Ettie Spencer
PLACE– a proposed installation by Ettie Spencer on Blackfriars Bridge in London.
all text copyright Ettie Spencer 2006
A commentary funded by PROJECT – ‘Talking Artists Award’ which is managed by Public Art South West and funded by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and Arts & Business (A&B).
‘PLACE’ was originally conceived as collaboration between artist Ettie Spencer and arts organisation Hames Levack to be presented during 2005.
The proposed installation was to consist of eight white refugee tents, secured on top of the vacant pillars next to Blackfriars Bridge for one month.
On an aesthetic level, the tents would have had a striking ethereal beauty, strong silhouettes constructed out of a delicate material against a dense and well established urban landscape. The installation would comment upon the issues of displacement and homelessness and be designed to prompt meaningful public debate.
In this work Ettie Spencer was asking, ‘How, in such a sophisticated and complex environment as the centre of London, can we be brought up sharp against our basic needs, the fundamental requirements for our successful survival?
Detailed structural planning with a RIBA architect and Arup Engineering was underway and all necessary planning permissions secured. The Red Cross was also interested in becoming involved and a connection had been made for the supply of traditional style refugee tents. However the considerable budget for installing the work using river cranes and suchlike was never achieved and recently Hames Levack has ceased to exist in its original form so the project is as yet unrealized.
However, the proposed installation had already prompted a talk at the ICA on the use and misuse of public spaces and a related body of work by the artist has since been realised. As a collaboration this project received a PROJECT - CABE and Arts and Business award - called ‘Talking Artists Award’ to go towards producing and publishing an interpretative commentary in order to engage architects, and others involved in the construction of the built environment, with the ideas raised by the artist.
What follows is a conversation with the artist and an arts writer, about this project and related ideas to do with sense of place and displacement and the creativity of collaborative working between artist and architect.
Ettie Spencer in conversation with Johnny Bartlett
December 2006 .
JB. Tell me how you became interested in ideas to do with displacement and movement of peoples across boundaries, as an artist.
ES. I suppose my earlier work has been about displacement in that I have concentrated on putting things out of context – like putting vacuum cleaners in the sea and casting kettles in concrete, so that that whole idea of displacement that makes you look again, has been an interest of mine for sometime.
CROSSING THE LINE November 2002
Sea Change Feb - May 2002
But I’m also interested in global issues and it seems to me that the 21st century issue is that all things are changing, boundaries are changing very fast, people are mobile, the whole world is displacing itself, and I think it is the role of the artist to bite the bullet on global issues. I think it lies at the core of how we are going to handle the planet; how the environment is going to survive; to get to grips with the fact that there’s this huge movement going on. I think I’ve always had an interest in architecture and sense of place because I think I’m a bit of a nomad myself, in my personal life. I grew up on a farm and really got immersed in that. But I spent all my adult life in the inner city, in some of the poorer inner city areas – the east end of London, Detroit and Belfast – where there’s a sort of wildness that I also found in the countryside, and a sense of having to be quite tough about how you survive, and who belongs where. But I’m not entirely sure where I belong so I suppose my artwork has been about exploring what it is that gives me a sense of place. And also, how to recapture what I got from working on the farm, which was the feeling of being connected to the earth literally – with my hands in the earth – and making some kind of difference in a very practical way.
JB. Ok, that stretches the issue a bit. You’re giving us a picture of the micro and the macro – a very personal route into that via your own mobility, but also this big, global issue about immigration. And I know that your father was very peripatetic, in that he moved about with the army, but he also had to do with displacement of peoples after the 2nd World War, didn't he?
ES. Yes. Actually, I was born in Germany because he was in the British Army of the Rhine. He was stationed in Germany – this was 1951 – and I think the brief of the army then was to put Germany back together. There were huge numbers of people in the wrong places and I think they had a lot to do with the logistics of that. I have read a report on what the British Army faced in terms of re-organisation there. As an aside that’s interesting. I think I was brought up with this idea that it can’t be taken as read where people come from and what the order of things are.
JB. I think this is very interesting. It makes it almost a family business, doesn’t it? And your mother comes from South Africa but has lived all her life in England. And she has links with Scotland….
ES. She’s half-Scottish, yes. So when people ask me where I’m from, I can’t give an answer to that. That’s always bemused me, that some people are absolutely clear where they come from and I’ve always wondered what that would be like. But actually I think what most people are going to have to get their heads around is that you can’t be as clear as that. If you meet an Asian person in Glasgow, and they say they’re from Glasgow, they absolutely are, and yet some people would assume they’re not really. This is something that Scotland in particular has to get to grips with, because Scotland desperately needs people to feel this is their home because it’s depopulating and it needs people to come here. So it’s a massive quantum leap that really people throughout the world are going to have to make if the whole world order is going to hang together at all. That’s a very broad picture of things but where people feel comfortable is therefore very important. And what makes people comfortable – and belonging – of course that brings us onto architecture, in the sense that your home is where you’re from on the whole.
