The tiny Norman church at Manaccan is locked into a close embrace with a fig tree. I stand in the autumn light and look up at the sinews of the fig tree knotting through the stones. It is halfway up the buttress supporting the tower, nowhere near the ground. I picture the Green Man carved into the wood of another church, the tree pushing out from his body through his mouth so that the only thing he can speak is tree. Then a memory leaks into my mind:

Maybe a decade ago, I was listening to the radio, driving in a particularly suburban, traffic choked, conformist district of London. A woman scientist was describing her job in the forensic investigation of genocide in Africa. She said the story of even that very recent genocide was already being denied, that she must unwaveringly point to the truth of history with her work.

She described a visit to an African church, the floor of which had been replaced by glass, to reveal the coffins beneath. She remarked that one coffin was unnaturally long. Her guide explained that it contained the corpse of a woman who had been raped by a gang of soldiers – raped with a tree. The tree had been pushed so far inside her body that it could not be separated, and so she was buried with the tree.

In the mossy churchyard at Manaccan the sound of the scientist’s voice is suddenly in my ears. The aged Sunday congregation is hastening to the sound of the church bells. I feel compelled to try and be rid, or at least to unravel this brutish fragment, the tree and the body. I walk inside the tree-church and see the fig tree, green and spindly, sprouting through the plaster high up at the triple junction where white walls meet wood ceiling. The Green Man stirs and hovers, and beside him Sheila na Gig holds open her obscene gaping vulva.

—Abigail Reynolds

Dear absent person,
who was not on the walk,
who thinks that rocks and human beings don’t have anything to do with each other, no resemblance, no shared characteristics,
no intersections.

This is where it starts. Intersections.
A hard word, a lot of t’s and s’s, a lot of consonants.

Dear absent person,
who was not on the walk,
who thinks that rocks and human beings don’t have anything to do with each other, no resemblance, no shared characteristics,
no overlap.

That’s better. Overlap. Soft vowels, lapping, movement.
The slow rolling and pushing of masses.

Dust, granules, sand, mud, earth, gravel, pebbles, stones, boulders, rocks.
Layers and layers.

A layer is something that lies on top of another, itself. There is core and heart and mantel and skin. Layers are something that can be folded, kneaded, stretched, squeezed. So much movement, so much heat. In this.

Imagine being here now but imagine also
that here has not been here,
that here has been somewhere else as well.
You and me are not the only ones moving around.

—Bettina Wenzel

Cornwall 18 October 2011

Dear artists,

I write to you from a time standing still.

Once again art has brought me to a situation where histories are connected. 
As I walked through woods, small towns and on rocks by the sea, joined by a group of peers and navigated through the history and folklore of the place by locals with experience and knowledge of the area, I realized that I am no longer interested in or even able to simply enjoy nature for its aesthetic or its natural healing elements alone.

I looked out to the sea. Informed by stories of shipwrecks and unusual sea-creatures I looked for unusual sights, aware of my amplified sense of imagination (imagination as the strongest combination of all the senses) as part of the walk. I wondered if some of the many shipwrecks along this coast more than a century ago had been of ships sailing close to the shore of Iceland, perhaps with some of our forefathers aboard. The sad, dark announcements of death would have reached the worrying wives at the other end by another ship, approaching the shore along two possible roads of destiny.

Betho whye lowenack! (happiness to you – in Cornish language)

—Birta Gudjonsdottir

The impressions seem quite dispersed, but the feeling of artificiality is predominant. I can sense the hand of men in every inch of the land. Even the bushes that could be considered wild are hiding some stories behind their branches. The logic of geological processes reveals a particular narrative that is parallel to the folk stories. Maybe living in this kind of environment enforces a belief in transcendence, because the sublime is the predominant element of my reading of the landscape. But the struggle is constant and the idea that all of it is artificial is the only escape, even if the stories of industry and scientific explanations mix with the myths. If it is a lesson, it is a lesson on how a monument or a statue could actually be read and misread, not in accordance with its aesthetic value or formal aspects, but through the narration that forms a social fossil or a deposit around it. Introducing a temporal element leads also to speaking of things as disconnected from its creator. This notion is distributed in each and every participant in the process and social actor or force of nature. What saves me from patching incomprehension is an anecdote.

—Daniel Muzyczuk

Purposeful magpies—a short introduction to the working methodology behind LOW PROFILE’s approach to ‘active borrowing’.

As artists, we (Low Profile) are purposeful magpies. We actively seek out and collect material from our lived experience and the world at large, to sample, steal and rework, as the fabric of our art practice. Love songs, scout mottos, the TV character MacGyver and a 1960’s survival publication all feature in our work.

This methodology of ‘active borrowing’ has been honed over time alongside the development of a specific set of concerns that surround our practice and which centralise around an ongoing investigation into notions of preparedness.

As artists who are busy juggling various roles and jobs, opportunities to spend time in the pursuit of ‘active borrowing’ for the purpose of new idea generation can be limited. Hannah was recently fortunate enough to participate in The Cornwall Workshop, a six-day intensive residential workshop for artists, curators and critics. As part of the workshop, a geologist and a folklorist took the group on a guided walk, giving a fascinating insight into the Lizard peninsula. Hannah decided to make use of the walk as not only a learning experience, but also as a scavenger hunt for new artistic source material. The simple rules for this working methodology are to pay close attention and record the details that feel pertinent to your research.

The day provides a series of rich starting points for new ideas.

While walking, the group are told stories of shipwrecks and men lost at sea. Hannah thinks about the tragedy of the Titanic and this gives her the idea to do a project where Low Profile will collect the final dialogues, or last words spoken, between two characters in films where only one survives.

Participants pick blackberries as they walk and this reminds Hannah of the time when she spent the day collecting berries with her Nan along a coastal path, only to trip and send then cascading down a hill on the walk home. Hannah then remembers similar experiences and she thinks about collecting these stories together and making a book that might be called ‘small scale failures’.

The group are taken to the place when Titanium was discovered and told a story about how the planned celebration for the 200th anniversary of this significant find had to be re-scheduled when the tragic events of 9/11 unfolded on the day of the party. Later, the re-arranged event had to seek the approval from the bishop to go ahead when the news that the queen mother had died reached the village. This narrative makes Hannah think about writing a performance text that tracks a series of celebrations that have had to be re-scheduled due to situations of emergency.

