Of rock and concrete by Helen Pheby
“Moving through and over the West Riding landscape, through hollows and over peaks and concavities. I am the form.” Nwando Ebizie referencing the writings of Barbara Hepworth.
In her sound work The Garden of Circular Paths 2021, the Todmorden-based artist Nwando Ebizie has collaged together spoken word, field recordings from St Ives and West Yorkshire – Carbis Bay to the Cow and Calf – with Hepworth’s own words and an original score. She has created an immersive and meditative piece through which to differently experience the exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life at The Hepworth Wakefield until 27 February 2022. Ebizie is a multidisciplinary, neurodivergent, artist whose work draws together performance art, music, neuroscience and African diasporic ritual dance. The combined experience of the exhibition-specific commission and Hepworth’s work is profoundly physical. We are made deeply aware of being in the moment and of ourselves in relationship with the object presence of the sculptures. Through choreographing a bodily experience of the space, the heft and form of the works are emphasised and in relation to our being, the interior and exterior worlds of artworks and people brought into sharp relief. The objects lose any sense of being artefacts loaded with economic and cultural capital on a plinth. Instead, they are testament to the natural processes over millennia through which their material was created, excavated from the earth and formed by hand tools, the marks made residual through time and space. Hepworth and Ebizie share a deep sense of connection with the West Yorkshire (West Riding) landscape, something that is not just to be visited but is part of them, they part of it. In the same vein, Henry Moore wrote that WH Auden ‘was Yorkshire… I am Yorkshire’[1] in a text to accompany a portfolio of prints that he made in response to Auden’s poems.
Photo: Nwando Ebizie making field recordings for The Garden of Circular Paths 2021. Image courtesy the artist. Photography: Alice Pat Jackson.
Ebizie is one of a number of contemporary artists engaging with landscape, particularly the Yorkshire landscape, and the modernist tradition embodied especially by Hepworth and Moore. Another such artist is Rosanne Robertson, who grew up in Sunderland and established their practice in West Yorkshire, supported in part by the Yorkshire Sculpture International (YSI). YSI is a partnership between Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Hepworth Wakefield, Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Art Gallery that not only stages collaborative presentations of sculpture but invests money and expertise to support the cultural ecology of West Yorkshire, such as establishing a network for artists during the Covid-19 crisis. Robertson was a YSI Associate Artist paired with The Hepworth Wakefield and enabled to develop new work, which was then acquired by THW with a grant from the Contemporary Art Society’s Rapid Response Fund. It comprises a video piece and surface casts of the Bridestone rock formations. The Bridestones are an outcrop of millstone grit rocks and boulders running for about half a mile on the moorland around Todmorden. The subject of many myths, some lost to history, there are various theories surrounding their name including references to a pre-Roman goddess of the Brigantes tribe. The Brigantes ruled most of what is now Northern England but little is known about them until the Roman era, when their Queen Cartmandua formed an alliance with the Roman invaders in the middle of the first century CE. She was overthrown in c.69 by a revolt led by her former husband Venutius, who she had divorced in favour of his armour bearer.
The tendency to consider aspects of the land, indeed Earth itself, as female seems common to many cultures across time and their treatment reflects attitudes of those societies. For example, in a male-dominant, binary and capitalist system there is a will to explore, map and own every peak and crevice and to exploit its resources for wealth and power. Hills and mountains in Britain over 492 feet are called Marilyns, in irreverent response to the fact that mountains in Scotland over 3,000 feet are called Munros – to be conquered or ‘bagged’.
Through their practice, Robertson subverts a binary perception of the land. In their Talk Art conversation[2] they discuss how stone, something that is perceived to be unyielding, hard and associated with masculinity, is often considered in contrast with water, seen to be softer and linked to femininity – but that this view is undermined by the fact that water has the power to erode stone. Robertson has spoken of the YSI opportunity to work in the open air as one that really established their relationship with landscape. Here they felt able to consider their body in relation to land and from a queer perspective, challenging any preconceptions that queerness is unnatural. They reference a 1993 lesbian novel by Leslie Feinberg called Stone Butch Blues, which claims a natural landscape as a metaphor for freedom. Robertson ‘followed the journey of the landscape’ to West Cornwall where they are now based, describing the place as liberating and where they can live in inspiration.[3]
Robertson’s recent exhibition Subterrane at Maximillian William, London, of painting, drawing, sculpture and the filmed performance made for The Hepworth Wakefield, was mesmeric. Stepping out of the consumerist bustle and sensory over-stimulation of London’s pre-Christmas West End, I was suddenly amongst the more familiar. Although abstract and utterly unique I could trace the echoes of Hepworth but also hear the sound of water over rock, the roll of a wave, my head opened to breath-taking long views. The exhibition coincided with the presentation of Robertson’s first public sculpture, Stone (Butch), as part of Sculpture in the City until spring 2022. Founded by Stella Ioannou and now in its tenth edition, Sculpture in the City is an inspired initiative to share contemporary art and ideas in the heart of London’s financial district and Robertson’s sculpture is a breath of natural air amongst the glass and concrete.
Photo: Rosanne Robertson Stone (Butch), 2021
Corten steel, jesmonite and paint
220 x 130 x 156 cm © Rosanne Robertson. Image courtesy the artist, Sculpture in the City and Maximillian William, London. Photography: Jack Hems
Holly Willats, founder of the brilliant Art Licks now divides her time between London and a farm rented from the National Trust on the North York Moors. At Cow Syke, Willats has established a residency programme and her partner a production studio. I visited while Emily Hesse was there, an artist based in Saltburn-by-sea whose practice, in part, is an acknowledgement of the human relationship with materials. During her time at Cow Syke, Hesse documented the generations of mark making that exist in the fabric of the farm, its outbuildings and stones. She has recreated these on found old doors, bringing to the surface centuries of expression. As part of her research she has been speaking with local farmers, including one who has burnt an entire season of fleece in a protest of last resort at the fact that they are worth only a few pence, costing more to shear, when they would once have covered the farm rent for a year.
Emily Hesse work in progress, Cow Syke, 2021 Photography: Helen Pheby
The 2018 report Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries[4] includes a table that maps ‘British Social Attitudes responses to left/right questions by occupational group’. It documents those working in culture as having the furthest left views, and those in agriculture the furthest right. One of the many findings in the Arts Council England’s annual report on culture in relation to the UK economy in 2019[5] is that the sector contributes more than agriculture, an aspect particularly highlighted by the media. At Yorkshire Sculpture Park culture and agriculture not only coexist but collaborate. It is more beneficial to not consider the two in binary opposition, farming is essential to our survival and for a sustainable relationship with the land. There’s wisdom in the fields as well as university halls and we will need both to overcome the crises we face.
Photo: View across Todmorden moors, photography Helen
[1] From Moore’s typed and hand-edited draft for ‘Auden Poems / Moore Lithographs’, catalogue section five reproduced in David Mitchinson Henry Moore Prints and Portfolios The Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, 2010
[2] https://uk-podcasts.co.uk/podcast/talk-art/rosanne-robertson
[3] Ibid
[4] Dr Orian Brook, Dr David O’Brien and Dr Mark Taylor, Create London, 2018
[5] https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication/contribution-arts-and-culture-industry-uk-economy-0