I’ve been making with land in mind for a long time, considering how place imprints itself onto us, but also how it has been carved and shaped by humans. Land-scaping, literally sculpting land, is vivid in the stone of quarries and mines, ditches and furrows in fields, canals and leats. My research into a sublime anthropocene has anchored my practice and my curiosity, revealing the simultaneous horror and allure of extraction or agriculture.
PORTALS materially combines my fascination with these themes above and below ground - the mineral absences of an industrial sublime with the present remnants of a thatched farm on the north Cornish coast. These materials show us places we can’t always see, that when you stand looking out to the Atlantic, beneath you tunnels and voids network the cliffs like a wormery, fingers stretching out over and under the sea.
Polly Judd’s writing accompanying the installation is firmly rooted in this geographical location. In her excerpt from a longer book, she describes fingers finding portals between worlds, fizzing pink holes between times and place. I like to use this to think about how material traces linger, how minerals might haunt us, how waste could be re-used. How we might speak back and forward in time and through place about what we know and what is hidden from us, what we should remember.
I’d like to thank Polly for generously letting me use this excerpt of her writing to contextualise my thinking behind the materials, place and what is invisible, hidden or absent. I’d also like to thank Erika Cann, the organiser of Traction Projects, for the opportunity to realise this idea at scale and Emma and Mark Mantle for the unlimited thatch supply.
PORTALS materially combines my fascination with these themes above and below ground - the mineral absences of an industrial sublime with the present remnants of a thatched farm on the north Cornish coast. These materials show us places we can’t always see, that when you stand looking out to the Atlantic, beneath you tunnels and voids network the cliffs like a wormery, fingers stretching out over and under the sea.
Polly Judd’s writing accompanying the installation is firmly rooted in this geographical location. In her excerpt from a longer book, she describes fingers finding portals between worlds, fizzing pink holes between times and place. I like to use this to think about how material traces linger, how minerals might haunt us, how waste could be re-used. How we might speak back and forward in time and through place about what we know and what is hidden from us, what we should remember.
I’d like to thank Polly for generously letting me use this excerpt of her writing to contextualise my thinking behind the materials, place and what is invisible, hidden or absent. I’d also like to thank Erika Cann, the organiser of Traction Projects, for the opportunity to realise this idea at scale and Emma and Mark Mantle for the unlimited thatch supply.
PORTALS
by Polly Judd
When the miners left, the portals came. After the industry folded and the Cousin Jacks were faced with little choice but to migrate to keep their profession, something grew in the dead landscape poisoned with heavy minerals—an inexplicable connection to the Cornish souls elsewhere.
The cliffs of the north coast rose steep from the sea. They were stained with minerals and pockmarked with mine adits, and waves lapped far below. Foam gathered in a winding line on the water about a metre from where the rock met sea; it looked as if somebody had traced around the coastline but had not held the white pen close enough. A girl stood on a platform at a halfway point. It could have been a foothold for a giant, though was accessible to her by stepping off the path, snagging jean cuffs on twigs of wiry heather.
Her gaze crossed the miles, her back pressed to the cold coarse surface which had not yet gotten sun. Three slanting monoliths were left behind millennia ago when the coastline retreated. These too had a foam decoration, except theirs was a chem-trail of white stretching behind them for about half a mile, as if the rocks themselves were drifting and leaving this in their wake. But this is not what she meant to see. The girl shifted her back, crouching lower, waiting until penny-sized portals spotted her vision instead.
There. She paused. Dark holes interrupted the view of the sea beyond, like a smattering of bullets had punctured an invisible fabric, their edges fizzing an iridescent pink. Just large enough to put an eye to, or stick a finger in. These had not been recorded yet. Either they were new, or had somehow gone unrecorded for two hundred years, because they were not in the online archive. She leaned closer. It was not unlike pressing her face to the metal grid capping a mineshaft and being hit by a heavy draught. Wherever these led to, the sky was a flat grey with a dull illumination on the land made no shadows. It looked like the middle of a quarry. And then a centimetre to the left was Earth and the great expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Insects, sea foam or pollen on the wind would travel beyond, carrying pieces of Cornwall to places they should not be. Environmentalists could only be grateful that any rodents or any larger animal had an adversity to entering. Using the portals for travel did irreparable damage to the brain.