Later on their journey, the workshop leader describes how during the war Ealing studios created a dummy version of Falmouth bay to lure the enemy into attacking the uninhabited folly. Hannah imagines what film sets might feel like to visit once they have been emptied of all action and life. She wonders if this somehow might be connected to Low Profile’s ongoing obsession with dry runs. She doesn’t know if this particular excitement will lead anywhere and comes up with no ideas on how to translate this into an artwork.

After a long day of ‘active borrowing’ it is now time for Low Profile to reflect together on the material sampled and to consider what leads to follow.

—Hannah Jones

How to live without metal.

The geologist asked us to think about a world without metal and tapped the wire frame of his spectacles. No cars, telephones or computers. I had metal fillings and metal trouser buttons so imagined a scene of barelegged dental agony. I could stuff cheese where my fillings had been. I think cheese would neutralize any pain, and I’d just have to wear trousers with elasticated waistbands. The geologist could get laser eye surgery or I could carve him some new frames from wood.

He told us to crush the red powdery sand to see how fine it was. It puffed into miniature red clouds that hung around, then floated off. I looked at all the cameras without lens caps and felt sorry for them.

They didn’t see the danger, like living next to a power station.

—Jonty Lees

None of this is ours at all

A walk, rich in sensory observations. A crash course in geological evolution and tales of snakes and dark matter in the tangled forest of Nemea; the paradoxical meeting of geology and folklore. At Manaccan Church, where the 16th century Prayer Book Rebellions took place and Titanium was first found, we discovered an invisibly rooted magic fig tree. Where its roots really were, no one knew. A more present myth we could really experience, I thought, as we looked inside and then out, and chuckled as the story was satisfactorily realized. From there to Nare Point and then a disused quarry where a machine (big, I imagined) used to crush rocks and lorries would cart them away, leaving tyre trails in the ground and depositing remnants of the site all over everywhere as it travelled wherever it may have been going. The quarry’s rock was a good soft rock for crushing, the kind that won’t disintegrate completely — unlike the dusty, yellowy, sandy soil type. Did we find that on the beach or in the land? I’m not sure now, but I took some good pictures of us clutching it in our hands, keeping the desperate-to-escape grains captive between our fingers as histories of science and mysticism morphed in our weary minds. It was at this point, where the sea and the land felt weirdly as one, that these physically stacked sites became more clearly not just representations of filters and layers of matter, but places and movement and transmission, fraught with mimicry and deception and on which the survival of place and people had relied over so many years before us. As we sat there touching, and very respectfully picking at this place, I wondered what impact we might have on this particular spot and whether anyone might mythicize about our presence at that exact place at that moment ever again.

—Laura Barlow

In my hand

What is this thing in my hand? I first notice its hard, rough edges. The surface is broken and uneven. There are four faces, each roughly triangular. The material is dark, but as I look more closely I see small specks of colour — white, olive green, ochre and rust. It has to be touched. As I roll it across my fingers, its pyramidal form reveals itself. I have the entire surface available at once. Shards of a chrystalline substance animate its planes.  This gives the object its character. The material changes and becomes new.

I have encountered such objects many times before. But they have not become known as this thing in my hand is now known to me.

—Morten Kvamme

Four Rocks (An incomplete itinerary of seeing-walking)

A walk is broken down into four pieces of rock. The walk is thus, revived through solid fragments or… crusts of time that are air and liquid all at once.

A geologist and a folklorist accompany a small group coming from varied distances. The lizard is a labyrinth.

Mor (Sea)

Naval watch tower looking onto a flat sea. News from Nowhere.

The distance from here is the distance between two leaves.

We have reached the end of the public footpath.
Songs were sung in memory of those who sank. But, a little stowaway was forgotten.
Ki (Hedge)

An old Knocker warns of peril as he chews on the miner’s bread slice.

Three and a half million years of history missing between two sheets of earth

Scath (Boat)

The shard of an ancient pot – still cold and wet – embedded into this shoreline.

A floating rafter that must remain perpetually suspended between sky and land

Forth (road)

The scars upon these boulders speak of a disappeared ocean.

Some say, fossils are stories waiting to be told.

—Natasha Ginwala

Are You Local?
A proposal for a hypothetical exhibition

‘Are You Local?’ proposes a multidisciplinary exhibition that discusses the concept of Cornish ethnicity and what it means today.

Cornwall is home to a large population that considers itself indigenous to the area. Being Cornish and having a place in the county’s rich heritage is an immense source of pride for many residents.

The Cornish descended from the Celts, genetically sharing more with the Welsh than the English. Yet it is not uncommon for first generation residents or long-term immigrants to consider themselves Cornish.

Countless Cornish people will no doubt be descended from the many European sailors that have settled in the area for centuries.

Cornish legacy owes much to its coastline yet there are chunks of rock native to France embedded in the Lizard shoreline. What does it mean to be Cornish when even the land itself isn’t truly so?

‘Are You Local?’ invites the debate that being Cornish is as much a modern social construct as it is about heritage. The exhibition invites artists, both Cornish and non-Cornish, to respond to either side of the argument whilst exploring what it means to be Cornish today.

—Phil Rushworth

I imagine a civil society, and how I might behave within it. But then I forget that I am within it, and I am behaving in it. I want to believe in it, I do believe in it. I am able to believe and be genuinely interested.

‘Please don’t mention the pagans in the churchyard.’

I hear the collective sigh of a thousand Goths. The bell ringers in the church suddenly appear, taking their positions. The doors of the bell tower are generously opened to allow the onlookers a better view. I imagine the villagers caught in this task, not unlike the slow-moving geology, ringing bells for thousands of years.

…2:3…3:4…2:5…

A ringing score?

I ceased hearing the bells and only heard the numbers.

A vortex in the woods, plates bigger than I can imagine shifting, but very slowly.
Are you sure? Has anyone seen the plates move? Maybe crashing and shattering when fault lines or deep-sea trenches lurch and cause destruction, but not here, surely, not recently.

400 million years ago? It all seems so calm. Not a cataclysm in sight.

The giants have left, the sea monsters have gone and the mantle has cooled. Ok. The sea seems a more urgent beast, a more tenacious combatant. I think I get the sea.

