Agency, belonging and the divinity of plastic

 

Originally posted in July 2010

I went to a fascinating workshop at the October Gallery yesterday with George Nuku, a Maori, an artist, a collaborator with museums and champion of young people. He was also the first contemporary Maori with a complete body tattoo. The trail that led me there started when I was wandering round Sheringham, my Norfolk ‘ancestral home’. I’d just visited the newly opened Sheringham Museumand seen a photo of my great great grandfather, who had been coastguard and promenade inspector. He had also been to Japan & the Pacific as a naval officer, training the Japanese navy in British ways. I was thinking about how I had his eyes and nose, about my belonging to that place, yet also my distance from the town now. My relative (‘the Old Chap’) must have felt an odd dislocation travelling East, and I was wondering what he saw through his eyes and what stayed with him, what knowledge he brought to Sheringham and how it infused the place. That led me to reflect on my husband Brian’s ancestors who went from Scotland to settle in New Zealand. I wondered about what changed in them, despite always looking Scottish, in becoming part of a place that was another people’s.

I was carrying my camera, as I have on and off in Sheringham for 30 years, looking for something different to photograph. As it happens I always find something different even in a small place like that: evidence of change, of erosion of the coast or evidence of moments in time like the 1st World Cup English game. But, then I saw George. I’d never seen anyone in Sheringham like it before. I was stunned because in a second I knew he was Maori, and realised the resonance with all my thoughts at that moment. So, that sense of interest led me to his workshop in London. He’d been working at the October Gallery with young people related to the EthKnowCentrix exhibition, which included his work, and the resulting Cut it Out exhibition can be seen there now. He’s a sculptor who brings traditional Maori forms into new materials and locations. For example, he reconstructed missing parts of a war canoe, using perspex rather than wood, for the National Museums of Scotland, and he loves to carve in polystyrene.There has been some criticism from Maori for this, that he’s not using proper traditional materials. He says to them ‘don’t worry, plastic will be traditional by this afternoon’.

The first words he spoke to us were in the tongue of his mother’s people, the Ngate Kahungunu from the Heretaunga region of the North Island. It was an incantation to draw in our ancestors to the meeting. I was reminded of the way that many indigenous people make decisions, consulting with generations of ancestors and successors, not just the living. Immediately I was struck that agency was a central theme for him. He talked about the relationship of his people with the British. The Maori were honourable and generous, to be in a position of agency, to give and ‘treat’ in order to be equal. They have been disenfranchised and alienated but he feels the story isn’t over yet, that having no hope for equality would make all that suffering in vain. When the ‘knives and blankets and tables and chairs’ started coming, Maori saw they must be part of that change, to see the value of those things and deal in them. ‘You had to be part of that change, to direct change rather than be directed by it. Nobody is more equipped to deal with these changes than yourself’.

He showed some images from a ceremony in which he performed, at the Pasifika Styles exhibition in Cambridge, associated with the birth of a child and he talked about how creativity and procreation are the same thing. He feels that men in particular have a longing to create, to be closer to the miracle of creation of people which women are blessed and pained with. Creativity  is an utterly human power, and human agency is all around our potential to convert materials and to ride change. One kind of material at the moment that is giving the planet a lot of grief is plastic and of course the oil that it’s made from. I asked if those who object to his use of modern materials most object to the use of plastic for reasons of marine pollution causing biodiversity loss and climate change. He said that plastic is from the earth, it is indigenous, and that through art we can give it its divinity. It was an optimistic moment for me, in a week in which I felt mired in worries about the unrepairable cracks in the ocean leaking millions of gallons of oil. I don’t know yet what reasons for optimism there are but I felt stronger for his example.

Ghost forest and icebergs

Ghost forest 1, a photo by bridgetmckenzon Flickr. 

I posted this after a day off to soak up some culture on November 21 2009. An updated coda to it would be to mention that I’ve since met Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey and talked about their project to continue the work of Beuys in planting oaks, and we’ve also seen the spread of Sudden Oak Death in the UK.

The bad news about the evidence of warming and resistance to act on it is relentlessly dripping into my Twitter stream. It’s difficult to be upbeat in the face of it. The climate negotiations are based on out of date predictions. Last night, I heard that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing 57 gigatonnes of ice a year (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes) and that the temperature there is now 6 degrees warmer than it should be. Last week there were reports of over 100 icebergs heading slowly for New Zealand. If the sheet melts entirely the sea levels will rise by 64 metres. Almost the most depressing thing about that is that the predictional film most likely to come true would be Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.

Having spent weeks without any breaks for creativity and culture I thought I should lift my spirits with a cultural afternoon. Angela Palmer is the artist behind the Ghost Forest which landed in Trafalgar Square last week en route to Copenhagen. She was so depressed by deforestation and its links to climate change that she couldn’t sleep about it. So she undertook a major challenge, went to Ghana and transported these rainforest tree stumps to Europe. I found the installation an odd experience, unsettling, being in Trafalgar Square surrounded by these great uprooted things while people looked on respectfully at this combination-at-once of creativity and destruction. The labels told us that some of the trees had stood as tall as Nelson’s column. We were just looking at the feet of these giants, all washed of their soil. As I was taking photos, I felt a shadow of what it must be as a photographer in a war, albeit an extremely safe one, yet aware that the context was far more serious than any war.

Afterwards I went over to St Martins in the Fields to the Hard Rain exhibition, which although unconnected to Ghost Forest, had a lot of resonance with it. It showed photos of the Ghanaian logging operations, and other evidence of environmental destruction. There is an image of a small Ghanaian boy stretching out his arms in front of the disc of a chopped trunk, a vibrant orange colour. The text for this exhibition said ‘If we can understand the horror we can dare to hope.’

My next stop was another exhibition by Angela Palmer, called Breathing In, in the Wellcome Institute. This is the result of journeys to China and Tasmania to collect evidence of the effects of climate change and pollution on people’s lives. For example, she compares white clothes and face masks worn in both places, China showing itself as one of the polluted places on earth by the black grime.

I liked these three exhibitions and I was glad they had been made. But I felt a kind of tedium or hopelessness, a feeling that art as eco-propaganda isn’t going to work, all these images of destruction and dystopias, that it wasn’t actually planting trees but using them up.

My final exhibition that day was Points of View, about 19thC photography from the British Library. Having just been to see the Ghost Forest I was struck by the first image, blown up large, a ghostly tree, all brachial white against dark. This was the negative of An Oak Tree in Winter, the first photograph by Fox Talbot, the first photographer, the image itself a ghost. He was excited that in a few seconds you could make an image that would take a skilled artist weeks or months. This process is still something we can get excited about, and photography is a primary means by which artists show us the abuses of nature and peoples around the world. But it is all part of the mechanisation that accelerated the materialism which has brought us to this state.

The next day I went for a walk in Honor Oak, up to One Tree Hill and found myself caught by an oak tree. A man came along the path and stood there quietly looking at it with me, then after a while he nodded, smiled and walked on. Oaks were planted by Joseph Beuys in his 7,000 oaks work in Kassell and are still being planted around the world in a legacy to that project.

The tree of doors and of endurance…