JB. We’ll get onto that. But just tell me what you think an artist has to contribute that a politician or a social scientist or anybody else couldn’t contribute to this debate.
ES. Yes, well I think an artist is much freer to comment, full-stop. That’s the reason I’m an artist. I’m not constrained by technical information or politics; I feel that the role of the artist is to speak very freely and to chuck questions up in the air. I don’t have to provide answers but feel very strongly that it’s my duty to pose those questions and to be quite to the point – and as off-beam as I choose to be. To create a dialogue is the very important role of the artist.
JB. Just to pin this right down to where it belongs. The other thing you said about being an artist – relating to working on the farm and so on – was to do with getting up to your elbows in it, getting your hands dirty. What’s the relationship between making stuff – making objects in the world – and these ideas. Because arguably, you could just have the ideas, and speak them. But actually you choose to make stuff – to embody ideas.
ES. Yes, I do. There’s a big trend in the art world to say we don’t need more stuff so we shouldn’t be making things. A lot of what I make is temporary anyway. But the making is part of the learning and exploring process, and I think that by making things myself, and indeed engaging other people in that process there’s a whole other dimension of ideas that come out of it because I think that what’s missing in our modern urban life if you like, is digging the potato patch, or catching the food or whatever, in a very physical sense. So now everything is either on a screen or information spoken to us or that we read, and there’s no identification with it. I think that once you have physically exerted yourself to make something, you have a different relationship to the idea, as well as to what you produce. And I think that for the observer – the audience – they can have a physical response to what’s there in front of them, rather than just being told. It’s a very powerful language if you like – it’s the language that I’ve chosen because it speaks to me. And I think it speaks to a lot of people.
JB. Can you just describe – before we get onto the architectural links – some of your recent work that particularly embodies ideas of displacement. You’ve mentioned domestic objects placed in unusual settings, but describe some other recent ventures.
ES. It’s been a progression, the whole thing – one thing leads to another. But I moved on from displacing domestic objects – which was not to do with domesticity, but just to think about the culture in which we live. I then played with interior/exterior which was very much to do with buildings – because we just take it as read that this is inside and that is outside, but what is that? So I filled a room full of barley in one project – with fully grown barley.
INTERIOR - Installation, Edinburgh (June 2003).
JB. So you brought that in from outside?
ES. Grew it outside, brought it in and installed it like a carpet, wall-to-wall, fully grown barley, so that in a very simple way I brought the outside inside. But like all my work, it can be taken just like that or it can raise a whole complexity of issues to do with us personally – what’s exterior, what’s interior? But also some very public issues, eg the politics behind food and growing stuff and what’s happening around the globe. From there, I started getting interested in the concept of people getting displaced. Considering what we have – I forget what it is – something like seventeen million people at any one time living in temporary shelter or tents, or being displaced either by war, famine, politics or whatever, which is a huge factor in our modern culture and the kind of obvious thing to get involved in was using the tent as the archetypal, universal, recognisable shape of temporary shelter. Shelter’s an interesting one because it’s so fundamental to peoples’ survival obviously, but also their sense of who they are – their security, place and everything else – and I began to think about what it must be like for all those people who for a long stretch of time – a large part of their life – have no sense that they belong anywhere – and how that affects our world culture.
JB. Tell us about some of the other work you have made and about the PLACE project on Blackfriars Bridge.
ES. An arts events agency in London called Hames Levack asked me to think about making a temporary installation on the empty pillars of the old Blackfriars Bridge – the disused pillars that sit beside the railway bridge, which look just like huge plinths in the Thames. And as my mind was running along these ideas of displacement, my proposal was to put refugee tents, one refugee tent on each pillar – the standard tents the Red Cross use, great big canvas things. It was called PLACE, and that whole project was well-advanced except for the enormous budget that was required to install it, because of the logistics of using river barges and that kind of thing. It remains a project that may one day happen – you never know- but it’s gone into a bit of a virtual state. But what that generated was other ideas around tents and I made an installation in the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh of 79 tents made of horticultural fleece, one man-tents, and on each flysheet were the names of plants from all over the world, in the English and Latin, which we just assume are part of our culture that we make use of as food, ornamentally or for drugs, as part of the landscape – but in fact do not originate from Scotland. I thought this was an interesting idea and made an interesting parallel with immigrants and people that have been assimilated into the culture by necessity. We may or may not assume that they’re part of our culture. So that was that – particularly in the Botanic Gardens where there are plants from all over the world. But these were plants we might have assumed were our native plants – and not a single one was.
displace 24th June to 10th July 2005
I also used black tents in a couple of installations. I put one black tent which said “Displace” on it in a permit-holder-only parking space in Edinburgh where it stayed all day, until the Environmental “Quick Response” squad came and moved it on. It was in another installation in a brand new office block in the middle of Edinburgh, as well.
