Soft Estate - wild motorway landscapes

Left: M2 Medway Services Eastbound 2013

Oil on shellac on linen 180 × 140 cm

Thank you to Edward Chell for alerting me to his forthcoming book, Soft Estate, featuring his words and artwork and also including an essay contributed by Richard Mabey.

The title derives from the Highways Agency description of the natural habitats on the edge of motorways and trunk roads. The book, which will be distributed by Cornerhouse, looks at how these borders offer a refuge for wildlife and a modern form of wilderness. In Edward's words:

“While 18th Century tourists travelled to areas such as the Lake District to capture images of wild places, in today’s countryside, uncontrolled wilderness only springs up in the margins of our transport networks and the semi-derelict grid plans of industrialised corridors. These soft estates invite a new kind of tourist, new ways of looking and new forms of visual representation.”

Alongside the publication of the book, the Bluecoat arts centre in Liverpool is holding a Soft Estate exhibition featuring the work of Edward and a number of other artists:

“Soft Estate features new works by Edward Chell that explore the interface between history, ecology, roads and travel. In paintings, prints, and objects, made using a variety of materials including road dust and etched car parts, he investigates motorway landscapes, linking these contemporary environments with 18th century ideas of the Picturesque.

Other artists interrogating similar ‘edgelands’ – familiar yet ignored spaces neither city nor countryside – exhibit alongside and in conversation with Chell. They present juxtapositions commonly experienced in edgelands, like beauty and pollution, wilderness and human agency”.

I will be reviewing the book in more detail in due course. 

Above: Poker Smoker Mantle Piece (one of a pair), laser etched stainless steel, 2013 
58.5 x 23 x 12.75cm

Wales Visitation by Allen Ginsberg

Wales Visitation

White fog lifting & falling on mountain-brow
Trees moving in rivers of wind
The clouds arise
as on a wave, gigantic eddy lifting mist
above teeming ferns exquisitely swayed
along a green crag
glimpsed thru mullioned glass in valley raine—

Bardic, O Self, Visitacione, tell naught
but what seen by one man in a vale in Albion,
of the folk, whose physical sciences end in Ecology,
the wisdom of earthly relations,
of mouths & eyes interknit ten centuries visible
orchards of mind language manifest human,
of the satanic thistle that raises its horned symmetry
flowering above sister grass-daisies’ pink tiny
bloomlets angelic as lightbulbs—

Remember 160 miles from London’s symmetrical thorned tower
& network of TV pictures flashing bearded your Self
the lambs on the tree-nooked hillside this day bleating
heard in Blake’s old ear, & the silent thought of Wordsworth in eld Stillness
clouds passing through skeleton arches of Tintern Abbey—
Bard Nameless as the Vast, babble to Vastness!

Winter In - Gene Clark

Gene Clark was always the most melodious voice of the many who graced the records of The Byrds. Although Clark's career stuttered after his brief period with the group, and he suffered a - perhaps somewhat inevitable - early death, his legacy is some sublime country-soul music.

The 1971 album White Light is a mellow affair and the CD version includes a mellifluous bonus demo track, Winter In, that I always like to hear at this time of year; an elegiac evocation of a landscape gearing up for the rimy season.

Blackbird was in the field and the sun was getting dim

The breeze running through the trees like an organ in a hymn
Thoughts were suspended like a leaf out on a limb
Fire was burning low and the winter coming in

Now some music was playing in the background of the night
Some friends from around came in and they all said things were high
And we spoke of a stranger that we all met on the way
Who said there was danger in those who watch out for their greed

Now the summer is past the grain and the river getting high
It's amazing a month can bring so many things that can get by
The old ways were drowning to the new ones with a sigh
It seems so incredible that sometimes I could cry.

The New English Landscape: A Review

This is a longer version of a review that was written for the Caught By The River web site.

This is a view from the west of a book about the far east of England. Although a relatively short work, The New English Landscape, a combination of Ken Worpole’s words and Jason Orton’s photographs, covers much ground as it sets out “… to meld together historic, aesthetic and ecological elements around the issues of habitat, landscape and sense of place which have been in play in Britain since the Second World War”.

Worpole makes it clear from the start that the “new English landscape” of the title is an “imaginative construct”. This is not an attempt to comprehensively chronicle post-war developments in the English landscape as a whole; the methodology here is a focus on a particular genius loci rather than the more conventional magisterial sweep of, for instance, W.G. Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape or, more recently, Trevor Rowley’s The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century. The canvass for this exploration is very specifically the “bastard countryside” of the estuary indented, marsh rich and semi-industrial Essex coastline – a liminal wonderland at once on the doorstep of, but also estranged from, the Great Wen of London. This is the territory explored in The Joy Of Essex, Jonathan Meades idiosyncratic filmic tour of the county.

As a western dwelling, midlands raised and northern souled reader I cannot help noticing that Essex, and the wider East Anglian region are not exactly under-represented in the current well-spring of nature and landscape writing. At times it seems that Norfolk’s Waveney valley and environs – stalked by dragoons of Macfarlane’s, Deakins, Mabey’s and Cocker’s – is the lone player in town; challenged only by the psychogeographically-minded flaneurs, striding in Iain Sinclair’s mighty slip-stream across the edgeland’s of London, with the military-industrial marshes of Essex on their mind. But, in many ways, this is the book’s over-arching thesis: that the centre of gravity of ideas, art and writing on ecology and landscape has moved eastwards to envelop not just a previously neglected region, but changing perceptions of what constitutes places worthy of comment and study.

Grantchester Meadows

1969, amid the general strangeness of Pink Floyd's Ummagumma album sits the 7m26s of pastoral calm that is Grantchester Meadows; Syd Barrett's legacy pulsing through Roger Waters lyrics. Autumnal wistfulness transports me to the year of my birth.

Icy wind of night, be gone.
This is not your domain.
In the sky a bird was heard to cry.
Misty morning whisperings and gentle stirring sounds
Belied a deathly silence that lay all around.

Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground.
See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water.
And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees,
Laughing as it passes through the endless summer making for the sea.
In the lazy water meadow
I lay me down.
All around me,
Golden sunflakes settle on the ground,
Basking in the sunshine of a by gone afternoon,
Bringing sounds of yesterday into this city room.
Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground.
See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water.
And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees,
Laughing as it passes through the endless summer making for the sea.

In the lazy water meadow
I lay me down.
All around me,
Golden sunflakes covering the ground,
Basking in the sunshine of a by gone afternoon,
Bringing sounds of yesterday into my city room.

Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground.
See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water.
And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees,
Laughing as it passes through the endless summer making for the sea.