EXHIBITION – towards the water – ecotone
Exploring the challenges of Argyll’s environmental stewardship during COP26
An exhibition at Dunoon Burgh Hall and online with images and texts by
Nina Bacos and Anna Bokström
Joseph Beuys and Richard Demarco
Laura Donkers
Naoko Mabon
Deirdre MacKenna
Alexander and Susan Maris
JMW Turner and William Miller
Seawilding and Philip Price
Susannah Rose
Roc Sandford
Caroline Younger
As the attention of the world’s leaders and environmental activists settles on Scotland during the 26th UN Climate Change Conference COP26, we present a new folio of images and texts by artists and writers undertaking research in Argyll’s unique ecotone habitats, which enable transition between land and sea. Their insights invite you to reflect upon the responsibilities involved in using the environment’s natural resources, in climate stewardship and in sustainability.
The images date from 1836 with a detail of the etching ‘Dunstaffnage’ by JMW Turner and engraver William Miller in which the artists depict the moment that land gives way to the unrelenting swell of the ocean waves. The tamed land bears the scars of commercial industries in the image portraying Joseph Beuys, a pioneer of environmental stewardship as he stands on the shores of Loch Awe in 1971. The dystopian image by Alexander and Susan Maris depicts future ‘Isles of Iona’, submerged under raised sea levels, accompanied by a text by Roc Sandford, Director of Ocean Rebellion describing how climate damage has changed his island home beyond the Isle of Mull.
Roc Sandford’s leadership in global-level activism is echoed in the research by Nina Bacos and Anna Bokström whose images document the COP UN Climate Change Conferences, global-scale fossil-fuel extraction and community activism to unravel the complexities involved. These complexities are brought into focus by artists Laura Donkers and Susannah Rose whose durational practices illuminate aspects of land-ownership, access and expectations which shape our everyday engagement in the places of west Scotland.
We extend an invitation to you to consider the environmental blueprint of the places you inhabit, such as St Bride’s Well in Dunoon rediscovered by Alexander and Susan Maris, and the lichen prints which map the environmental conditions that surround the home of Caroline Younger, and take stock of the role they play in renewing and stabilising our collective wellbeing.
And we encourage you to take action! Start by inviting Naoko Mabon to collaborate with your own regenerative practice, and use the community-led coastal-project kit that Philip Price and Seawilding can give you, and together, become resilient climate stewards.
Please enjoy the Folio and reflect on how you can activate your role as a climate steward:
Portraying the unrelenting swell of storm-tossed waters, wind and tide, JMW Turner became revered as the artist who reinvented the genre of Seascape painting. Over a period of thirty years he visited Scotland’s westerly coast to study its natural environment. This detail from the etching ‘Dunstaffnage’ by Turner and engraver William Miller excludes recognisable features such as boats and buildings in order to focus upon Turner’s depiction of the frenzied transition between sea and land.
Image above: Detail of ‘Dunstaffnage’ by Joseph Mallord William Turner and William Miller, 1836 etching and engraving courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
“I look through my salt-caked window towards the Island of Iona, blue in the distance beyond Staffa. Enormous clouds, far bigger than islands, slide by above, trailing their streamers. Between me and Staffa floats the isle of Mâesgeir. When I first peered through this window, thirty years back, Mâesgeir was white with gulls. It was already white a thousand years ago, when the Norsemen came, because Mâesgeir means ‘gull island’ in Norse. It’s now black – the gulls have died.
Walking along Gometra’s shoreline has always been difficult because the rocks were crusted with sand-coloured whelks. Now, it’s easy and these rocks also are black. Like the gulls, most of the whelks have died.
The pastures in front of my house used to be perpetually green. They are now the colour of burnt grass because it hasn’t rained. Soon they will go white in the snow that hardly used to fall.
As the weather shifts, the sea in which Mâesgeir bobs turns every colour except yellow and red. Soon it will become these colours too, when all the fish, unable to form their skeletons due to acidification from burning oil, are also dead and only algae and jelly fish remain.
