Entanglements

Lizzie Perrotte

‘Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note. It is the highest light. It is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.’ (1) (G.K.Chesterton, 1910)

Writer/philosopher, G.K.Chesterton, suggests porosity between an inside and outside, a notional body and precarious environment. His words are weighted with a sense of uncanny threat, impending ruin. A similar entropic imaginary permeates work by British artists, Andy Hughes and Peggy Atherton, who have collaborated for a project, Red Creek, in response to the site of Frenchman’s Creek, a steep wooded ‘valley drowned by the sea’, (2) extending inland from the Helford Estuary, Cornwall.

During a time of existential apprehension, in the context of a global pandemic and environmental predicament, Hughes and Atherton evolved the project through a year of research and formal experimentation: visits to the creek location, conversations, readings, exploration of materials on-site and in the studio. This remote place of semi-wilderness, identified by the National Trust as an environment of outstanding ‘natural’ beauty, has, through time, been disturbed by rhythms and cycles of human consumption, both sustainable and unsustainable. Rich in resources, the valley has, from times of pre-history, been a site of extraction: hunting, habitation, global trade, colonial passage, industrial production; modernity. The forest of oaks growing and collapsing on the steep sides of the inlet, have died many deaths; denuded for building and shipping timber; burned to fuel Cornwall’s tin mining.

Red Creek is a project of entanglements: ecological, temporal, material, imaginary. Flooded daily by the sea, the Creek has a complex ever-changing ecosystem. Both artists have responded to its uncanny nature: fallen oaks draped with pelts of bladderwrack seaweed; woodlands lush with wild garlic, mingling with flows of thick, salty alluvial mud which suck down and spew up decaying matter of bodies, boats, mysterious debris. Life and death continually fold into each other and metamorphosize. It is rare to encounter other visitors and walkers in the valley, even in the summer months. The entangled trees muffle the close presence of contemporary living and, for a brief moment, it is possible to fantasize the creek as a place of primal wilderness. This illusion is always broken, continually rippled by historical traces of human activity, consumption and its wastes.

Atherton and Hughes’ diverse practices are entangled with the ‘vibrant matter’ of the creek. Photographic works and sculptural casts taken from found materials, are directly indexical to the site. Complex phenomenologies (experiences of being there): moving through thick undergrowth or picking a way along the viscous shoreline, are embedded in process. Hughes infra-red photographs capture memories of deep reds, curdling the muddy, tidal waters. However, this photographic process reverses certain natural signifiers. The variegated greens of foliage turn psychedelic, vampire red. Fallen branches become a gothic fantasy with running veins or bloody bones. Atherton’s works are performative objects, charged with uncanny potential. Sculptural assemblages of dead animals and discarded commodities become the imaginative debris from a dark drama. Atherton sited and Hughes photographed some of her work back at the creek, further amplifying feelings of its ‘bodily nature’. Working together, their practices braid environmental matter and speculative imagination ever more tightly.

Red Creek continues to entangle imaginations with matterings. After photographing Atherton’s wig sculpture, crawling with insects, Hughes discovered a reference to a diary entry by Charles Darwin, made aboard HMS Beagle, on a colonial expedition to South America. Darwin reflected on sensations of entanglement between the bodies of Fuegan natives and their ‘savage’ forest environment. He noted the Fuegian’s ‘black, coarse, and entangled hair’. A later entry reiterated this uncanny of forest entanglement: ‘On every side were lying irregular masses of rock and torn- up trees; other trees, though still erect, were decayed to the heart and ready to fall. The entangled mass of the thriving and the fallen…’ Familiar measures of human time and positionality are dissolved in the uncanny thickness of Red Creek shaped by Hughes and Atherton. Entangled with apprehension of future evolutions, my imagination spins and torques back through Chesterton’s red vision, further in time, to the prophetic menace found in Greek tragic drama, the Orestia by Aeschylus: ‘The reek of human blood smiles out at me’.

1. G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, Methuen, London, 1910, Chapter 10, The Red Town, pg 67. This passage was cited by Robert Smithson to introduce his essay ‘Spiral Jetty’ relating to his epic land art project in great salt lake, near Rozel point, Utah 1970.

2. Christian Boulton, Five Million Tides: A Biography of the Helford River, Stroud, Gloucestershire, 2019.

3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London, 2010

4. Stacy Alaimo. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self, Indiana, 2010

5. Charles Darwin quoted in Ben Carver, An Entangled Forest: Evolution and Speculative Fiction, Urbanomic/Documents, 2018 - urbanomic.com,p.1. file:///C:/Users/eliza/ Downloads/Urbanomic_Document_UFD032.pdf (Accessed 10.10.21)

6. Francis Bacon quoted in David Sylvester, Looking Back atFrancis Bacon, London: Thames & Hudson, 2000, p.190.