JB. I’m kind of interested in that shape, because I saw a photograph of that and it has some resonances with the veil – the Islamic veil – and the tent almost stands in for a person, as well as being a shelter.
ES. Yes. I made it out of the black material that you put under gravel in gardens, so it’s very lightweight and a little bit see-through, very like the Islamic veil, and interestingly enough, where I had parked it in Edinburgh was outside the DSS. The people who came from there said “Is that about homelessness?” and then they said “Is that about asylum seekers?” People immediately associated “black” and “tent” with the dreaded asylum seekers that everybody seems to fear. It had kind of tapped into prejudices that maybe we don’t know we have, or people don’t actually acknowledge that they’ve got.
JB. You went on to do more work with plants a show in the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. Could you tell us something about that?
ES. I had a solo show at the Dick Institute and I was asked to make a new piece of work for that. Japanese Knotweed had caught my eye because there is some growing near where I live and as I started to find out about it, I was amazed to discover that it’s not only an “alien invasive”, but it’s also on the environmental hit-list as being a top category threat. It is hugely threatening because it grows incredibly fast, and to the exclusion of all other flora and fauna around it. So it takes over whole woodlands, churchyards and other spaces. I thought this is the ultimate invader really even though we’ve had plants from all over the world which have done that very thing – like rhododendrons and gorse. But people are particularly fearful of Japanese Knotweed, so I thought I would like to cage it up, and in the exhibition wait for it to burst out of its cages - because there’s a parallel here with our fear of “foreign invaders.” Originally, Japanese Knotweed was brought here by the Victorians as an ornamental plant. In the same way we import people, and a whole load of paranoia grows up about who’s taking our resources – taking our space. And this is exactly what the paranoia about Japanese Knotweed is. Anyway, I duly caged it up and created a wall about 10 feet by 8 feet, and in due course, throughout the exhibition, it grew phenomenally fast and bust its way out of the cages. It looked like it was escaping. It is actually a very pleasant plant to look at, but once you know about it, it’s actually a very threatening plant. It has that effect.
Oh Mother! July/August 2006
Also in that exhibition, I put a huge arrow-shaped aviary, basically – a cage 17 feet long and 12 feet high, and it was tethered by wire ropes and concrete blocks, and inside, this enormous rusting industrial object were 24 live finches - ones bred in captivity, and they were having a lovely time in there, but they were encased in this arrow that was pointing at the sky, but tethered – couldn’t move – with live creatures inside. And in fact it drew a big response from some people who somehow found it very offensive. Even though, up the road in the park, there was another aviary with more birds of the same sort. Because it was in an art exhibition people were quite upset. I found that very interesting – perhaps because it indicated the freedom of art and the power of art to make comments and have an effect.
WHICH WAY 2 July/August 2006
JB. It strikes me that you’re making work to create a response. You’re making quite provocative work. Are you aware of that?
ES. Definitely. That’s why I’m an artist if you like. I have a background in community development and community politics and I made a specific decision to pursue my career as an artist – which had been my original one and which I’d left for a while – because I think I need a medium so that I can speak my mind. And art provides me with that language. I’m a visual person, it’s my language and I feel I have things to say. I like to make art that has an aesthetic so that people can enjoy it, but I also like to make art that, if you choose to unravel it, touches on some big important issues that I think need to be touched on.
JB. Could you just describe for us the work that you most recently did in North Uist, which further embodies your ideas about displacement?
ES. I was commissioned to make an outdoor work alongside a solo show of my work in the gallery at the Taigh Chearsabhagh Arts Centre, up in North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. As a continuum from work I’d been doing with tents something quite naturally came up. When I went up to look around, everywhere I looked were these roofless houses that had been abandoned. Not the Black Houses, but the more recent ones built at the beginning of the 20th Century. People had simply walked off and left them and now they stand roofless but otherwise in reasonably good condition. No doors, windows or roof, but looking very much like the archetypal house – with a door and two windows and gables sticking up into the sky. I think that’s quite a haunting image for me – that people had to move on for whatever reason - not just the clearances, but for economic reasons as well. In some cases they simply shut the door and walked off leaving all the personal possessions inside rotting away.