These portals were not exclusive to the displaced miners, as they could appear anywhere in the world wherever a person left a piece of their soul behind, but the Cornish variants had stayed open for an unusual amount of time. Hundreds of thousands like these connected countries through history, dense in warzones, cities of nuclear fallout, and sites of natural disasters. As a child, the girl would call through to the world beyond. Sometimes a voice answered in another language or another child’s eye would blink from the other side. Sometimes if there was a wild animal, she would squeal and pull back her grubby little fingers from the opening.
When she slid out of the nook of the cliffside, shaking out cramped legs, and looked back, there was nothing there. When she inched around to see the portals side-on, a sliver of pink caught her eye. It was an optical illusion she would never tire of.
The girl retreated to the cliff path, turning her face to the sun and listening to the sea throwing itself around below her. It was not long before she passed a fallen chimney and the route took her inland, where she found buddle pits with graffiti on their curved walls, the bottoms already peppered with young green montbretia shoots, which, come August, would be mature and flowering an unmistakable orange. Invasive, she remembered. The girl’s footprints severed the long tracks made by dirt bikes as she passed the half-crumbled arsenic labyrinths. She did not need to look to know they were full of broken glass and sun bleached crisp packets, waterlogged between the layers. She trampled through dense heather and jumped over gorse, sometimes stopped in her tracks by ivy-clad walls or steep pits, where young sycamores had taken root. Gulls circled overhead, cawing, while blackbirds hopped around more self-consciously and clouds came and went over the sun.
The girl crossed a ridge and squinted at the horizon and the beach before her. Cliff became pillowy dune and dune flattened into wet-gold sand, and beyond, the sea churned in shades of teal. She descended, taking off her shoes and peeling off socks. Maram grass parted and the closer she got to the sea, the more water pooled in her footprints. She hiked up her jeans and let seawater stream over her feet, cold enough to make her wince. The waves out back were big, roaring and foaming at the mouth, bounding toward her only to collapse in the shallows. The pain of the cold faded to numbness, a relief. It felt like she was being accepted. Or perhaps assimilated. Or maybe it meant nothing at all.
The girl turned her back on the sea and looked back up the beach. The sky was bright compared to the woefully dark water. Muddied clouds smattered across it like spilt paint. And hanging, inexplicably, all around her, appeared to be dozens of onyx gemstones set in pink, hovering evenly spaced across the landscape like black eyes. But they were only portals. These ones were marked on all the tourist maps, only visible from out at sea, or low tide. A particularly large wave surged up to her knees and made her stumble forward, closer. Each dark picture of moorland inside lined up to create a broken but single scene of rugged Welsh hills. Only local, in the grand scheme of things. One Celtic region to another. When the sun came out inside, the portals gleamed brighter than her beach, then dimmed just as fast.
She tried to imagine how the miners took the move. Those men who crammed into the bowels of the earth, stooping in hot tunnels, hearing the rocks grate on the sea floor above, uprooting their lives to go somewhere else without the salt edge.
Another wave crashed behind her and the girl hurried away, ducking through a gap between the little windows, but the water still sloshed up around her and wet her rolled-up jeans. On the safety of sand, cool air chilling damp bare skin, she turned. She saw only the sea, stretching out over the curve of the world; the long way to a new life.
by Polly Judd
When the miners left, the portals came. After the industry folded and the Cousin Jacks were faced with little choice but to migrate to keep their profession, something grew in the dead landscape poisoned with heavy minerals—an inexplicable connection to the Cornish souls elsewhere.
The cliffs of the north coast rose steep from the sea. They were stained with minerals and pockmarked with mine adits, and waves lapped far below. Foam gathered in a winding line on the water about a metre from where the rock met sea; it looked as if somebody had traced around the coastline but had not held the white pen close enough. A girl stood on a platform at a halfway point. It could have been a foothold for a giant, though was accessible to her by stepping off the path, snagging jean cuffs on twigs of wiry heather.
Her gaze crossed the miles, her back pressed to the cold coarse surface which had not yet gotten sun. Three slanting monoliths were left behind millennia ago when the coastline retreated. These too had a foam decoration, except theirs was a chem-trail of white stretching behind them for about half a mile, as if the rocks themselves were drifting and leaving this in their wake. But this is not what she meant to see. The girl shifted her back, crouching lower, waiting until penny-sized portals spotted her vision instead.