And when the Gulf Stream which brings our lovely climate fails, which may happen suddenly, within ten years, we will need snowshoes to walk across the pack ice to the Isles of Iona, and cuddly huskies with steaming breath to pull our shopping home. If we haven’t yet been cleared by people still hungrier than us.
All we love is in danger. The hares are dead. There are fewer dragon flies and bees. The distant ice-sheets shatter and tumble into the sea and each spring-tide is a little higher. As the ice-sheets melt, not only Mâesgeir and the Isles of Iona, but great cities like Glasgow, slip silently below the waves.”
Text by Roc Sandford, Director of Ocean Rebellion
Image above: Alexander & Susan Maris ‘The Isles of Iona / Modern Hy’ 2021, courtesy of the artists
Joseph Beuys looks at us from the past. Standing on the shores of Loch Awe he is framed in a landscape scarred by industry. Beuys regarded himself as a Germano-Celt, and in 1970 joined Richard Demarco to investigate the Celts’ philosophies of living with the natural world at the western edge of Europe. His visits fuelled his pioneering artworks, raising awareness of the impact of human consumption on our planet, and the need for environmental stewardship. Beuys’s legacy of activism gives context to the climate challenges we face today and fifty years later, underscores the need to take action, now.
Image above: Joseph Beuys in Argyll, Friday 8 May, 1970, courtesy of the Demarco Digital Archive
In geological terms, our current era is called The Anthropocene, named so because, for the first time in the life of our planet, human activity is the dominant factor that affects it; this human activity has put climate systems into an unstable state.
Demand for products such as cement, plastics, fuel and meats drive processes that are exhausting the planet’s resources and our industrial-scale extraction of sand, rock, minerals, oil and fisheries have destroyed many natural ecological systems and the life-forms that depend upon them.
This image is from a series by artists Nina Bacos and Anna Bokström, undertaken in collaboration with people in Greece, Italy, Scotland and Sweden. The artists explore ways of generating sustainable circular economies which don’t require global-scale fuel production and mitigate the threat of climate change. The image shows one of the stages at the the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference COP24 where politicians and scientists discuss the challenges of global climate change, similar to COP26 currently taking place in Glasgow. While the scientific community and world leaders commit to a carbon-free future, state governments have, so far, been unable to set collective agreements.
Image above: ‘Green is Great at COP24 in 2018’ by Anna Bokström, from Geology on Speed, courtesy of the artists
Land Radius is part of a 9 hour film by Laura Donkers recorded during sixty days on the Isle of North Uist; a Bushnell Trail Camera was placed in the landscape to capture the ecological activity of the land acting as a proxy human sentinel, and frame the perspective of the hunter’s gaze. This image shows an area of salt marsh, animals, and a blue plastic tube shaped into a circle to demarcate an area of ground, drawing our attention to the multiple and often clashing claims upon the land. Over the course of the two months, it was colonised by Armeria matritima flowers known as thrift and sea pink, red deer, moths, herons, otters, gulls and tidal water-surges which overwhelmed the land at moon rise. The film is accompanied by a sound work of recorded human stories expressing frustration at unmonitored growth in deer and geese population, and chronicles of crofters’ raids to capture land upon which to grow their own families.
Image above: ‘Land Radius’ by Laura Donkers, 2013, courtesy of the artist
Water is a healing elixir that falls from the skies. It appears as dew at dawn and collects into streams and rivers in an almost miraculous way. It is the one element that flows between loch and ocean, land and air, in a constant cycle of renewal. Fresh, clean spring water is a fundamental necessity, enabling humans to thrive; springs which provide fresh water continuously have been blessed and have become sacred wells. Sacred wells tare located at sites where people have congregated for millennia and are still revered today as places of wellbeing and healing. This image shows the magnified fibres of a skein of wool dyed by Alexander and Susan Maris using water from the ancient Well of Schiehallion and a small handful of lichen which they gathered from a hazel tree at St Bride’s Well in Dunoon on St Brigid’s Day.