Secondly, as everyone knows, the light in the Outer Hebrides is just stunning and changes every few minutes. I also wanted to capture that light so that people look again at it and also at the enormous amounts of water on North Uist that changes colour every few minutes as it reflects the sky. So I decided that what I wanted to do was clad one of these roofless houses in aluminium sheeting on the outside so that the whole house was picking up the light, but also displacing it in quite a dramatic way. The aluminium would either make it stand out as the sun caught it or it would disappear into the landscape or the sky as it picked up the ambient light. I wanted to put this very industrial material onto stone, with all these wooden beams that had fallen down inside to make a dialogue between the materials. I decided it would be fixed on with lots of screws and looking industrial and angular, not soft and organic. So I did that, so there’s a house up there even now clad in aluminium and it did do a lot of what I wanted it to do.
Changing Places 1 – Metal House Nov/Dec 2006 – Jan 2007
And then running in parallel in the gallery, I made a video installation of New Zealand semi-tropical rainforest. What was interesting me here is the fact that Scotland is directly the opposite side of the globe to New Zealand, one of the many places a lot of Scottish people went to. If you go to New Zealand you can find whole communities of people living as if they were living in Scotland. So I thought I’d play with ideas about that kind of displacement which a lot of people can identify with up there. A lot of people had left those very houses to go and live in New Zealand. So in the gallery, I made a cloth or tent version of the house and projected onto the four walls, inside, moving tropical forest. You walk into it and there’s movement of trees and forest all around you, inside the house. So that also taps into this inside/outside idea and also the fact that there are no trees in the Hebrides, although originally, way back when, it was forested. The two pieces went together and were called ‘Changing Places 1 and 2.’
Changing Places 2 – Forest House Nov/Dec 2006 – Jan 2007
JB. What strikes me hearing about all these is, that they are very structural pieces, aren’t they? Cages built as a wall, the big arrow built of industrial materials, the house as a very solid shape – so it seems to me that you’re already moving towards architecture; you’re already using materials that architects use – these are not traditionally art materials necessarily. I know that you work quite closely with architects on some projects. Could you explain how that collaboration has worked and what that involves?
ES. Yes. As you rightly say, I am very interested in architecture. My sister’s an architect. I think the way we think about things is very similar, and I am very interested in the idea of ‘place’ and where we live….But, yes, there are some architects in Glasgow I work with quite a lot, cameronwebster. It started with a competition we entered jointly as an artist and architect team. The brief was to come up with a virtual design for a 21st century Community Green, for an area called Pollokshields in Glasgow. It was funded by the Arts Council and New Media Scotland. We came up with this idea of a huge glass structure – a massive greenhouse in effect – with semi-tropical forest inside, but one that local people would be involved in growing and using – a place that you could use. An indoor park, if you like, in this rundown part of the city – unlike gardens that you go and view. This was somewhere you could sit in and make use of and an offshoot to the main structure would be what we called pods, small glasshouses on wheels which would be parked in different parts of the district. They would be sited in various streets where people could grow what they liked in them – for example, particular plants used in traditional cooking by the large Asian community in that area. These pods would have the ability to be locked onto what we call “the mothership”, for festivals and specific occasions. So this was our proposal. And it was very much about my ideas as an artist – connecting people with the natural world, as a way to feel rooted – connected with, and in relation to, my architect colleagues’ vision. We produced this proposal and were in fact joint winners of the competition and was part of an exhibition in The Lighthouse Centre in Glasgow. It has never been realised, although potentially it might be, but once again, the project has influenced subsequent work.
Pollokshields Community Green - proposal in collaboration with cameronwebster Architects
March 2006.
As a result of that, there have been various projects we have collaborated on, and indeed I have consulted with those architects when doing things like the metal house on North Uist. I find it a very stimulating way to work. As an artist I don’t have the know-how for the kind of structures I’m interested in. I can come up with the broad vision if you like, and then when connecting with an architect, if they agree with the vision, we can work together to make it more of an actuality. This process also works the other way round when the architects are working on a brief initiated by them.
JB. Just go into more depth about that. You are saying some very clear things about that. But how do you think artists and architects benefit each other?
ES. I think artists can be as unfettered with their ideas as they want, but it can’t go anywhere unless it is structured into something that can actually happen. Artists struggle with that. Architects similarly can have a vision but they have the tools of the trade that can make something practically happen, and maybe they have to spend more time on the practicalities than they do on the vision. And I think there’s a triggering both ways that works quite well – the artist can be pushing one way and the architect another, and they can come together on something that is perhaps more imaginative than either an idea that can’t actually happen, or a building that’s focuses on the practicalities.