—Steven Paige

At first I am writing to myself. I need to work it out.

Then it might be to you.

Tasked I head straight for an open window where the sun is streaming in across the ledge. A good place to sit. The open window is significant. The sound of birds – crows I think, and something else twittering away in the background – mixes with the sound coming from lunch being prepared down below. The wind in the trees.

***

Walking the path to the woodland below, entered via a stone stile different in form from the ones at home – that was the first thing I noticed – the bars are less horizontal, the stone rails are stacked alongside each other like shutters. There is an energy here that aligns with a sense of foreboding (I’m not sure if that’s the best word); I have a knotted feeling brought on by lack of sleep complicit with the perennial fear that lurks not far away of perhaps not being equal to the task in hand – of dissipated energy, of closing down. The ancient tangled forest of Nemea infested by snakes engulfs us all around, its spells broken gently now by the sound of conversation to my left and my right, and later the gentle trickling of a stream. There is talk of time and geological process measured not in the hours of the day but in hundreds of million annum, of Mylor Slate formation: stones amongst the sediment thrown up from the ocean floor life times ago defy imagination. But time peels out its song with the relentless circling peel bells of Manaccan – the roll call of the dead, anticipating tales of shipwrecked sailors found frozen in the rigging in the watery graves of Mên-aver and the Manacles and the opening out through the woods at Nare Point to the sea.

It was a balmy day.

***

And I realize my job here for this moment is done. There is movement in the building. The sun has gone in, the breeze is up and the open window is rattling in the wind. This space is gently disrupted as the building comes alive, fidgeting with the sound of lapsed concentration, of chatter and the banging together of kitchen pots.

Still I have not written to you…

—Veronica Vickery

Writing presupposes reading. We learn to be great, or at least interesting, writers through exposure to a broad array of texts written inside and outside of our chosen fields. We write with these words, and sometimes against them.

With this in mind, participants were asked to choose a single, relatively brief piece of published writing to bring with them to the workshop to share with colleagues. The text could be written by an art historian, a novelist, a journalist, a philosopher, a poet, a curator, an artist — anyone, really — but it was supposed to be about art, or the act of looking, something that had inspired them, or prompted them to conspire, or even made them transpire.

Subsequently participants were asked to summarize their introductions in a few sentences.  Edited and compiled by Lori Waxman, the introductions and extracts published here are the outcomes of this workshop session:

Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘The mediation that communicates the work is, in principle, total.’ Truth and Method, 1960
[View the text, PDF (938 Kb)]

Following Lori’s call-out I was looking for a text that had made me sweat or spurred me into action. I was Curatorial Assistant for an exhibition project in Berlin when I met people who spoke about curating as a subject studied at university — something that, when I inscribed myself as a student, was not on the curriculum in Germany. Having studied Cultural Studies, I now thought that maybe I had to read up on the topic of curating and bought the book ‘Curating Subjects’ of which I brought the first text to the workshop. When I came to the middle of the first page I got a little warm when the authors likened the figure of the middleman – read curator – to a ‘parasitical agent’ with ‘an aura of mediocrity’, ‘a suspect character’, but I decided that an anthology on curating would not abolish its subject on the first page already and I read on. But the rest of the text left me cold. Whilst I found it interesting to read and think about what a curator is or does, I realised that I did not want to get buried under another shipload of theoretical texts but rather make exhibitions.

—Bettina Wenzel

Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen, ‘The Middleman: Beginning to talk about mediation.’ In: Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O’Neill, De Appel, London, 2007, pp. 20-30
[View the text, PDF (70 Kb)]

I chose an unpublished text by Icelandic art critic Olafur Gislason, who was my tutor for my BA and MA degrees of Fine Art. Gislason is a well-known art theorist in Iceland and has written texts for numerous catalogues.

The text is titled ‘The Langenlois Work of Art speaking’, referring to the town of Langenlois in Austria where Icelandic artist Katrin I. Jonsdottir participated in a recent exhibition.

In her own absence, Jonsdottir asked Gislason to travel from Iceland to Austria to present himself as her artwork, as her contribution to the exhibition. This is a text that Gislason wrote for and performed at the opening.

Gislason, who has until now solely written texts to be read from print and not to be performed or listened to aloud, includes this specific dilemma — his experience of himself as a work of art — in the text that he then performs.

I find it interesting to regard Gislason’s writing as action, challenging his usual forms of writing and thinking about text, and the perception of his text. Unlike before, the writer now gets to know exactly who his audience/‘readers’ are and receive immediate feedback!

—Birta Gudjonsdottir

Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos
[View the text, PDF (905 Kb)]

This novel seems to be relevant to the topic for several reasons. It tells a dark story about a holiday trip out of town that becomes a crime story. A bird hanged by the neck on a metal wire becomes a trigger for the protagonists to resolve a mystery. Gombrowicz tries to unravel the act of perception and how a common thing that easily could be overlooked can, if focused on, bring disorder and cause chaos. Gombrowicz uses the novel to discredit the human construction of meaning. The living moment is incoherent. If it means anything in and of itself, the message does not come through. It’s an ongoing process without beginning or end. But the novel could also become a metaphor for the act of perceiving an artwork as a phenomenon encountered in a natural environment.

Agnieszka Pindera, ‘Touring Culture’ in Re-tooling Residencies, A Closer Look at the Mobility of Art Professionals, ed. Anna Ptak, Warsaw, 2011
[View the text, PDF (3.2 Mb)]

This essay covers a long history of taking artists outside of cities to participate in events that were first organised by the People’s Republic of Poland. Originally known as plein airs, since 1989 and the impact of the Western art scene they have become known in Poland as residencies. The author argues that the two formats have more in common than we think and that their creation and functioning are each the outcome of a specific political context. Taking into consideration this replacement of one by another, the residency model seems in fact from a certain point of view a rebranding of the former. It is worth bearing in mind the reasons why the state became interested in organizing plein airs for neo-avant-garde artists.

—Daniel Muzyczuk

Matthew Goulish, 39 Microlectures in proximity of performance

As someone who has an ongoing, irrational and obstructive anxiety surrounding reading, it feels particularly significant to have discovered a book that has changed my life.

