VOGUE COMES TO CANVEY

In November 2013 UK vogue decided to use Canvey Island as the location for a fashion shoot. The spread was titled Somewhere Girl- Be Carried Away by the Tides of the Season and featured a solitary model expertly shot in a variety of implausible locales around Canvey’s sea front.

The choice of location was perhaps not especially remarkable. The juxtaposition of the glamorous world of fashion against the mundanity of a fairly typical British seaside resort in fairly typical British decline serves the art director’s goal of emphasising the aspirational aspect of buying and wearing expensive clothing. It could be seen as yet another example of the fetishisation of entropy, with its antecedents in the ready-made-ruins of the picturesque garden through to the hyper documentation of central Detroit’s decline via Bernard Tschumi’s 1970s Advertisements for Architecture (“the most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay in which it is [sic]”)...though were that the intention the occidental jetty may have been a better choice of shooting location.

However, what this vapid and ephemeral fashion shoot emphasises is the way in which landscape is defined by activity. A thorough survey, a psychogeographic exploration of the temporal and historical currents running thorough the site, even GIS- do these data gathering exercises do anything other than build upon existing preconceptions in the designer’s mind? Preconceptions that can be swept away by the actions of an individual or group with their own agenda.

A landscape can be a habitat or a golf course or a playground... It can also be the location for a fashion shoot, a crime scene or a battlefield... or all of these things.  What defines space is what happens there, or in the words of Albert Camus: “Sense of space is not something that you feel, it’s something that you do.”

A landscape architect will design space with some concept of programme, perhaps defined by the brief and augmented by their own imagination. But once it is constructed, design intent is revealed to be illusory: on top of the layers imported from AutoCAD and Photoshop the user superimposes their own ideas of how the designed space is to be occupied and experienced.

So too in this post: the landscape architect’s notebook, full of oblique narrative and esoteric references, is laid bare... Only to be trampled on by someone else’s vision of what this island means.

RIP SEAMUS HEANEY

Residual Condition by Boo Saville

BOGLAND

We have no prairies 

To slice a big sun at evening-- 

Everywhere the eye concedes to 

Encrouching horizon, 

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye 

Of a tarn. Our unfenced country 

Is bog that keeps crusting 

Between the sights of the sun. 

They've taken the skeleton 

Of the Great Irish Elk 

Out of the peat, set it up 

An astounding crate full of air. 

Butter sunk under 

More than a hundred years 

Was recovered salty and white. 

The ground itself is kind, black butter 

Melting and opening underfoot, 

Missing its last definition 

By millions of years. 

They'll never dig coal here, 

Only the waterlogged trunks 

Of great firs, soft as pulp. 

Our pioneers keep striking 

Inwards and downwards, 

Every layer they strip 

Seems camped on before. 

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. 

The wet centre is bottomless. 

-Seamus Heaney

This is my favourite poem by Heaney, for the lines Butter sunk under/ More than a hundred years / Was recovered salty and white. I have never seen the bogland he describes, but somehow it stirs a deep ancestral memory, buried like the bodies- butter sunk- that are fished out by our pioneers. My ancestors were peat cutters.

Three years ago wandering east London in a mushroom haze I happened upon an exhibition by the artist Boo Saville at Trolley Gallery on Redchurch Street (sadly no longer there). The title of that exhibition was Butter Sunk, and consisted principally of biro drawings of bog men (see above).

A year or so later and I happened to be at Spitalfields market, no too far from Redchurch Street, traded a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus for P.V Glob's The Bog People, an amazing catalogue of immortal remains.

In ...Sisyphus Camus addresses the principal of absurdity: namely our search for meaning in a Universe that is apparently meaningless. We all desire immortality, yet we all die. After death most of us remain as some kind of shadow, a slip of memory for a time at least, until ultimately we are forgotten. For men and women like Heaney (and there are but few) their work survives them, long after their flesh has withered. The bog people attained a different kind of immortality: their deeds, words and names are long forgotten but their flesh remains.

Albert Camus Quote

"Sense of place is not just something people know and feel- it is something people do." -Albert Camus