor amongst
the forest trees. Chigwell Row Wood was the second
commission for Border Dialogues – a three year Epping Forest Arts project funded by ACE to take artworks to a wider
audience across the EFA district.
Chigwell Row Wood - video still
Chigwell Row Wood and other works -
installation view
The
following works were also shown on a laptop computer in the forest for the homelife event:
5am, 18th May 2007 (video, duration 2
hours)
The forest is slowly revealed across the two hours of daybreak from darkness to the moment that the
sunlight falls to the forest floor: a solitary dog-walker and the occasional wild creature pass through the frame while the
explosive exuberance of the dawn chorus reveals the richness of the woodland wildlife. The forest refuses to become the
spectacle of landscape; it becomes visible yet remains hidden amongst the trees.
Voice
Over (video, duration 10 minutes)
For this work children create an audio landscape of their local ancient woodland for exchange
with children located in the west country beside another woodland (Haldon Forest, a pine plantation in Devon). The camera focuses on the surface of the spring forest canopy; the surface confronts the viewer as an impenetrable wall
of foliage while the children attempt, through their descriptions, to reveal the forest to us.
At a Distance,
2 (live MSN link)
A live on-line link was made available for audience members
in the forest of Chigwell Row Wood and those at the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World located
in Haldon Forest, Devon (http://www.ccanw.co.uk/) to exchange descriptions of the landscapes they found themselves in.
Matching Green
Using the languages of documentary and an anthropological gaze this video installation, Matching
Green, is an exploration of ‘Englishness’ and the quintessential village green. Members of the community of Matching Green speak of the green and what it means to them through their memories
and anecdotes. They also try to describe the green; some struggle with a description
of the topographical features, the aesthetic and material nature of the green, and turn back to their narratives revealing
how they and others activate the space.
They speak
of social activity, public gatherings, spaces of communication, rural poverty, economic migration, arrivals and leavings,
land rights and ownership, the pleasures and hardships the age of oil has brought.
Their narratives allude to a speaking between the lines and hint at off-camera asides and undercurrents; a family history
of loss and longing that bind a talented child to place and so nurture the village eccentric; American aircrew kindnesses
and losses and what they left behind; and the vicious battle raging around the proposed new cricket pavilion.
The ecologist, the young and the elderly tell us what is actually there; a passion for the survival of our green spaces,
play with the flora and fauna, and a pre-television was of seeing enable a picturing of the green. The green, a space
of soft edges, is revealed as a theatre of change and, paradoxically, permanence - the precious and fragile heart of the village.
Matching Green was commissioned for ‘Common or Garden’
an exhibition on village greens across Essex under Border Dialogues – a three year Epping Forest Arts project funded
by ACE to take artworks to a wider audience across the EFA district. Interviews
with seventeen Matching Green community members are punctuated by vignettes of the village’s May Day celebration activities. Interviewees were asked to speak of their memories of the green and what it means to them,
and then to describe the green itself. This work is intended as an exploration
of the notion of the ‘betweeness’ of place; that our sense of place is as much through an anecdotal understanding
as it is to do with the geographical features of a place.
Matching Green is a rural Essex village. This work was originally
shown on the village green in the shed (6’x8’) where the interviews took place.
The LCD screen was placed where the subjects had been sitting during their interviews.
Each shot starts with the blank shed wall and the speaker fades into view - the shed on the screen fitted into the
real shed wall behind it.
©
Anne Eggebert and Epping Forest Arts 2006
Duration: 1 hour 25 minutes
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Finland in
collaboration with Tuula Seppänen
Finland no. 2, woodpile
C-type photographic print 100cm x 100cm. One of a series of five photographic
and text works made for ‘Something Strange’, Aine Art Gallery and Museum, Finland. These works were made in response to the idea of the Finnish forest. Using the web to find textual
information about Finland and an email conversation with Finnish artist Tuula Seppänen, Eggebert went looking for the
Finnish forest in Epping Forest, to the northeast of London, while Seppänen sought Epping Forest at the edge of the Artic Circle in Finland.
The
following is an extract from the text work:
…
I like the idea that there is always something about our
activity of imagining places that eludes us - even our 'own' forest with all its shifting seasonal changes of growth and decay
eludes our knowing; it remains imagined for the best part, resists language and translation.
…
At first I must ask you about the word "elude", I feel it
very important for you when you described the activity of imagining. In Finnish
there is no comparable word. From my dictionary it means something that is avoiding
us or we are avoiding in a negative way. I think it’s too mild a translation. I like to think it means some kind of a force which comes between a target and a person. But is it insurmountable? I think the
word is so abstract, that it must be translated by several words.