I read this book after my friend offered to lend it to me during the summer holidays of my second year at University. I was struggling with being a painter (my chosen discipline) and particularly with the notion of failure within a painting practice. My friend Rae thought that this book might help, I’m not really sure why, but she was right.

The book taught me about ways of ‘finding’ an approach (within an arts practice), about starting with questions and not answers, about the importance of process, and it taught me to embrace failure. It also taught me to free up the way I read, to worry less about starting at the start and finishing at the end.

It encouraged me to write in a way that was informed by finding a voice through the voices of others. I learned about the value of sampling, borrowing, re-telling and reusing others people’s words.

The book also gave me the confidence to seek out other writing around performance as well as to go to see live work. In a short period of time I attended some key live art events and performances (including Inbetween Time Festival, Bristol and Live Culture at Tate Modern) and started experimenting with making low-fi performative works. After a short while I quit painting and for almost nine years now, I have been making work under the name LOW PROFILE, a collaborative duo producing predominantly live work, alongside associated ephemera, photography, bookworks, video and publications.

—Hannah Jones

Mark Twain, ‘Two ways of Seeing a River’, excerpt from Life on the Mississippi. Published by Penguin Classics; reprint edition (25 April 1985)
[View the text, PDF (53 Kb)]

We were invited to bring a piece of writing that described the act of looking. I selected ‘Two Ways of Seeing a River’ by Mark Twain. It describes the perils of careful study.
Ignorance is bliss.

—Jonty Lees

Andrei Monastyrski, ‘Earthworks’ (‘The Theme of the peacock and the condor on the expositional sign field of Moscow’), 1987
http://www.conceptualism-moscow.org/page?id=1559&lang=en

Andrei Monastyrski’s text “Earthworks” is possibly the single most particular piece of writing I have read by an artist in which the “root work” of artistic objectivity is defined in intricate detail. It is at once a specific text about a particular place (Soviet Moscow in the 1980s); a text about how artists (in particular Kabakov and Monastyrski himself) look at a “place” and use this specific reading in their work; and as well a preface to the striking photographic series he made following the writing of this text (which aptly takes the same title). The notion of the “sign field” plays a central role here, with the distinct fields of the “demonstrative” and the “expository” delineating moments in which something is demonstrated and fixed, versus something being motivated or set forth for exploration. It is Monastyrski’s words on the term “inspirator” that are most revealing about what was influencing conceptual art practices in 1980s Moscow. As a whole the text therefore offers a glimpse into the very logical mind of Monastyrski and a society clearly concerned with  being defined.

On my return from the workshop, I came across this text while reading Monastyrski’s writing in preparation for composing the press release for the exhibition of his work that we were opening at e-flux. It seemed to coalesce these parallel moments in which I was thinking about localities and artistic production, albeit in places that are polar opposites: Cornwall in the present day and Moscow in the 1980s.

—Laura Barlow

Brian O’Doherty, Inside the white cube: The ideology of the gallery space, (originally appeared in Artforum 1976), Lapis Press, San Francisco, pp. 14 & 15
[View the text, PDF (49 Kb)]

My interest in this text is linked to several of its aspects. I relate to it both as an artist and as a curator, my practice proceeds both from the inside and the outside. The white cube has at times been seen as a utopian and outdated arena for art. But in its simplicity, the timeless cube has become an arena for new strategies and remains a central structure for contemporary art. It creates a framework, not only formally but for meetings, discourse and opportunity. The white cube is also a paradox; it is a design created for art, not for me, but mysteriously I enjoy being inside it, without windows and away from the world.

—Morten Kvamme

Seth Price, Dispersion, 38th Street Publishers(distributed by Motto), 2008
[View the text, PDF (1.2 Mb)]
Also available at: http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf

This 14-page essay by artist Seth Price begins with a quote by another artist. Marcel Broodthaers states, ‘The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution.’

This is an exercise in actively re-framing the legacy of Conceptualism as a ‘radically incomplete’ project, which continues to metamorphose, cross-reference and re-negotiate its presence(s).

Dispersion is a special text as it involves a doing as much as a ‘saying’— first appearing as a self-produced booklet in 2002, then appearing as ‘This Version’, a Ukrainian-art-student-bootleg edition in 2006. Finally, it was published by 38th Street Publishers with a hand-designed cover and continues to be hosted online. (It may also be encountered in exhibitions as sculptural fragments). When looking into the continued existence and modes of ‘appearance’ of dematerialized/non-object based praxes, Price brings refreshing perspectives on Art’s potential role toward disguise, counter-production and disappearances facilitated through distributed media.

I brought this text to the workshop so that it might provoke collective responses/counter-positions and active re-readings of Cornwall as a ‘dispersed’ region.

—Natasha Ginwala

John Waters, ‘Roommates’ from Role Models, 2011

When I was asked to provide a piece of writing for The Cornwall Workshop I instantly knew I didn’t want to choose an academic text. I’m interested in responding to audiences, and that style of writing can seem unrepeatable and confusing.

I chose this chapter by John Waters, where he talks about his personal collection, because of the way he talks about his passion and knowledge of art in such a humorous and light-hearted manner.

Waters talks about the art he owns as though they are his roommates, each with distinctive personalities. Mike Kelley’s work likes to be obnoxious whilst Fischli and Weiss have a sense of humour. This is such a creative way of talking about art, neatly conveying what the art is about without being dry.

There’s a beautiful section where he translates Cy Twomby’s ‘Letter of Resignation’. Each page of distinctive Twombly scribble becomes a viscously hilarious quote in the author’s hands.

Waters knows that art can seem ridiculous or baffling. He knows that it can make people angry, but he seems to revel in that. This piece of writing comes from both an outside and an inside perspective, and it is rare because it laughs with contemporary art, not at it.

—Phil Rushworth

Allan Kaprow, ‘The Real Experiment’ in Artforum International, No. 4, 1983, December, pp. 37-43
[View the text, jpeg (471 kb)]

I have never really been able to reconcile what appears at first to be a dichotomy in arts practice: an artist’s vision of the larger world as a revelatory exploration, as opposed to a commercial value that corrals art works and artists, and creates a market worth. As Kaprow states, there is ‘art like art and art like life’. In essence the tension would lie in the use value of art, its ability to act as a lightening rod, to explore, challenge and have a dialogue with a viewer, or else to have a monetary value, an art historical place. I don’t want to perpetuate the notion that art needs to be ‘useful’, but I would wish for it at least to be having a dialogue with itself or the viewer, even if the language used is at first indiscernible. The ‘blurring’ that Kaprow talks of, between an arts practice and life, has always felt personally more relevant, and more honest and straightforward, and ultimately more fun.