Image above: ‘Skein of wool dyed with lichen from St Bride’s Well, Dunoon and water from the Well of Schiehallion’ by Alexander and Susan Maris, 2021, courtesy of the artists
“The landscape of the West Coast of Scotland is a place of wind, rock, trees, and especially water. It is ancient and wild and under threat from a number of human activities. I am engaged in community efforts to defend and restore the Marine Protected Area in which I live.
In my work the emphasis is on the complexity and variety of this environment. Making prints directly from the plant captures the individuality of each particular one, which can also stand for its whole class.
Lichens are composite organisms – algae and fungi forming a mutualistic relationship, each dependant on the other. They are an ancient life form which grows on almost any surface and in any environmental condition. If you look for them, you should see them growing on trees and stones around you. All lichens absorb moisture from the air and from rainwater, along with any pollutants carried by these.Some lichens can filter and absorb the pollutants, cleaning the air in the process.
Other lichens need clean fresh air to survive. They are sensitive to pollutants carried in the air and rainwater and will be killed by them. The absence of these lichens is a reliable indicator of invisible but present high levels of pollution.
The lichens with which I have been printing are Lobaria pulmonaria (Tree Lungwort). These prints resemble maps referencing the environmental conditions that surround my home.”
Above: Text and image ‘Purple and Blue Lichen (1)’ by Caroline Younger. Monoprint 2019, courtesy of the artist
Susannah Rose’s artworks explore how the personal, social and political influences around each person affect their movement through places; her sustained immersion in the West Coast of Scotland involves maps and mapping, intuitive navigations through cultural, physical and sensorial geographies, knowledge accumulated through the disciplines of running and orienteering, engagements with communities and the gradual honing of her own psychogeographies. Reflecting upon concepts of the words ‘wild’, ‘remote’, ‘access’, ‘entitlement’ and ‘boundary’, she acts as a connector between creativity and the interests of groups of people, exploring the interconnectedness of ideas and physical experiences of place. The image here was made as preparation for her work titled ‘A Run of Protection’ which is a performative demarcation in the Sound of Jura Marine Protected Area which has been damaged by ineffective protection, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, ownership-issues and climate change.
Image above: ‘A Run of Protection in the Sunart to Sound of Jura Marine Protected Area’ by Susannah Rose, 2020, courtesy of the artist
If actions for change begin with critical questioning, then making a forum for different perspectives is vital; curator Naoko Mabon has been working to activate her local intertidal zone as such a forum through practice-led research. Liminal yet highly productive intertidal zones are governed by tides and offer an educational and resilient space in a state of constant submersion, exposure, and motion. Naoko’s research is testing and utilising tangible and intangible cultural heritage (activation) by sharing responsibilities with residents and visitors (participation) with awareness of interdependency embedded between species (regenerative practice).
Image above: Second open session devised by Naoko Mabon on the shore of Corran Esplanade, Oban 19 August 2021. Part of On Tidal Zones hosted by ATLAS Arts and CLIMAVORE, courtesy of Ainslie Roddick
The Ocean has absorbed 30-40% of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution, and this is leading to rapid acidification and climate change. Scottish coastal marine habitats are in crises as a result of over-fishing, scallop dredging and bottom trawling, pollution from aquaculture and habitat change. Working with coastal communities, Seawilding is restoring degraded inshore marine habitats for keystone species to enhance biodiversity, improve water quality and sequester carbon; anything they can do, however small, to address this, is important. Putting back rare priority marine features such as native oysters and seagrass, which were once widespread around the coastline, goes a long way to addressing bio-diversity loss. By 2025, Seawilding aims to have restored 1 million native oysters and many hectares of seagrass in Loch Craignish and to keep rolling out community-led coastal projects to restore marine habitats.
Image above: by Philip Price shows the blending of the ecotone area which cultivates the transition between land and seabed, courtesy of the artist and Seawilding
Towards the Water Folio is conceived by Deirdre MacKenna and produced by Cultural Documents for the Dunoon Burgh Hall COP26 Season, with funding from Creative Scotland.
