Further Inspiration for Assignment 3.

As a reminder here is the brief for my work:

Restrict yourself to the flotsam and jetsam of the estuary and tie it in with beachcombing? You're a beachcomber but instead of old pottery and coins you collect photographs of rubbish. You see the rubbish as a great subject for photography but you're also keen to raise important issues about the environment and have an exhibition of your photographs organised at a local museum. The magazine - lets say it's a serious, glossy nature or culture publication - wants to cover the exhibition and your work. They want some of your exhibition photographs - interesting rubbish aesthetically photographed on appropriate backgrounds (its important that you take them out of their estuary context so that they appear as a collection). They also want a few location shots of you collecting on the estuary. There should be one or two wide angle close ups with rubbish you've just discovered clearly visible - perhaps one with your hand in shot or a portrait closeup with rubbish, and a distance shot of you beachcombing alone to contrast the environmental beauty of the estuary with the overall theme of rubbish. If you have a second camera you could have this in shot. It will start with a double page spread and run over eight pages - a total of eight to ten shots. Delivery as usual via dropbox, files to be 2880 pixels longest side.

As mentioned in my early blog on Assignment 3, my initial inspiration for this assignment came from my research into the work of Justin Jin and, later, from the work of artist Martin Waters.  At this point I thought it pertinent to look up the dictionary meanings of the words Flotsam and Jetsam.  According to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary they are:-
Flotsam - Floating wreckage
Jetsam - Goods thrown out of a ship to lighten it and washed ashore.

So technically speaking I was looking at Jetsam, although I would question the idea of lightening the ship with some of the found items that I came across and some of the material found has obviously not come from ships, but has still finished up as rubbish on the beach.

Just lately I have been having several 'light bulb' moment,s where many things are coming together and the common link is the photography and research I have been doing for this module, beginning with Justin Jin and later Tamas Dezo.  I found the work of Martin Waters fascinating and was moved by Bill Brandt's selection of photos in The Land and even more so the essay by Keith Critchlow and the introduction to the book by Mark Haworth-Booth.  The idea of a planet in delicate balance and how easily the scales are being tipped towards self-destruction is both fascinating and horrifying.  I spent my working life in education, finishing as a Headteacher of a small primary school.  Many of my assemblies have been on an environmental theme and I have used my images to illustrate them.  I have always tried to stress to pupils that my generation has made a mess of our world and it is up to the new generation to rectify the damage.  Sadly though the destruction continues and, even today, the dangers of Fracking feature in the news.  According to National Geographic, when we think about threats to the environment, we tend to picture cars and smokestacks, not dinner. However, the truth is, our need for food poses one of the biggest dangers to the planet.  Population growth and richer diets will require us to roughly double the amount of crops we grow by 2050.  (Foley, J. 2014)
Keith Critchlow reminded us in his essay 'Return from Exile' as early as 1975, that it took millions of years for nature to lay the irreplaceable carpet of soil on our land; it can take one season of ignorant farming to denude it. (Critchlow, K. 1975)  I can feel all of this reading and research coming together and can, perhaps, see a route forward into my third level work.