—Steven Paige

There are so many layers to a place – cultural, geological, and archaeological – that it is difficult to recognise them all at any one time. Yet they are, whether we are aware of them or not, what make up the places we inhabit. This tour was conceived by FIELDCLUB, and led by geologist Dr Robin Shail, folklorist Steve Patterson, and FIELDCLUB’s Kenna Hernly. It was an attempt to show the participants of the workshop the relationship between human culture and geology in the unique region of the Lizard by offering the contrasting views of a geologist and a folklorist, with Kenna adding local historical facts and anecdotes. As the opening day of The Cornwall Workshop, it was also intended to orientate people to their location, and to help them get to know each other.

The group travelled over a relatively small geographical area to places of geological, historical, and folkloric significance. The tour started at Kestle Barton and went to Manaccan, Nare Point and Porthallow, finishing with a walk from Dean Quarry to Coverack.

The group kicked off the day at Kestle Barton with an early Sunday morning PowerPoint presentation on the geology of the Lizard by Dr Robin Shail, Senior Lecturer at Camborne School of Mines. The Lizard is an ancient part of the ocean crust that millions of years ago was thrust onto the continental plate of what is now Europe. Kestle Barton itself is in the Meneage, which is not part of the true geological area of the Lizard, but is the area that is the Northern boundary and forms part of the primarily sedimentary layer that lies beneath the Lizard.

With thoughts of old continents and the complexities of plate tectonics in our heads, we began the walk from Kestle Barton to Manaccan, starting with a cool morning stroll through a 300-year-old Sessile oak forest on a medieval laneway that once connected the three main settlements in the area – Kestle, Manaccan and Helford. The areas along the Helford River are very sheltered and have been settled since the Mesolithic Stone Age (7,000 – 4,000 BC).

In Manaccan we visited the village church. Originally Norman, the church was part of a large and important religious settlement in the medieval period. After all, the Meneage means land of monks. The church has a fig tree growing out of the wall; according to folklorist Steve Patterson, legend has it that, if the tree is chopped down, it will bring bad luck to the village.

We arrived just before the service, and were able to witness the bell-ringers at work.

Before we climbed into our minibus, Robin Shail told us about an element that was discovered in the millstream near Manaccan by William Gregor in 1791. Then known as Menaccanite, it is now known as Titanium. It is particularly valuable because it is corrosion resistant and can be integrated into bone, therefore having great medical potential.

Next we took the bus to Nare Point, located across the bay from Falmouth at the mouth of the Helford River. Here, Steve Patterson revealed the rich 3,000-year-old history of the Helford, telling tales of piracy and horrendous shipwrecks, and of Morgawr, the local sea monster.

Kenna told the group about the military history in the area. Visible from Nare Point, the nearby St Dennis Head was the site of one of the Iron Age fortresses that used to protect the important tin trade route along the Helford River. St Dennis Head was also the last Royalist stronghold during the English Civil War, and was refortified against the threat of the Spanish Armada and the Napoleonic Wars. Nare Point itself was used as a decoy site for Falmouth during World War II. To confuse the German Luftwaffe, Ealing Studios built a set that looked like Falmouth Docks at night.  It was automated and simulated the docks and the railways system. The set was mainly constructed from lights, plywood and sand bags, but was apparently convincing enough that the Germans bombed it in 1944. Today, Nare Point is the location of a volunteer coastguard station.

Robin Shail showed us important geological layers on Lestowder beach near Nare Point, evidence of the Lizard’s unique origins.

The group helped the bus leave Nare Point and head to Porthallow for lunch.

After lunch, the group explored Porthallow beach for evidence of rocks from the Earth’s mantle. Porthallow and Mullion mark the join of the geological Lizard and England.

After a short bus ride from Porthallow, Robin Shail explained quarrying techniques at Dean Quarry, where, until 2005, gabbro was extracted. Gabbro makes excellent road chippings for asphalt, and the quarry produced a lot of the stone that was used to build the Channel Tunnel. Robin told us of the importance of mining in Cornish history, and its influence on the society. Due to its mineral riches the Lizard was even on ancient Greek maps, and has been the site of cultural exchange throughout the centuries. Gabbroic clay was mined in the area between 3000 BC and 400 AD. Pottery from this area has been found all over the UK, and even in Brittany.

After investigating Dean Quarry, the group headed towards Coverack, across Lowland Point. The area along this path is a remarkably complex archaeological landscape with scattered artefacts, settlements and field systems ranging in date from the Mesolithic to the early medieval period. This area was among the first cultivated areas on the Lizard during the Bronze Age (2,500 – 700 BC).

Robin Shail shows the group loess, which is sediment formed by windblown silt that was deposited during the Pleistocene era, and forms much of the land at Lowland Point.

Steve told the group tales of shipwrecks on the treacherous Manacles, and identified a possible Cairn. Kenna pointed out a visible network of ancient field systems.

Kenna told the group about this Romano-British salt works dating to around the second century AD. Pottery shards can be found embedded in the cliff below, mostly fragments of the Gabbroic clay vessels used to recover the sea salt. The salt works is just one part of the vast prehistoric and medieval landscape that exists in this area.

Tired, after a long walk, the group reaches Coverack.

Robin draws a quick diagram to explain the geological significance of Coverack beach. Here we can see the Mohorovcic Discontinuity, known as the Moho. This beach was once the boundary between the rocks of the Earth’s crust and those of the lower molten mantle.

Robin Shail, Kenna Hernly and Steve Patterson close the day’s trip whilst standing on what was once the Earth’s mantle.

The group enjoys a much needed drink.

—Kenna Hernly

Workshop participants arrived in time for dinner on Saturday 15 October and the workshop began on Sunday 16 with a field trip on the Lizard peninsula, devised by FIELDCLUB and led by folklorist Steve Patterson and Dr Robin Shail, Senior Lecturer in Geology at Camborne School of Mines. The field trip offered two parallel and contrasting narratives, one relating to the folk history of the area, the other to its geological formation.