…
When I was a child I used to walk in the forest barefoot. Sometimes I lay on moss and imagined that "the whole earth was behind my back". The forest was all, there was everything. The
smell is very important, on hot summer days, a smell of anthills, on rainy days a wonderful smell of birches, in the autumn
a smell of decay, a smell of spoiled fungus. Even the snow smells different in
different weather, sometimes like a freshness of water.
…
Now it is frosty outside.
The lake is covered with ice; children are skating even though it’s dangerous when the ice is no more than two
inches thick. Last week one night I woke up suddenly, it was ten degrees below
zero outside. The night was silent and I wondered what was the reason I had my
eyes wide-open in the darkness. Then I heard it; the sound of ice. When the temperature falls sharply, the ice begins to expand and it cracks.
The sound (I’d like to say a voice), which rings out when the four kilometres of solid ice is cracking, is very
hard to describe. It sounds like something hard and heavy is running along the
open lake and the sound is echoing. It is like thunder. Its influence is subconscious, a sound of enormous force. At
this time of the year it can be heard almost every evening or night.
…
It is cold here now, ten degrees below zero, windy and no
snow at all. I hope the snow comes for Christmas, we also have muddy Christmases
sometimes.
…
Elude - I'm using the meaning that implies something that
wilfully escapes, something that we are trying to capture that slips away, and lurks just beyond our grasp or vision.
…
I was just walking with my dog in the forest,
I tried to manage in the darkness, but the dog brought me home.
Mr & Mrs Walker have moved in collaboration
with Julian Walker
Kettle’s Yard House Museum, Cambridge. The house
at Kettle’s Yard is the former home of Jim Ede and his wife, Helen. Jim
Ede’s idea was ‘that art [is] better approached in the intimate surroundings of a home’. Eggebert and Walker decided that the best way to test Ede’s idea of Kettle’s Yard
as a domestic living space and not a museum was to move in with their 18 month old son. As
a harbinger to reality TV they installed CCTV cameras and placed a monitor in the window of the gallery space
so that the passing public could view them day or night.
During their stay at Kettle's Yard they held a lemon garden party, in response to the
aesthetic use of a lemon regularly replaced on a pewter plate in the house; Eggebert installed a photograph
of the external wall of the building from the branch of a tree outside (the viewer could fit the image into the surface of
its origin by leaving the path between the house and the church).
Eggebert and Walker were also interested in the way that some objects were not conserved
– that a value system of objects operated in the house/museum; Eggebert
made new red gingham curtains to replace those that hung at the kitchen window when Jim and Helen Ede lived at the house.
A video and photographic installation commissioned for ‘Triplicate’ shown at the Towner Gallery,
Eastbourne, Southampton City Art Gallery, and the Tate St Ives. The photographs
were taken from the highest point at each gallery looking out towards the sea and installed opposite a postcard size
video projection of the view looking back from sea to land revealing a passing view of the south coast of England between
Eastbourne and St Ives. ‘The static and empowered ‘insider’,
commanding the view is pitted across the gallery space against the ‘outsider’ whose viewpoint shifts nauseously
with the rise and fall of the swell.’ Anne Hamlyn, Make Jan 1997
That’s nice dear, the sink overlooks the garden...
This work was intended as an exploration of the ambivalence
of being in and enjoying the domestic space while simultaneously longing to be somewhere else.
This 10 minute video loop, of Eggebert on the roof of her house, pitches and rolls as though aboard ship,
on a journey elsewhere. Shown as part of Eggebert's MA exhibition at the
Slade School of Art, UCL and in '3 x 105 km/sec' Standpoint Gallery, Hoxton, London.
Hoy
C-type print 190 x 130cm. Self-portrait on the roof
of UCL portico. Shown as part of MA installation at the Slade.
CCTV Installation for ‘Remote Control’, Queen’s
Tower, Imperial College 1994. This tower was once the centrepiece of the Imperial Institute. To critique traditional and contemporary systems of power and observation Eggebert
installed CCTV cameras at the top of the tower. This enabled the audience access
to the vertiginous view without the arduous climb. It was necessary for the audience
to look up inside to look down outside the tower.
Video Image, Oxford
This work, shown at the Pitt Rivers Museum as part of ‘Divers Memories’ in 1994, was intended as a critique
of the museum context and how ethnographic museums construct otherness. Eggebert
made a cabinet to resemble those in the museum within which the viewer was captured in an unflattering light on a CCTV monitor. This work was also shown at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne as part of ‘Quarrying’
and ‘Liar’ at Hoxton Square, London. When the work was shown outside
the museum context a label within the cabinet stated: ‘Image simultaneously appearing
on a monitor in a case of head-hunters trophies at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford’.
Alongside the cabinet a further monitor apparently relayed live surveillance images from the museum at Oxford.
There's no such
Book page and hand tinted photographic self-portrait.
© Images and text copyright Anne Eggebert unless otherwise stated
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