JB. That makes the split a bit like the artist is the free agent and the architect is somehow the grounded agent. And the two come together and something gets realised. Whereas I suppose a lot of architects would say they are hugely creative in their input, and it’s not just about practicalities. So is there something even more specific that an artist brings besides their freedom, to this kind of collaboration?
ES. Well, an artist uses other different media; it’s a very different approach. It’s not traditionally so structural. It’s a different form of creativity, and putting the two together means something can be done that uses both aspects.
JB. One of the things I was thinking about was that traditionally an architect is about the opposite of displacement, and so you’re trying to set up a dynamic with somebody who’s interested in building shelter, creating place.
ES. Yes, that’s interesting. Bringing us back to the project of putting refugee tents on Blackfriars Bridge, it is very much about architecture, this project, and yet it is working with tents that are very simple and transient. So it is considering issues about temporality rather than permanence. And perhaps this is the interesting crossover, if we consider that the world situation is not a permanent one. People are living in temporary situations and architecture at the moment is perhaps not often addressing that.
JB. Ok. So these flimsy refugee shelters in the middle of what is really a monolithic, concrete, built environment, are offering a kind of dialogue….
ES. Not just temporality, but something fluid and organic, something less austere, something closer to nature. If you live in a state-of-the-art beautiful, modern building you are displaced from nature. You don’t feel the wind and the rain. You can see it. You don’t feel the seasons because the temperature’s controlled, and so on. If you live in a tent, you are very barely separated – you have a thin film, a thin bit of cloth between you and the elements, the heat and the cold and the wet, which means you have to notice what season it is. And I suppose that brings me right back to square one – I felt that in my days of living on the farm, you are everyday aware of what the seasons are doing, what the weather is – but if you live in an urban situation, it is incidental. You know, do you take your umbrella or not when you go out. It’s neither here nor there. And this disconnection perhaps lies at the heart of whether or not we will engage in what’s happening to the environment - which, in the end, is what everybody’s got to do if we’re to survive. But we’re increasingly displaced from it at the moment. We don’t have to notice it unless we choose to. And that is a problem.
JB. The tents in the city I suppose return us to the work with the barley in the room. It’s inside/outside. It’s not only displacement. It’s a question of what’s inside and what’s outside.
ES. It is. Yes. And how we are institutionalised into thinking about things. People come along – “What’s that barley doing in there? It should be outside.” But who says? We believe it because that is what we’re told.
JB. Well I know that one of the other metaphors you’ve used in relation to that is about skin, is about skin as the covering both for us, but also as the fabric under which we live.
ES. Yes. Especially when I was doing the very ephemeral tents – the horticultural fleece – that are not waterproof. They are designed to let light and water through. I started to think about a tent as a sort of skin. If we just live outside, skin is not sufficient, we need another kind of skin over us. And skin as well as being protective is also porous to some extent. It needs to take things in and out. It was a sort of metaphor I played with around tents as well. And I guess that it would apply to buildings but buildings are so much more thick and rigid.
JB. As a last question, I think a lot of architects will be familiar with this and I know you are, that a lot of projects don’t get realised. They remain virtual projects. And the one across Blackfriars Bridge is, at the moment, an unrealised, virtual project. I know that your intention is to realise these things and make them happen and that’s one of your big strengths, but what do you think the impact of a virtual, unrealised project can be on the culture of art and architecture?
ES. I think there’s a big role to be played by such ideas. A lot of artists operate entirely with virtual ideas – but the possibility of it happening gives it a bit of an edge. In this case, it’s a long shot because it’s such a big budget. If it never gets realised, I think the ideas are still there, they’ve still gone out – in some ways, they’ve become very real in that we obtained all the right planning permissions from all the right authorities to make it happen. I think it is out there in the public domain already. There are lots of images, there have been a lot of thoughts around it, and there are lots of resulting projects from it. I think it has been extremely productive, and it has been very good for communication between me personally and other people including architects, and all the other people I’ve made work for. It’s there on my website. I’ve made a booklet about it; it has had discussions about it all over the place – and it has been there in reality actually. I think there’s a big role to play in coming up with ambitious ideas even if they don’t get realised, because otherwise it is a bit reductionist – if you’re always trying to come up with ideas that can definitely happen for sure. I think that’s another role for the artist – to come up with as big an idea as is needed for the concept. It has happened in fact.
JB. And I’m sure a lot of artists and architects would agree with that. I think we’ll leave it there.
Ettie Spencer’s work is documented on her website www.crossingtheline.org.uk