At one point during our Sunday field trip I found myself on Nare Point, staring across the water at my home town, Falmouth. It was a strange feeling to be standing for the first time somewhere I had seen, from a distance, hundreds of times from Gyllyngvase beach or Pendennis point. Yet before that day I hadn’t even known its name. It was a small revelation to discover I knew so little about an area I felt I knew so well.

This moment solidified in me something I had long since suspected; that a local perspective will not always give the most honest or revealing insight into a particular place.

Other points on our walk unveiled yet more revelations, about the centuries of Spanish immigrants, or the origins of the rocks below our feet. The very idea of being ‘Cornish’ became an abstract concept. I silently thought how silly I had been to hold such comfort in the idea of being indigenous to an area that had, as our geologist tour guide explained, only existed for a relatively short period of time (in terms of rocks, that is).

These thoughts, although personal, are symbolic of some of our discussions during the week. They represent how important it is to look outward, as well as inward, when discussing Cornwall. Otherwise we can become weighed down with the history and the culture of the place, never producing anything new.

—Phil Rushworth

On Monday 17 October Mark Dion introduced his postcard game:

This was another example of how common objects can be an excuse to get to know personalities and temperaments of a group of people. The introduction to the workshop by Mark Dion was a game with strange and curious postcards from his collection. The group was divided in two halves. One had to propose an abstract category and the other had to answer by picking up a matching postcard. If the juries had any doubts why individual card was fitting the category, they could ask for explanation. Easy to follow rules, a strange collection of images and a sense of humor became the main ingredients of the game. Soon the participants learned that the game can be more complicated than it appeared at the first glance and that it allows even a certain strategy to be developed. Relaxing and amusing, it was also an experience of a certain procedure with a trivial starting point but uncertain and illuminating effects on the meaning of being in a certain place with certain people.

—Daniel Muzyczuk

Mark Dion went on to talk about his experiences of art education as both student and tutor, and about the development of Mildred’s Lane in Pennsylvania.  The day concluded with brief presentations by each of the workshop participants.

On Monday evening sixty artists, curators and other members of the arts community in Cornwall attended a curry supper and evening of presentations and discussions at Porthallow Villlage Hall near St Keverne on the Lizard peninsula.

Artists, curators and producers were invited to give presentations about recent art initiatives in Cornwall:

Andy Harper talked about the artist residency programme at Assembly in St Just, and the recent programme of Slow Time events

Curators Maria Christoforidou and Laura Smith talked about the exhibition Decalcomania at the Exchange in Penzance.

Rupert White described the work of the online journal www.artcornwall.org

Kate Southworth provided a paper describing the project Electronic Village Galleries.

Ian Whitford, Rebecca Weeks and Andy Whall described the ongoing programme of screenings and events organised by CAZ in the basement of the Exchange.

Robin Mackay talked about the work of Urbanomic and the field trip Hydroplutonic Kernow organised for The Falmouth Convention.

Hadrian Pigott reflected on his work as an artist and as Chair of Penzance Seafront Forum

Sara Black of ProjectBase introduced The Cornwall Programme.

On Tuesday 18 October Lori Waxman’s Reading session invited each workshop participant to select and introduce a short text about art, or about the act of looking. In the second half of the day, participants broke into small groups for a Writing workshop in response to the field trip.

I was struck by how useful restricted time slots are as a working structure. Due to the large number of participants and the need to find a format that allowed for all of us to speak about our practice or a project we wanted feedback on, we were allotted five minutes each for our presentation and another five for questions. Five minutes being such a short amount of time, the impossibility to talk about one’s work in depth and its complexity was obvious, but it also forced us to be clear, precise and selective. Also during the writing workshop we were allotted a limited amount of time – one hour – to write a 250-word text. Again it seemed too small a period of time for the task set, but it also took the pressure off to deliver something finished, sleek, perfect.

My post-workshop enthusiasm to use these strategies for myself has not been able to instill in me with the necessary discipline as yet. My latest text was again written on the last days, pushing up to the deadline, in long and break-less periods of writing and editing. But the first draft of this text here has been written in a ten minute slot when I just wanted to jot down a quick aide memoire before getting myself some lunch.

—Bettina Wenzel

On Tuesday evening Mark Dion gave a public lecture in the Woodlane Lecture Theatre at University College Falmouth.  The lecture attracted a capacity audience, described by Daro Montag as the largest he had seen in ten years of teaching at UCF.

On Wednesday 19 October there was a session devoted to exploration of social context and to thinking about audience. Ten young people associated with the learning departments of Tate St Ives, Plymouth Arts Centre and The Exchange in Penzance visited Kestle Barton with members of the learning teams of these institutions and met with workshop participants to talk about their experience of living in Cornwall and the cultural opportunities on offer to young people.

We were sitting on the picnic bench, just outside the kitchen at Kestle Barton eating a hearty homemade lunch – beetroot soup and vegetable lasagne. As happened at mealtimes, small groups were temporarily formed, with people coming and going as courses were introduced. The picnic bench was the circular kind at which maybe six or eight people can sit. We got talking about what our visitors were up to, what stage of their lives they were at, where they thought they were going or indeed where they were coming from (some in college, others trying to move on after finishing a degree in Falmouth, others having recently moved here, specifically to get away from London). The majority of them were involved in one particular art institution’s education programme, which for them meant organizing the workshops for other ‘young people’. The limited possibilities within the programme were of concern and there was a general lack of energy or enthusiasm. They weren’t particularly engaged with their subject and they described their peer group as pretty unconvinced by their efforts. What do people do these days, when they’re not at school, I asked? I told them that when I was growing up in Cornwall most people just wanted to drink and hang around not really doing anything. They agreed that this was still the case and that there is a stigma attached to doing pretty much anything. What could be done to try and change this? I asked. But there were only inconclusive answers. The lack of public transport was a major issue, its limitations on achieving ‘adult’ independence sorely felt. I realized that they weren’t really that young at all, one just three years younger than I. And, not for the first time I wondered,  “why are we doing this, and whom are we doing it for?” I understood the perspectives of these ‘young people’ very clearly, having experienced the situation myself as I grew up in Cornwall and developed my own rather tangential relationship with the arts here. This kind of attitude isn’t particular to Cornwall, but the conversation made it clear that somehow, these smart and committed individuals weren’t fulfilled with what was on offer to them, despite the best efforts of the organizations with which they were working.