There. She paused. Dark holes interrupted the view of the sea beyond, like a smattering of bullets had punctured an invisible fabric, their edges fizzing an iridescent pink. Just large enough to put an eye to, or stick a finger in. These had not been recorded yet. Either they were new, or had somehow gone unrecorded for two hundred years, because they were not in the online archive. She leaned closer. It was not unlike pressing her face to the metal grid capping a mineshaft and being hit by a heavy draught. Wherever these led to, the sky was a flat grey with a dull illumination on the land made no shadows. It looked like the middle of a quarry. And then a centimetre to the left was Earth and the great expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Insects, sea foam or pollen on the wind would travel beyond, carrying pieces of Cornwall to places they should not be. Environmentalists could only be grateful that any rodents or any larger animal had an adversity to entering. Using the portals for travel did irreparable damage to the brain.
These portals were not exclusive to the displaced miners, as they could appear anywhere in the world wherever a person left a piece of their soul behind, but the Cornish variants had stayed open for an unusual amount of time. Hundreds of thousands like these connected countries through history, dense in warzones, cities of nuclear fallout, and sites of natural disasters. As a child, the girl would call through to the world beyond. Sometimes a voice answered in another language or another child’s eye would blink from the other side. Sometimes if there was a wild animal, she would squeal and pull back her grubby little fingers from the opening.
When she slid out of the nook of the cliffside, shaking out cramped legs, and looked back, there was nothing there. When she inched around to see the portals side-on, a sliver of pink caught her eye. It was an optical illusion she would never tire of.
The girl retreated to the cliff path, turning her face to the sun and listening to the sea throwing itself around below her. It was not long before she passed a fallen chimney and the route took her inland, where she found buddle pits with graffiti on their curved walls, the bottoms already peppered with young green montbretia shoots, which, come August, would be mature and flowering an unmistakable orange. Invasive, she remembered. The girl’s footprints severed the long tracks made by dirt bikes as she passed the half-crumbled arsenic labyrinths. She did not need to look to know they were full of broken glass and sun bleached crisp packets, waterlogged between the layers. She trampled through dense heather and jumped over gorse, sometimes stopped in her tracks by ivy-clad walls or steep pits, where young sycamores had taken root. Gulls circled overhead, cawing, while blackbirds hopped around more self-consciously and clouds came and went over the sun.
The girl crossed a ridge and squinted at the horizon and the beach before her. Cliff became pillowy dune and dune flattened into wet-gold sand, and beyond, the sea churned in shades of teal. She descended, taking off her shoes and peeling off socks. Maram grass parted and the closer she got to the sea, the more water pooled in her footprints. She hiked up her jeans and let seawater stream over her feet, cold enough to make her wince. The waves out back were big, roaring and foaming at the mouth, bounding toward her only to collapse in the shallows. The pain of the cold faded to numbness, a relief. It felt like she was being accepted. Or perhaps assimilated. Or maybe it meant nothing at all.
The girl turned her back on the sea and looked back up the beach. The sky was bright compared to the woefully dark water. Muddied clouds smattered across it like spilt paint. And hanging, inexplicably, all around her, appeared to be dozens of onyx gemstones set in pink, hovering evenly spaced across the landscape like black eyes. But they were only portals. These ones were marked on all the tourist maps, only visible from out at sea, or low tide. A particularly large wave surged up to her knees and made her stumble forward, closer. Each dark picture of moorland inside lined up to create a broken but single scene of rugged Welsh hills. Only local, in the grand scheme of things. One Celtic region to another. When the sun came out inside, the portals gleamed brighter than her beach, then dimmed just as fast.
She tried to imagine how the miners took the move. Those men who crammed into the bowels of the earth, stooping in hot tunnels, hearing the rocks grate on the sea floor above, uprooting their lives to go somewhere else without the salt edge.
Another wave crashed behind her and the girl hurried away, ducking through a gap between the little windows, but the water still sloshed up around her and wet her rolled-up jeans. On the safety of sand, cool air chilling damp bare skin, she turned. She saw only the sea, stretching out over the curve of the world; the long way to a new life.
