Friday 30 August 2024
At the Museum of 'Pataphysics
Tuesday 4 June 2024
A Connemara
Walk through a legible remnant,
A repository of archaic knowledge,
A stratum of linguistic culture,
Inscriptions on monuments,
Fragments of statuary,
Chambered cairns inscribed with
ciphers,
Orphaned and broken tomb pediments,
A text of gesture, line and
ornament,
A great book ripped out by time
Written in moss and Ogham
script
Saying care, closeness,
protectiveness, affection.
Traveling in the rain and the
sun,
Past famine grounds, sepulchres
and silent walls,
A landscape strewn with memory.
See Sheela Na Gig in a green lichen,
Vegetation’s biotic motions
Breathing human passion in verdure.
Walk the Atlantic coastline,
Erosion, granite cliffs and
bog pits,
Fragmentary, unfinished nature,
utopian promise,
The murmur of history, of green
ruins,
Bays, inlets, peninsulas,
islands and headlands,
Millennia of decaying plant
matter,
Waterlogged soil erasing field
walls,
Passage, portal, court and
wedge tombs
Announce I was here, I am here,
An intangible presence in
granite,
Speech emanates from the stones.
Saturday 1 June 2024
Wednesday 6 September 2023
Sunday 18 June 2023
L'Arroseur Arrosé (2022)
Wednesday 26 April 2023
Monday 13 March 2023
Commemorating Nancy Holt: The Swift, Swallow and Martin Tunnels
While visiting Amarillo, Texas, in 1973 Nancy Holt conceived
the idea of an artwork which became known as the Sun Tunnels. Buying land in
the Great Basin Desert, Utah, just a few miles from the Bonneville Salt Flats,
she proceeded to flesh out her ideas and eventually create this crucial addition
to Land Art. Northamptonshire wished to commemorate the 50th
anniversary of the creation by Nancy Holt of her Sun Tunnels and so
commissioned a team of local artists to work with the academic and sciolist Buil
de Onplezierig.
In selecting the land that she eventually bought, Nancy Holt
was looking for an area of flat desert ringed by low mountains, obviously
topographical features not readily available in Britain. Buil de Onplezierig
therefore selected a site on a gently sloping field, typical of the English
midlands.
To Holt the desert is an archetypal pared-down landscape
projecting a sense of profound antiquity. She writes about camping alone in the desert
and sensing the passage of time, feeling the age of the site with the sun
rising and setting for thousands of years over this same landscape. The Sun Tunnels
were therefore aligned with the angles of the rising and setting of the sun on
the days of the solstices, events that occur annually and eternally. Without
the wide, open spaces available to Nancy Holt and uncertain weather conditions
where the sun might be obscured on solstice days, Buil de Onplezierig
considered alternative metaphors for the passage of time and chose to explore the
movements of birds, more specifically, the wheel of annual avian migration.
Considering a range of summer visitors such as warblers, flycatchers, nightjars
and turtle doves, Buil de Onplezierig and the team selected Swifts, Swallows
and Martins as quintessential summer visitors to this country. Spring marks the
arrival of these birds and late summer their departure, and so it’s been for
time immemorial.
There are many studies that test and prove the hypothesis that migratory birds use the earth’s electromagnetic field to navigate during their journeys in spring and autumn. This is no longer in doubt. Studies also suggest what the mechanisms are within the birds’ bodies that interpret the magnetic field and enable them to use it as a compass in their flight. In the study, “The importance of time of day for magnetic body alignment in songbirds”, printed in the Journal of Comparative Physiology and published on the 7th January 2022, the researchers, Giuseppe Bianco, Robin Clemens Köhler, Mihaela Ilieva and Susanne Åkesson, conclude that, “- - results show that magnetic body alignment occurs prior to sunset, but shifts to a more northeast–southwest alignment afterwards.”
Based on this study and allowing that it is the biannual migration of birds that is being used to illustrate the passage of time, Buil de Onplezierig and the artistic team working on this project decide that the appropriate alignment for the Tunnels commemorating Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels should be northeast–southwest, and so this is how they have been laid out on site.
Northamptonshire has thus commemorated the 50th anniversary of the genesis of the thinking that led Nancy Holt to create the Sun Tunnels. The official opening ceremony will be celebrated with wine and canapés when the first Swifts, Swallows or Martins arrive in the spring. Please contact the organisers for your invitation.