—Laura Barlow

At the end of the morning Sally Tallant gave a talk about the Serpentine Gallery’s programme of education and outreach work.

On Wednesday afternoon the group visited St Ives to see the exhibition The Indiscipline of Painting: International Abstraction from the 1960s to Now at Tate St Ives.

At the Exchange in Penzance Lori Waxman gave a performance of her 60wrd/min art critic project.  For this project she performs her role as art writer in public. Gallery visitors can follow the development of her reviews onscreen as she writes about work brought into the gallery by artists in the locale. This was the first time Lori Waxman had performed the project outside the United States.  In collaboration with the Exchange, artists were approached through networks in Cornwall and invited to submit work to be reviewed. The online journal Axis also invited two artists to respond to Lori Waxman’s reviews by writing about the experience of having their work reviewed. The Cornishman published Lori Waxman’s reviews as a full-page spread on 3 November 2011 while the Axis feature ‘How was it for you?’ was published online at www.axisweb.org

Falmouth-based writer Jo Thomas supported Lori in the role of receptionist, receiving works of art brought in for review.

On Thursday morning Mark Dion visited Helston Community College, whose Head of Art selected students from her Year 12 and 13 BTEC groups to meet him. Dion talked about his work and about the experience of being an artist:

‘I liked the way Mark talked about his work, how he showed that an artist has to be really focused from the beginning idea to its completion’

‘It was good to meet an artist in real life, not just looking at their work’

‘It was good to see the huge scale and budgets you could work with as an artist’

‘His work seemed to have no creative boundaries’

‘The work was quite strange but I liked it because of the in-depth explanation’

‘I found it inspiring’.

The workshop programme concluded on Thursday 20 October with discussion about how best to represent the participants’ experiences at that evening’s meeting in Porthallow, advertised as an opportunity to share outcomes with members of the art community and other interested guests:

On the final evening of ‘The Cornwall Workshop’ an open (public) evening event had been scheduled, as a moment to share outcomes of the workshop and thoughts for the future, with invited members of the art community and other interested guests.

During the day leading up to the event, workshop participants spent several hours discussing how the evening might function. The group struggled with the idea of making a formal presentation or setting up a chaired discussion, both formats feeling too closed, restricted and limited. Instead the workshop participants unanimously agreed on the idea of a ‘cultural speed dating’ game.

Mark Dion eloquently identified how the game neatly mirrored and demonstrated some of the methodology behind the workshop itself, where our days had often begun with a game of some kind.

The game allowed us to highlight how important the process of getting to know each other had been and allowed us to share (in a small way), how the intensive experience of living in the same place, eating together and talking all day (and into the night) had allowed us to build meaningful relationships with each other very quickly.

Lori Waxman and I were nominated to introduce the speed-dating event to the large gathered crowd. Lori explained the rules of how to play and I tried to frame the game’s significance for the workshop participants.

I described how excited we all were by what the situation of ‘getting to know each other’, will breed. I explained how we hoped to expand and open up the group, so to increase the potential of what conversation, intensive encounters and the unexpected meeting of minds can activate.

Once everyone was clear on the rules (seven rounds, seven minutes each), I hit a saucepan lid with a wooden spoon and stood back and watched as everyone began to ‘date’. My lasting memory of this moment was that of being hit with a wall of noise, of everyone in the room talking eagerly, animatedly and enthusiastically at once. Seven rounds later the final ‘gong’ was hit and the crowd kept talking.

—Hannah Jones

The workshop set out to develop ideas suggested by Lucy Lippard’s keynote address for The Falmouth Convention, ‘Imagine Being Here Now’.

‘ . . . no matter how long or short a time we live in a place we inherit the responsibility for knowing about it, valuing it, working to keep it viable, and illuminating our dynamic cultural spaces and their underlying, often invisible meanings and uses — for those who don’t. If a local is someone who gives more than she takes, everybody is a candidate.’

‘. . . a tantalizing liminal space has opened up between disciplines, between the arts, geography, history, archeology, sociology. . . A real sense of place is a virtual immersion that depends both on lived experience and on topographical, even infrastructural, intimacy, not to mention acquired knowledge on the ground and in the books.

‘. . . What if the existing place demands to be considered for itself, not as a blank slate, but as an already evolved image with a history that can be altered, even transformed, but never entirely erased? In this case, collaboration with those who are of the place, especially scientists who know it close-up, in excruciating detail, would make the whole enterprise far more complex and more layered. Collaboration is the social extension of collage.’

Ten participants were selected from an open submission of forty-five applicants. In addition, and in recognition of the value of international exchange and networking, four international participants were invited to be workshop participants, with the support of overseas cultural agencies.

The workshop was described as ‘an intensive experience that will require commitment’. Participants were asked to undertake preparatory reading, come prepared to talk about an exhibition or project they were developing or would like to develop, participate in a writing workshop, prepare short presentations and bring materials to be screened and shared.

She has written catalogue essays for small and large art spaces, including: Spertus Museum, Chicago; threewalls, Chicago; SPACES Gallery, Cleveland; Institute of Visual Art, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Turpentine Gallery, Reykjavik; and Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. She has published essays on Arturo Herrera, Jenny Holzer, William Cordova, Eugenia Alter Propp, Raissa Venables, Gordon Matta-Clark, Joel Sternfeld, Emily Jacir, Taryn Simon, Ranbir Kaleka and Christa Donner. Waxman teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her doctoral research considered urban walking as a revolutionary aesthetic practice of the 20th century.

She received a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant (2008) for her project 60 wrd/min art critic, which is traveling to venues around the United States through 2012.

60wrdmin.org

A small number of international participants were invited to attend the workshop with the support of overseas cultural agencies: Natasha Ginwala, Birta Gudjonsdottir, Morten Kvamme, Daniel Muzyczuk.