Last Christmas a very good friend gave me Robert MacFarlane's 'The Wild Places'.  What a wonderful book.  I have since read two other books by him and am currently reading 'Wildwood; A Journey Through Trees' by Roger Deakin, himself an inspiration for and mentor to MacFarlane.  Both authors echo the above and I am sure both would empathise with the words of the Blackfoot Chieftain and Walking Buffalo as quoted by Keith Critchlow.  In the 'Wild Places', Robert MacFarlane visits iconic wild places of the UK, many of which I have been to myself.  In these locations he walks and sleeps out under the stars to truly absorb their atmosphere.  The Independent says of it 'A beautiful and inspiring book....when MacFarlane moves into the realities of the landscape, he makes them sing...a deeply stirring book'.  At the beginning of the book he refers to Johnathon Raban who suggested that the extinction of the wild happened early in this country.  He says that by the 1860s Britain was 'so thickly peopled, so intensively farmed, so industrialised, so citified, that there was nowhere to go to be truly alone, or to have....adventures, except to sea'.  (McFarlane, R. 2007)  John Fowles was adamant: 'We are now, in hard fact, on the bleak threshold of losing much of the old landscape.  We have done unimaginably terrible things to our countryside.....' (MacFarlane, R. 2007)  Wherever MacFarlane travelled on his journeys to the wild places, he collected found objects:a feather from Norfolk, shells from various beeches and driftwood from Scotland.  His aim was to make a collection of objects and display them as a record of his travels.  Much as Martin Waters did at Spurn and Gabriel Orozco does in America.  Jetsam greets Robert MacFarlane on most of his visits to beaches.  On the remote and isolated shore of Loch Scavaig on the coast of Skye he stopped by a cove to comb the stony beach.  He says 'Lurid debris was everywhere: blue milk bottle crates, pitted, cubical chunks of furniture foam, cigarette butts, bottle caps, aerosol canisters and Tetrapack cartons, printed with faded lettering in dozens of languages.  Even here, on this remote Atlantic-facing bay, evidence of damage was unmistakable, pollution inescapable and the autonomy of the land under threat'. (MacFarlane, R. 2007)  He goes on to explain that thousands of tons of debris are washed up annually on the coasts of the British Isles and the amount increases annually.  The effect, he says is severe and far beyond the visual impact.  Whales, dolphins and porpoises are dying, their digestive tracts blocked by plastic.  A minke whale washed up in Normandy in 2002 had nearly a ton of plastic packaging and shopping bags in its stomach.  Seals and seabirds become entangled in abandoned fishing nets drifting through the waters.  Loose oil, spewed out by shipping and offshore drilling, coats kelp beds and fouls birds and seals. (MacFarlane, R. 2007)  From my own observations, other than in the Humber Estuary, gannets nesting on the cliffs at Bempton RSPB reserve incorporate all manner of jetsam into their nests and many adult birds have brightly coloured twine,  fish netting or fishing line wrapped around their legs or caught in their beaks.
Roger Deakin's wonderful book 'Wildwood, A Journey Through Tees' details his relationship, journeys to see and journeys through trees and woodlands; it is also about wood itself, including drifwood, both flotsam and jetsam of our seas.  As part of a trip to the New Forest to revisit schoolboy haunts, he walks to the mouth of the Beaulieu River, where there was no one else on the beach, no sign of human life except the tops of sails just visible sliding in and out of the Beaulieu River, and the driftwood. (Deakin, R. 2007)  He goes on to relate that it is a remote beach and its flotsam has escaped being tidied.  It is a haunt of birdwatchers and every so often, he tells, they came across their improvised encampments of driftwood benches, places to eat their sandwiches.  The driftwood and birdlife along the shore are closely connected.  Flotsam (and jetsam - my words) give shelter to sandflies and other food for the small flocks of wading birds. (Deakin, R. 2007).  The wonderful thing about driftwood, he says, is the way the action of the sea etches the softer wood between the grain, revealing the sinews, bleaching it to a pale grey, smoothing it, rounding all edges and corners.  He says that it makes him want to pick it up and handle it.  Halfway along the beach he comes across a driftwood den like a bower bird's nest.  All sorts of flotsam had been collected and gathered into a surrealist installation.  A wigwam of of driftwood spars lashed to the central totem pole was encircled by a pattern of grey sticks laid out like basketwork and punctuated by such objects as the flip-flop sandals and trainers that seem  perpetually to ride the waves, Coke cans, garish cork or plastic lobster-pot buoys and the armoured white carapaces of spider crabs that abound on the beach.  He enjoys driftwood fires, as, he says, they are unusually beautiful, especially at dusk, because the salt in the wood burns green and blue. (Deakin, R. 2007)
In his chapter entitled 'Driftwood' he visits the artist and sculptor, Margaret Mellis, at her Southwold home where she swam everyday in the sea until well into her eighties. (she died in 2009 aged 95).  Once a painter of the modernist, St Ives School she turned, later in life to sculpting with driftwood.  In her studio, says Deakin, a scree of driftwood tumbles down from the picture rail at one corner.  Her driftwood constructions are hung on nails and screws artlessly driven into the walls: collages or assemblages of assorted shapes and fragments, bleached, pickled, painted, battered or frayed by the action of the waves and shingle. (Deakin, R. 2007)

