Art 7

Art at Leskernick

Initially, in attempt to re-present our experience of the hill, we experimented with writing the stones (Bender, Hamilton and Tilley 1997). We opened up our text by juxtaposing diary entries with conventional prose, but our illustrations remained traditional 'scientific' abstracted representations. We needed more open-ended drawings and images, ones which were more subjective, full of question marks, and in some way more indicative of our various interpretative leaps, perspectives and knowledges. We believe that rt provides us with another way of telling, another way of expressing the powers of stones on Leskernick Hill. We want to try and capture the powerful sense of place which the rocks evoke through their inherent sculptural properties, and their positioning, whether these be stones incorporated into the houses, or stones in clitter spreads or stones in the fields or clearings. We cannot aspire to recreate the specific meanings that the stones had to the Bronze Age inhabitants of the site. Our work is our creative response to their creativity or, better, the ruins of their creativity.

The ways in which we have begun to explore this are:

1. Through investigating how our practical engagement in archaeological recording and excavation can produce and inform imagery.

2. Through physically transforming, and adding to, the surface structures of the hill by wrapping stones and creating installations.

3. By materialising our surface activities: placing markers (such as flags) in the landscape signifying the loci where at any one time we are surveying and investigating connections between places.

4. By constructing visual representations of our multiple perceptions/understandings of the site and our activities.

At first we wondered whether we ought to get artists to do these things for us. It seemed presumptuous, for instance, to think that we could arrive on site with swathes of textile, or roles of cling film and pots of paint, and wrap a stone and produce a 'convincing' art work capable of effectively communicating something meaningful to others. We worried that we might be graphically appropriating another discipline's 'language'- a form of plagiarism. But our starting point was to try and physically represent our various reactions, knowledges and interpretations which had grown out of being archaeologists, and being on Leskernick hill. Importing an artist from outside, attempting to explain the hill to him or her, and then expecting them to produce some informed response to our work seemed a futile exercise. Anyway, the exclusivity of the category 'artist,' and what object 'art' is supposed to be, has been effectively challenged and debunked in the 'post-modern' discourses of the last twenty years beginning with radical environmental artists such as Joseph Beuys.

While an environmental artist is free to respond to a sense of place in the landscape in any way that might seem interesting or appropriate we are relatively constrained insofar as we only want to respond to what we have found, through our fieldwork, to be archaeologically significant. We cannot, then, wander around Leskernick and create installations on an ad hoc basis. Precisely because of this constraint we regard our art works as being relatively empowered rather than relatively diminished in significance. This is because there is the potential of establishing, through the creation of the art work, a genuine dialectic between past and present. For us the process of producing art becomes an integral part of the process of recording, writing, interpreting and representing the past in the present. Rather than being regarded as something outside and alien to a discourse of archaeology it becomes an integral part of it. In this respect we find it significant that while many environmental artists make frequent reference to time in their works in almost all cases this refers not to human time, the landscape as a cultural palimpsest that develops through human agency over time, but to environmental or geological time: weathering, erosion, decay (processes of entrophy in the case of Smithson).

It is worth pointing out that a great deal of our knowledge of the hill is of a practical, routinised, non-discursive character which we cannot yet, if ever, express effectively in words or verbally communicate to others. It stems from spending considerable amounts of time there, being in place, feeling the wind and rain in our hair, walking through the mists, sheltering behind the stones, making tea in the ruins of a prehistoric house. 'The most rewarding thing ever said to me was by a Dutch woman of a shape I had carved in sand. She said 'Thank you for showing me that was there'' (Goldsworthy 1990: 163). This quote from Goldsworthy succinctly states what we are attempting to do in our artworks at Leskernick: it is a means of seeing and showing what is there. We conceive of the role of art in the Leskernick project as a means to renegotiate a relationship with the past, a response to our existential alienation from that past. We work in an unpopulated village which has been abandoned for over two and a half thousand years. We create a sense of presence through our own contemporary experience of the hill and through the process of making. The significance that this work provides for us does not so much originate in the form of the art itself but with our experience of place. Art is a means by which we can give expression to the particularity of place. It provides us with a capacity to reveal aspects of reality that would otherwise be both overlooked and impossible to re-present in any other way. We regard the art that we are producing as being a synthesis of subjectivity and objectivity. For example, by wrapping cling film on a stone, and subsequently painting it, we are creating something new: a synthesis of the stone shape that we have not created and something which we have added to it. The end product, the work, is a product of the interaction between stone, the wrapping and the colour. We now want to discuss our work of re-presentation in more detail, addressing each of the four themes mentioned above in turn.

As an excellent exemplar of contemporary environmental art we cite Goldsworthy's words frequently in what follows below. In part this is simply to acknowledge that, together with the work of Christo, he has been one of our main inspirations. The purpose is also to bring out both essential differences between his approach to place and landscape and ours.