Laura Barlow

Laura Barlow grew up in Cornwall and is currently based in New York, where she is Project Curator at e-flux. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from CCS, Bard College and a BA in History from Swansea University, Wales. Curatorial projects include Living Modern, CCS, Bard College, 2010; Leya Mira Brander Selected: Untitled 1997-2008, Bard College, 2009; and the film screenings, Before and Beyond the Motion Picture Archive, Goethe Institute, New York, 2009 and The Curve is Ruinous, Grazer Kunstverein, 2009. She has written for publications such as MAP, Paletten, and the Performa ’09 Anthology.

Paul Chaney

Paul is the lead artist/director of FIELDCLUB – a four-acre field where art is used as a catalyst and facilitator to investigate models of low-impact self-sufficiency and off-grid living. Over the last 12 years Paul has been involved in a number of artist-led projects and spaces in Cornwall. In 2009/10 he worked with Urbanomic – a small international arts organisation and publishing house – to deliver a program of art events and residencies in Falmouth and London.

paulchaney.co.uk
www.fieldclub.co.uk

Natasha Ginwala

Natasha Ginwala is an independent art critic and curator based in Amsterdam, where she participated in de Appel Curatorial Programme 2010/11. She completed her postgraduate studies at The School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and holds a diploma in Broadcast Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai. Her research interests include histories of exhibition-making and artistic programming, cross-disciplinary engagement with colonial documents and the study of contemporary craft processes.

Birta Gudjonsdottir

Birta Gudjonsdottir studied Fine Arts at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts and at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. From 2005-8 she was chief curator of SAFN, a private contemporary art collection in Reykjavik, and she has since worked as curator’s assistant at M HKA in Antwerp, as artistic director and chief curator of the exhibition space 101 Projects in Reykjavik, and as director of The Living Art Museum in Reykjavik. Birta has curated shows in Melbourne, New York, Copenhagen, St Petersburg and Reykjavik. She has produced her home-gallery Dwarf Gallery in Reykjavik since 2002 and is a founding board member of Sequences real time art festival.

Hannah Jones

Hannah is one half of the performance company LOW PROFILE, working collaboratively with Rachel Dobbs since 2003 to make live art and performances. They are based in Plymouth and are Arnolfini Associate Artists. Hannah is committed to artist-led activity and is actively involved in instigating, co-producing, programming and project managing projects such as PL:ay festival (2007), DXDX studio group (2010) and Come to Ours (Sept-Dec 2011). She is also the Exhibitions and Events Officer at Plymouth College of Art, where she curates and manages the gallery programme, produces publications, organises and manages seminars, workshops and the visiting artist lecture programme.

www.we-are-low-profile.co.uk
lowprofilepresents@hotmail.com
www.cometoours.co.uk
gallery.plymouthart.ac.uk

Kenna Hernly

Since completing her MA in Contemporary Visual Art in 2007, Kenna has developed a research-based curatorial practice focused on the relationship between art and the real. She co-founded FIELDCLUB, an artist-led interdisciplinary project that explores the paradigm of life as art through a rigorous physical and philosophical interrogation of zero-carbon homesteading, and has also been involved in organising art events with Urbanomic. She is an Assistant Curator at Tate St Ives and works in the library at University College Falmouth.

www.fieldclub.co.uk

Jonty Lees

Jonty Lees lives in Cornwall. His work is currently on display in Outrageous Fortune: Artists Remake the Tarot, a Hayward Touring / Focal Point Gallery group exhibition at various locations across the UK.

Morten Kvamme

Morten Kvamme has a Masters in Fine Art from the Academy of Fine Art in Bergen. He worked as a curator and producer at Bergen Kunsthall from 2000-2010, developing the space Landmark into one of Norway’s most active platforms for interdisciplinary art. He is currently teaching in a 50% position at the Academy of Fine Art in Bergen. In 2010 he initiated TagTeam Studio, an artist-run gallery and production space in Bergen, in which he works both as a curator and as an artist.

Daniel Muzyczuk

Daniel Muzyczuk has been Curator of the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun, Poland, since 2008. He was co-founder of the anti-censorship initiative Indeks73 and has curated, amongst others, the following exhibitions: Long Gone Susan Philipsz (2009), Fabryka Mariusz Waras and Krzysztof Topolski (2010), MORE IS MORE (2010) and Melancholy of Resistance, Works from the M HKA Collection (2010). He teaches at the Academy of Fine Art in Gdańsk and is a member of AICA.

Steven Paige

Steven Paige makes art through activities that explore social mores. Recent projects relate to hobbies and self-help manuals, as well as mimicking instructional modes by presenting assembled libraries and archives as art.

A keen advocate of artists dialogue and activity, Steven is involved in creating and presenting platforms for national and international exhibitions and projects. These have included development of The Western Alliance research and exchange project and the co-curated exhibition Control Point: A Temporary Facility at Plymouth Arts Centre in 2010, and Trade Routes in 2011-12.

www.stevenpaige.com

Abigail Reynolds

Abigail Reynolds lives and works in St Just, Cornwall. She studied English Literature at Oxford University, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London. She is represented by Seventeen Gallery in London and by Ambach and Rice in Los Angeles. Her work is in numerous collections including the Government Art Collection.

www.abigailreynolds.com

Phil Rushworth

Phil Rushworth is an independent curator based in Falmouth, Cornwall. Her practice explores accessibility. Projects often feature interaction, popular culture, nostalgia and a sense of humour.

Phil recently co-directed 24hr Comic Etc. with Tom Sharpe, a project funded primarily by Arts Council England and FEAST. The series of three 24-hour events across the county challenged a selection of artists, writers and performers to produce a body of new work in town halls and public spaces.

Veronica Vickery

Veronica Vickery moved to West Cornwall ten years ago and has developed an artistic practice immersed in place, questioning received and often static narratives associated with heritage and tourism, involved with the invisible, the marginal and the overlooked. She graduated from University College Falmouth in 2010 with an MA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice and was a recipient of the Sandra Blow Prize. She is a member of the LAND2 research network, a director of BOSarts and a lecturer at University College Falmouth.

veronicavickery.co.uk
bosarts.org

Bettina Wenzel

After completing her MA in Cultural Studies, Bettina Wenzel moved from Berlin to Cornwall in 2009. She has worked as an independent curator since 2010, when she initiated |Narratives|, an exhibition project investigating concepts and notions of narrative in contemporary art. She writes for the art space enblanco in Berlin and has a strong interest in site-specific projects.