1. Driftwood Collage, Margaret Mellis

2. Bog Man, Margaret Mellis

Normally, when driftwood is washed ashore it gradually becomes more and more weathered and broken down, or, maybe, burnt on a driftwood fire, until it eventually returns to the earth from whence it came, but Margaret Mellis takes what is 'washed up', disjointed, apparently finished, and resurrects it.  I have found some immense pieces of driftwood on the shores of the Humber Estuary, so huge it makes me wonder where they can have come from or what huge tide can have carried them and, in some cases washed them over the dunes and into the salt marsh.  Occasionally two huge pieces are joined together by huge rusted bolts.  These are some of my favourite 'found objects' and I only wish I could transport them back to my garden.  I once photographed one such piece beached high up on the edge of the salt marsh and a couple of years later photographed it again 3 miles down the coast.
Later in the chapter Roger Deakin writes that driftwood can be found in rivers as well as on the sea shore and hanging above his fireplace he has a spar of slender oak heartwood he found in a mountain river, high in the Rhinnog Mountains in North Wales.  We have a treasured piece of river driftwood I found when abseiling into the gorge of the River Dordogne in France nearly 30 years ago.  It sits in the hearth in our dining room with other 'found objects'.  We also have a large basket of 'found objects' in the conservatory, collected from many different beaches: pebbles, shells, driftwood, sea glass, glass and cork fishing floats.  We have collections of sea glass picked up from beaches and our garden is a repository of driftwood both large and small.

Another artist that Deakin refers to in the Chapter is Roger Ackling who also collected driftwood and painstakingly burned into it using the sun's rays focused on it by a hand lens.

3. Burned discarded wood, Roger Ackling

Roger Deakin concludes the chapter by describing how driftwood makes a vital contribution to the sea's ecology (unlike inorganic jetsam) in the same way that decaying trees do in a woodland ecosystem. (Deakin, R. 2007)

I thought that I must be unique, photographing what, at first, appears to be unsightly rubbish, so imagine my surprise when I tried a Google search and came up with Mexican born artist, Gabriel Orozco who is doing what I am but on a massive scale and has exhibited at The Guggenhein, New York, no less..

4. Sandstar exhibition, Guggenheim

5. Flotsam and Jetsam, Guggenheim

His work is made up of thousands of items of flotsam and jetsam that he gathered at two sites, one of which is a protected coastal biosphere in Baja, California Sur, New Mexico.  It is a two part sculptural and photographic installation.

References

Foley, J. (2014) A Five Step Plan to Feed the World National Geographic 225 (5) pp. 26-59
Critchlow, K. (1975) Return from Exile The Land London and Bedford, The Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd
McFarlane, R. (2007) Cited in Raban, J, The Wild Places London Granta Publications
McFarlane, R. (2007) Cited in Fowles, J (1985) The Wild Places London Granta Publications
MacFarlane, R. (2007) London Granta Publications
Deakin, R. (2007) Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees 2nd Edition London Penguin Books Ltd

Webpages

Orozco, G. (2013) Gabriel Orozco: The Art of Flotsam and Jetsam [online] Global Art Junkie Available from:
 http://theartjunkie.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/gabriel-orozco-the-art-of-flotsam-jetsam/ [Accessed 10 June 2014]

Images

1. Mellis, M. (unknown date) Driftwood Collage [driftwood] [online image] Available from:
http://www.artcornwall.org/features/New%20Folder/images/mellis_Text_img_161.jpg [Accessed 10 June 2014
2. Mellis, M. (unknown date) Bog Man [driftwood] [online image] Available from:  http://www.artcornwall.org/features/New%20Folder/images/mellis_Text_img_161.jpg [Accessed 10 June 2014
3. Ackling, R. (unknown date) Burned, discarded wood [discarded wood burned with a hand lens] [online image]. Chelsea Space Available from:
 http://www.chelseaspace.org/archive/ackling-pr.html [Accessed 10 June 2014]
4. Orozco, G. (2013) Sandstar [Flotsam and Jetsam] [online image]. Guggenheim Available from:
http://theartjunkie.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/gabriel-orozco-the-art-of-flotsam-jetsam/ [Accessed 10 June 2014]
5.  Orozco, G. (2013) [Flotsam and Jetsam] [online image]. Guggenheim Available from:
 http://theartjunkie.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/gabriel-orozco-the-art-of-flotsam-jetsam/ [Accessed 10 June 2014]